A Research On Opera Couplet

Opera couplets are written symbols posted or hanging on the op era stages. In ancient China, it is commonly spread in rural temples, ancestral halls, guildhalls andopera theaters. Opera couplets are widely used in people’s life from emperors down to the public, and their existence is closely connected with traditional opera. Seen from its external form, opera couplets share same literary features of couplets:the two lines have the same length, opposite part of speech, complementary meaning and same pattern. Its expression is poetic, brief and symmetric. But from its content, it can be known that as a type of literary style, opera couplet is not a literature work posted on the stages for appreciation, but also includes a lot of ancient people’s perception, ideas, attitudes and thoughts on operas, from which we can conclude and learn plenty of the theories, attitudes, evaluations, etc. on opera. That can be an effective reference to construct opera theories with Chinese characters.From the external form, opera couplets can be made of wood, stone, bamboo and paper, and mostly they are made of paper. Written form includes running script, cursive script, official script, seal script and regular script. The places where the couplets can be posted are the front eaves column, partition board, railing board, entrance and exit, and backstage. If the stage has very complex structures then the positions of couplets are relatively complicated including one-stage-one-couplet and one-stage-many-couplets.On literary rhetoric, the major rhetorical formsof opera couplets in phonetics are homophony, heteronym and rhyme. On character, there are 7 major rhetorical typessuch as separation, embeddedness, inlaying, same radical, repetition, symmetric form and adjacent repetition. On lexical rhetoric, there are separation, reiterative, palindrome, string, allusion, figure and location. On grammatical rhetoric, there are 14 major types including simile, hyperbole, rhetorical questions, echo-question, parallelism, repetition, progression, contrast, superordination to subordination, pun, metonymy, echo, allusion and cento.On the time of posting, in ancient China, people put on opera performance, wrote couplets and postedthem as celebrationat some important folk festivalssuch as Spring Festival, Dragon Boat Festival, Mid-autumn Festival and some gods’ birthdays, or in some important events of one’s lifesuch as giving birth to a baby, praying for pregnancy, birthday congratulations, work promotion, etc. The folk customs are always accompaniedwith the drama in mutual development.On the place of posting, the opera coupletsfall into 5 categories including temple stage couplets, guild hall stage couplets, ancestral hall stage couplets, theater couplets and palace stage couplets. The content is related to specific cultural field.The most special couplets are theme opera coupletssuch as puppet or shadow play stage couplets whose language is always with double and cautionary meaning. For example, the content about the Three Kingdoms and Mu Lian play is always related to evaluation of thoughts. And the content of sometheme operassuch as Huangmei opera and Tea-picking operais related to the existence patterns of these operas.An analysis from content of expression shows that most opera couplets expressopera’srelationship with life, politics, economy and religions, etc. and the most important thing among which is Chinese people’s unified attitudetowardopera and toward life. Moreover, the appreciation and evaluation of operasis tune-oriented with moral education as the major function, which carries Chinese people’s special moral principles, emotional patterns, thinking modes, value orientations and life attitudes.As a means to express ideas, opera couplets contain human feelings, social phenomena, joys and sorrows. It is an art form that contains diversified social psychologicalaspects including essential features of opera, features of performance, psychologyabout blessing, philosophy oflife and so on. Therefore, it can be said that opera couplets express people’s various emotions throughcautionarylanguage and harmonious tone.