On The Family Ethics Opera Of Yuan Dynasty

Chinese opera is good at observing the social life and portraying characters through the aspect of ethics, especially the ethics of the family life, which is paid much attention to by playwrights. Among the operas in the Yuan Dynasty, the scripts with the subject of "family trifles" occupy quite a large proportion. Those scripts are mainly about the relations of family ethics and moral conflicts, which show the ancient's opinions of family life and the active pictures of social life in ancient time as well. Therefore, they have important value in research.The preface mainly focuses on the history and current situation of research about "the Family Ethics Opera". The first chapter is about the classified research on the related scripts in the research scope of this paper, which points out the family ethics opera is concerned about the generation relations, relations among the same generation and couple relations in the family. In particular, couple relations are the focus in lots of scripts.The second chapter is mainly written to research the content of "the Family Ethics Opera". It can be found that there are strongly moral emotions hiding in the process of maintaining moral orders of the family life, and that loving parents, filial children, companionate brothers, responsible husbands and virtuous wives are the moral ideality of the ancient's family life.The third chapter mainly focuses on the observation of the historical orientation of these operas in the traditional culture system. Thought and emotional contents are analyzed and observed in this system as well as the social life contents of the family ethics opera. It's concluded that the operas are affected by both the main culture and the folk ideas, which are rich in content and complex in ingredients. The "labels" stuck to the Yuan operas in the past can't accurately display the right position of this kind of operas in the traditional culture system.It's pointed out in the conclusion that the family ethics operas among the Yuan operas were created by the playwrights in the special historical period ruled by the alien race. These operas reflected some new changes in the thought contents and expression extent in the creation of the classical works in China. Meanwhile, these creations also unconsciously and historically take a heavy task upon maintaining the Chinese culture. Hence, in the process of holding the secular characters, this kind of operas inevitablyhave the characteristic of moralization of the traditional culture and they become a special scenery in our classical literature.