Tragedy Of Love

Euripides, one of the three great Greek tragedians, is honored as"philosopher on the stage"â‘¡. Medea is one of his famous works and is considered to be concentrated with all forces of western modern tragedies, so it is no surprise that it enjoys great concern for thousands of years by men of letters and the discussion is still continuing today. With double literary and cultural background, famous playwrights Zheng Zhong and Wang Yao create a unique historical tragedy Song of Da Ming Palace, which is the result of the perfect combination of both western and Chinese tragic arts and is bestowed with the new meaning in the view of modern people. That can be the best explanation for its sensation throughout the literary field and film and TV circles when it is published. Its script has been printed for several times and the series play of it has also been repeatedly played. Though Medea and Song of Da Ming Palace are created over a span of two thousand years, they are both the tragedies concerning women who are open to disputation of their actions by the scholars or historians, and both expound the enduring meaning and spirit of tragedy through the presentation of love stories. Besides, the playwrights of Song of Da Ming Palace have admitted that their creation is influenced by western tragedy, especially Greek tragedies when they are interviewed by the journalist from China Youth. Therefore, the two tragedies are worth studying in a comparative way. However, with comparative literature developing rapidly in China, many scholars have made comparative studies between Medea and Chinese tragedies, most of whom pay attention to the comparison between Medea and traditional Chinese tragedies and focus mainly on feminist study. This thesis tries to make some breakthroughs on the basis of preceding studies and attempt to carry out a parallel study of these two works in three aspects, namely, language style, tragic characters and tragic conflicts with the tragic aesthetics as theoretical basis so as to reveal the development of Chinese tragedies and the enlightenment of tragic spirit for our modern life.The thesis consists of three parts: introduction, the main body and conclusion.The introduction offers a brief survey of the study on the works, the approaches we resort to, the purpose, innovation and the significance of this thesis. The second part is the main body comprised of three chapters.In Chapter One, language styles of the two tragedies are in comparison. Euripides borrows the art of the oratory in Medea and uses a lot of rhetorical means to intense the argument between characters, making dialogues poetic and full of emotion. In Song of Da Ming Palace, poetic sentences, dramatized lines and metaphorical dialogues help present fluency, musical quality and tension of language completely no matter whether it is dialogue or monologue. One possible explanation for the similarity in language style of the two works is that the playwrights of Song of Da Ming Palace Zheng Zhong and Wang Yao have been deeply influenced by western writers in their writing. That's no surprise to us, for Zheng Zhong majors in English and Wang Yao majors in Spanish, and they are both familiar with the western literature and even prefer to use western style to write and speak in their daily life. Besides, their experience abroad also contributes to such kind of writing style. Zheng Zhong has been a student of drama in School of the Art Institute of Chicago, during which time he has written the scripts in English while Wang Yao has been on a visit in Europe. He has also created lots of novels and poems, which paves the way for the poetic writing style. However, under the influence of different world views, Chinese and western aesthetics have different focus as well, and the most prominent one is that Chinese aesthetics stresses on implicitness while western aesthetics emphasizes on explicitness, which is presented in these two works at three levels: lexical level, syntactic level and text level.Tragic heroines in these two works are analyzed in Chapter Two. According to Aristotle, the tragic character shall not be a man of virtue or a man of evil but a man between them, a normal man. The heroine in Medea is a normal woman in this sense. Medea will do all that she can to fulfill her pursuit no matter whether to love or to hate. However, her character inclines to go to extreme and there is no middle point in her action. Such frailty in her character leads her to take the extremely cruel revenge upon her foes when her love is completely converted into hatred as Jason betrays her. She tortured Creon and his daughter to death with poison and even killed the sons she has had to Jason as the deadly revenge upon Jason. Medea bravely takes actions and fulfills her resolution of revenge but the extreme action of killing her own children makes her endure the grief and torture at the rest of her life. The tragic effect is thus invoked. Medea is a character tragedy as regards the tragic aesthetic appreciation while it is also a fate tragedy for there is still such an image as Zeus to give oracle of her fate. In Song of Da Ming Palace, Princess Taiping and Wu Zetian are the main characters who live in the center of power. The heroine Princess Taiping is innocent and straightforward, and such character of her is not fit for the bloody wrangles in the palace; Wu Zetian struggles for the right of love and life in the palace to her best, during which she comes closer and closer to the power. Taiping desires to enjoy the true love among the family and between the lovers and ceaselessly pursues her ideal emotional world for all her life, but the power, like a whirlpool which will gulp down whoever is close to it, destroys all her dream. She is doomed to be harassed by the power since she was born to a royal family. Her pursuit of emotion is in great conflict with the almighty power which never lets her escape its shadow until she hangs herself to end the confused life; Wu Zetian chooses power instead of emotion and makes the best of her wisdom and talents, obtaining the power but losing the true love of her lovers and her sons and daughters. Besides, social factors give rise to the tragedy in Song of Da Ming Palace as well.The third chapter is comparatively more important than the other two chapters. This part first goes to the discussion of tragic conflicts in the two works. There are usually three forms of tragic conflicts, that is, conflict within the characters, conflict between man and man, and conflict between man and society. In Medea, tragic conflicts are presented as conflict between Medea and Jason, Creon and his daughter, and intense conflict within Medea. As a metic woman, Medea is betrayed and abandoned by her husband Jason, and at the same time dispelled by Creon the king. Medea is a bold and steadfast woman and she won't obediently accept the treatment. Therefore, the conflicts between them are unavoidable. Besides, when she has to revenge herself upon Jason by killing her sons, the mother love and the desire of revenge are in collision within her, which discloses the dilemma that Medea is in. In Song of Da Ming Palace, the choice between emotion and power is in great conflict within Princess Taiping and Wu Zetian who are both struggling in the whirlpool of power. Furthermore, different attitudes of main characters towards the choice between emotion and power bring about the complex conflicts among them, such as the conflict among Taiping, Wu Zetian and Xue Shao. In addition, the pursuit of individual freedom by the tragic characters in this play is in conflict with the feudal society which fetters and depresses the individuality of the characters. Through the comparison of conflicts in the two works, we can easily find that the conflicts in Medea are plotted in a vertical way as a line. Simple but intense conflicts go deeper and deeper while the plot is being developed towards denouement. However, the conflicts are more complex in Song of Da Ming Palace, and are developed in a curved way. Through the tragic conflicts, tragic effect is achieved and tragic spirit is revealed. As to these two works, they present us the same tragic spirit in different forms of conflicts, that is, struggling for one's life when confronted with adversity, which shows the profound meaning of the two tragedies regardless of time and place.The conclusion is to make a generalization of the whole thesis, and at the same time clearly points out the breakthroughs made on the basis of the materials and academic studies by the previous scholars and critics as well as the significance and value of the thesis in modern society.