The Beginning Of Enlightenment Drama Study

Chinese society became stablation and flourish at the end of the Yuan dynasty and at the beginning of the Ming dynasty from Hongwu to Zhengde period. During this time that more than one hundred years, the sermonic operas prevailed on the stage and a lot of operas represent homiletic themes. They performed ancient Chinese traditional ethic and morality. The thesis researched the unique literary phenomenon synthetically, analyzing its societal background and intrinsical contents. It's pointed out the societal function and the cultural significance of these sermonic operas roundly.There was special historical and cultural background for the prevailing of the sermonic operas in the early Ming dynasty. It has relationship with the central cultural policy, the literary theories, the dramatists' attitude and the Chinese interior homiletic tradition tightly. The dominators of the early Ming dynasty established the New Confucianism as the dominant ideology and only permitted the operas to perform the ethic and morality paragons. The literary theories which alleged the literature should lay out morality played an important role in the production, guiding the literature. Some dramatists who had societal and historical responsibilities on their own initiative, others were compelled to admire the ethic and morality paragons. These operas also were influenced by the ancient Chinese poetry- essay sermonic tradition and the ending Yuan dynasty's ethic dramas directly. For these reasons, the sermonic operas turned into the leading style at that time.These dramatists can be divided into two parts, the toppers were noble and official" dramatists, the lowers were common-people dramaturges. They set out different ethical-moral concepts and creative methods. The toppers expressed the systematic and common ethical-moral concepts, which deviated the lives and looked rigid. They cooked up absolute ethical-moral roles to educate the audiences. The lowers mostly showed the civilian ethic and moralities what were lower folk-custom and civilizations. They exhibited the idiographic and plain ethical notions. At the same time, these conceptions inosculated. The toppers' operas transferred the ethicand moralities to the commons but accepted some plebeian habitudes and emotions, attending the lower populaces' lives. The lowers' dramas performed the civilian lives and sentiments which also learned the toppers' operas, representing the toppers' ethical conceptions obviously.The sermonic operas of early-Ming dynasty emphasized the ethic and theirs societal functions, which had biggish effect in the society. They transmitted the ethic and moralities to the commons with the method that embodied the moralizing in the entertainment, which changed the societal customs, facilitated the stabilization of the society and boosted the economy. Meanwhile, the negative effect of them was evident. The sermonic operas operated the literature history visibly at the same time. They had consanguineous relations with the operas of the subsequent middle-end-aged Ming dynasty and the Qing dynasty, which inherited the those contents and the themes. They provided the drama critics opuses of the Muig-Qing dynasty and enriched the ancient Chinese drama theories system, which affect the operas' composition contrariwise.We can draw a conclusion that the sermonic operas of early-Ming dynasty is an external historical existence, which had biggish effect in the society and in the literature history. So, it is inequitable of the present academia attitude that they negated theses operas in all, which only estimated the contents of these dramas.