O'Neill Impact On Cao Yu

Eugene O’Neill, the founder of American national drama, showed solicitude for the inner world of the people, and had compassion for the mankind. He got the Pulitzer prize for four times in his life, and won Nobel Prize for Literature in1936.Cao Yu, known as China’s Shakespeare, his 《Thunderstorm》,《Sunrise》,《Wilderness》,《Beijing People》, one after another masterpiece, like textbooks, lit up the way for the descendants, and pointed out the developing direction of Chinese drama.After the careful study, it’s easy to find that Ancient Greek dramatist and the dramatists like Shakespeare, Ibsen, Chekhov had an impact on Cao Yu. However, the author thought O’neill’s works made the biggest impact on Cao Yu’s creation. The paper uses the method of infuence study and parallel study to investigate the influence of O’neill on Cao Yu respectively from theme, character image and artistic skills, and the localization attempts made by Cao Yu, and the whole process of Chinese drama final realization from naive to mature. From the reason Cao Yu renouncing the O’neill’s drama, it sums up the general rule of the dramatists using foreign culture for reference and creating the local works, therefore digs the meaning of the phenomenon that Cao Yu’s success as a case of China drama faces the foreign influence.