A Study Of Japanese Noh Elements In O'Neill's Late Drama Creation

Eugene O'Neill is the founder and creator of American modern drama.Because of the great contribution in the drama history,he got the attention of many domestic and overseas scholars,and the relevant studies on him and his plays are difficult to gauge the number,but there are many repeated and no real breakthrough studies in recent years.O'Neill himself had a certain degree of research on the Noh and there are abundant elements of the Noh in his late plays,but this characteristic hasn't attracted the attention of scholars,and the research on this aspect is still in its infancy.Thereforethe,"O'Neill's late plays creation and the Japanese Noh" is a topic worth studying.O'Neill's life was fruitful,and his late plays called "soul-revealing dramas" represent his highest creative achievement which contain abundant the Japanese Noh elements.The Noh is a traditional drama form unique to Japan,which is based on the Buddhism thought that was introduced into Japan from China and integrated with its local Shinto religion as the philosophical soil.And it has a relatively fixed role setting and performance program with the protagonist's past memories as the main content,reflects the past experience of the protagonist,reveals the mind and spiritual world of the character,and embodies an aesthetic realm of "everything in nothing".O'Neill's late works are heavily autobiographical and The Iceman Comth,Long Day's Journey into Night,Hughie and A Moon for the Misbegotten are the four most representative of his works which reflect O'Neill's own life experience and philosophical thinking.These works have the typical characteristics of static drama in form,refraining from external conflict of drama,fulling of characters' memories of the past,taking the memories and stories of the characters as the main or key content of the play,and reflecting the philosophical brilliance of eastern Buddhism and Taoism,which share many similarities with the Japanese Noh in character image,dramatic structure,aesthetic pursuit and philosophical connotation.The great similarity between O'Neill's late plays and the Noh provides enlightenment for us to have a deeper understanding of O'Neill's late plays.The Noh is a static drama mode unique to the east,which used for showing the westerners' living state,spiritual world and eternal care successfully that proves the compatibility between the western connotation and the oriental form.The unique performance form of the Noh provides new direction and space for the communication and dissemination of the O'Neill's late drama.In addition,the dicovery of the elements of the Noh also provides a new way to interpret the late drama.