This goal of this project is to compare William Shakespeare’s dramas with Tang Xianzu’s, who is known as “the Shakespeare of China”. The two great playwrights were both active in 1500s-1600s, died in the same year, recognized as great playwrights for centuries and influenced the development of performance arts significantly. But unlike Shakespeare who became a household name for every well-educated person in 20th century China, Tang’s reputation has only begun to revive more recently. As China is going through a modern transformation, the economic booming nurtured the need for social and cultural identity amongst the younger generation. Therefore, my question is whether Tang’s works are comparable to those of Shakespeare’s or not and why.
Since Tang Xianzu did not dedicate himself to playwrighting until his retirement, he only left four highly ackownledged plays. Among the four, the Peony Pavilion is the most influencial piece and well known oversea. Peony, often referred as the the 16th century Romeo and Juliet of China, depicted a romantic, passionate and intricate love story between a young scholar and the young daughter of a high official. Despite Peony ended happily , both dramas have many similar plots including resurrection. Also, Peony is also a bit similar to A Midsummer Night's Dream given both were comedies, involved supernatural spirits to aid the progress of plots and depicted determined female characters who were able to stand against societal and family pressures and to pursue their personal happiness.
Here you can select a text corpus to visualize what are the hidden themes embedded in the word network graph and compare between the aforementioned three dramas.Words clustered together tend to co-occure more often than words that are far away.