20세기 중국 전통극 연구의 흐름 - 문본(文本)에 대한 인식의 변화를 중심으로 -

Abstract

The research trend of the Chinese traditional theatre has been changing according to the change of the concept of the text and the boundary of Chinese theatre, and it ultimately shifted the course to recover the real nature of the theatre. Because usually the theatre at the beginning was a social act or ritual in its total context, and it became a performance on the stage in the next step, and then it is recorded into a text--a play. The Chinese traditional theatre has a long history and approximately in Song-Yuan period it began to have a regular performing form and many written plays by literati. From that time Chinese theatre has a tradition that text is much more important than performance in the cognition of the scholars, although any text can be rewritten or revised according to the will of the playwright or to the needs of the performance. So for a long time a “text-based” tradition was built up in researching Chinese theatre and many studies on the theatre was carreid on the firm base of many written plays, emphasized on the view of literature. As the result, the study on the Chinese theatre had neglected the theatre as a performance or as a ritual. Wang Guo-wei was one of the leading scholar of early 20th century in the history of the modern study on the Chinese theatre. He still stands on the firm text-based tradition, and he influenced many scholars after him until now. But through 1 century, the idea has been changed because of the performing texts found by excavation or folk art collection and the recorded texts of oral tradition of folk artists. It extended the border of Chinese theatre. After 1980s, the border was extended not only in the textual dimension, but also to the contextual dimension. Through the archaeological discovery, we found old stages and diverse environment of the performance. Also through the anthropological field work, we found the ritual theatre throughout the China. Through these diverse ways of research including the field work, the concept of Chinese theatre was much extended and the result of recent studies are accumulated, but still not enough to change the whole frame of the description of Chinese theatre.