Li Longji, the emperor of the Tang Dynasty, played a special role in the Tang Dynasty. He reigned for more than forty years, and experienced the last prosperous period of the Tang Dynasty, from prosperity to decline. He is also a brilliant emperor, and even regarded as the "father of the pear garden" by later opera artists. There are many affairs, including those with Yang Guifei and Mei Fei. The ending between him and Yang Yuhuan was a tragedy, which was intertwined with his political tragedy and was commented by later generations.
The love story between Li Longji and Yang Guifei has always been a controversial topic among scholars in past dynasties. The Song of Eternal Sorrow by Bai Juyi, a great poet in the Tang Dynasty, is the opening work. Later, there were many novels, rap, operas and other works to describe this story, among which Wu Tongyu, a zaju by Bai Pu in Yuan Dynasty, was the best. Then Hong Sheng, a legendary writer in the Qing Dynasty, wrote the Palace of Eternal Life by "collecting stories of Tang people and several poems by Du Li and Bai Yuan Wen Li, and polishing colorful passages in ancient and modern dramas".
The research and arguments about Song of Eternal Sorrow, Wu Tongyu and Palace of Eternal Life mainly focus on the love between Li Yang and Yang Guifei. But obviously, the content and significance of the works are much more complicated than this, and Li Longji, the emperor of the Tang Dynasty, played a decisive role. So, below, I will compare the image of "Tang" with "Wu Tongyu" and "Palace of Eternal Life".
1. Conduct perceptual analysis from the perspective of text content.
As the "crown of the Yuan Dynasty" (Wang Guowei's Shi Shuo Xin Yu), Wu Tongyu basically accepted the tone of Song of Eternal Sorrow: it not only wrote Li Yang's sincere love, but also criticized Tang's emphasis on color and misunderstanding of the country, and finally expressed sympathy for Tang's tragedy. By dealing with Li Longji's illegal frontier commander An Lushan, Wedge not only showed Li Longji's ignorance, but also concentrated on his supreme power to decide the honor or disgrace of the people. The First Fold and the Second Fold are devoted to the grand scene of dancing in the Palace of Eternal Life, aiming at rendering that Li Longji has reached the peak of enjoyment in all material fields. The third fold describes the ups and downs that people can't grasp, which means that the son of heaven, like Li Longji, is supreme and doomed to perish. The fourth fold is to express the author's sigh through Ming Taizu's mouth after the first three folds and the wedge is laid. * * * Twenty-three pieces of music all show Ming Taizu's inner activities and miss all the lost and irreparable beauty, including Yang Fei. The falling rain under the buttonwood poured out the loneliness, lovesickness, melancholy and irritability of Ming Chengzu, which was incisive and touching.
In the Palace of Eternal Life, Hong Sheng praised "the bell of love" and "sincerity" and criticized "the extravagant demands of the poor". The whole drama * * * 50 describes the development of Li Yang's love in detail, which is similar to Wu Tongyu based on the principle that "every historian can't hide it". In the first half, Li Longji is superficial, but not professional. However, his love went from shallow to deep, and gradually matured, reaching its peak when he was sworn in on Tanabata. In the second half, Yang Fei's death is the beginning. Taking the Anshi Rebellion as the background, this paper turns to describe Li Longji's tragic character, repenting sins and abdicating. Li Yang's love also overcame the defects of the emperor's love. Repeatedly described Tang's unforgettable lovesickness and infinite affection, which highlighted Tang's single-mindedness in love and his adherence to the alliance of the former dynasties. (3) Li Yang's love became an idealized love of "sincerity to the end" and "sincerity to the end", so he reunited under the moon and finally tied the knot. The image of the Tang emperor in the Palace of Eternal Life is fuller and more substantial. Hong Sheng wrote Ming Chengzu as a character who can repent after making a mistake, a character whose identity and thoughts have changed, a character who is fatuous and can regret, a character who is frivolous and affectionate, and who can bow and scrape and respect himself.
As for the theme of the text, there has always been a single theme of "love" or "current politics" and a dual theme of "love plus current politics". We can make a comparison between Wu Tongyu and the Palace of Eternal Life. It was Tang himself who wrote Wu Tongyu to pardon An Lushan, reuse An Lushan and make him the adopted son of Yang Guifei. Yang and Zhang Jiuling remonstrated, but he didn't listen. An Lushan was appointed as our time in Yuyang. In the Palace of Eternal Life, it is written that An Lushan paid bribes to Yang, and Yang pardoned his behavior, but there was no plot for the imperial concubine to accept him as her adopted son. On the origin of Yang Guifei, Wu Tongyu wrote that she was the concubine of Shouwang, who was first named as a female Taoist priest and then as a high-ranking concubine. "The Palace of Immortality" wrote that she was a maid-in-waiting, and when Ming Chengzu met her, she was named the imperial concubine. Regarding the relationship between Yang Guifei and the Anshi Rebellion, Wu Tongyu describes their adultery, while Yang Guifei in the Palace of Eternal Life has nothing to do with the Anshi Rebellion. As for the cause of the Anshi Rebellion, Wu Tongyu pointed out that he "just wanted to rob the imperial concubine, not for the magnificent scenery". The Palace of Eternal Life is a sharp contradiction with Yang, who aroused his resistance. Regarding Yang Guifei's performance before she was killed, Yu wrote that she begged Tang to save her, and when the Buddhist temple was forced to commit suicide, she also said, "Your Majesty is fine." Have complaints. In the Palace of Eternal Life, Yang Guifei made her commit suicide when she knew that things were not harmonious. Before he died, he told Gao Lishi to take good care of the emperor without complaint. Wu Tongyu wrote that after Yang Guifei's death, Ming Chengzu's thoughts were only pain and dreams. The palace of eternal life includes ringing the bell, crying, watching the moon, rebuilding, dreaming in the rain, looking for the soul, following love and reunion. Therefore, I think the themes of "The Palace of Eternal Life" and "Rain of Wu Tong" are love and current politics, but the emphasis is different. The focus of Wu Tongyu is politics, which places the author's yearning for the motherland and the sigh of national subjugation. The focus of Palace of Eternal Life is love, which places the author's pursuit of ideal love.
In addition, the tone of the two works is also debatable. The whole work of Wu Tongyu is filled with a strong tragic atmosphere, which is quite sad. The work criticizes Ming Taizu and He, but after Yang's death, the work expresses Li's deep love and yearning for Yang in a strong lyrical style. Especially at the end, a series of novel and vivid metaphors, in which the phoenix tree is dripping with rain, are vividly written, delicate and touching, and lyrical through the scenery, which strongly exaggerates the pain of the collapse of the Tang Dynasty and the nostalgia for the prosperous and happy life in the past. The Palace of Eternal Life is an eulogy of the deepest feelings. Although the author criticized Li Yang's love defects, he mainly praised the ideal love, and the criticism in his works was mild. And finally Li Yang reunited in the Moon Palace, finally forgave their love fault, and gave warm praise without reservation. It can be said that compared with their previous works of similar themes, Wu Tongyu was more sympathetic to the emperor of the Tang Dynasty, while The Palace of Eternal Life further rehabilitated the emperor of the Ming Dynasty. Both of them describe Li Yang's real feelings when the traditional love between the emperor and the princess gradually changed into ordinary people, and show the change of Ming Taizu from fatuous romance to desolation. Under the background of An Shi Rebellion, Emperor Ming of Tang Dynasty was in a daze politically and affectionate and gentle in his private life. The more he indulges in love affairs, the more fatuous he becomes. He failed in politics for love and lost his love for politics. Through the analysis of the image of Tang dynasty, we can really get a lot of cognitive significance and reference significance.
2. Rational comprehensive analysis from the perspective of "emotion"
Both Wu Tongyu and Palace of Eternal Life are based on the love between Tang and Yang Guifei, which can be described as "love works". The first biography of the Palace of Eternal Life clearly States that "I just love to borrow too many reasons to spread new words". Therefore, the study has always simply understood "love" as Li Yang's love in the play, but it is not. The content and meaning of this "love" are far more complicated than this, and they are all related to Tang Dynasty. From "Wu Tongyu" to "The Palace of Eternal Life", it is about the love between Li Yang and life, the feelings between the monarch and the people, and the feelings implied by the author. Below we can analyze from these three aspects, so as to have a more comprehensive and profound understanding of the Tang Dynasty.
1. The relationship between life and death of Li Yang
The love between Li and Yang Guifei in Rain and Palace of Eternal Life has the nature of * * *, that is, the protagonists in love are not ordinary people, but emperors and concubines. Their love for Li and Yang Guifei has always been controversial, either attacking or opposing. Feudal morality holds the theory that women are a disaster. If a concubine is loved by the emperor who caused the disaster, she is considered to be an enchanted concubine. If the emperor's love for this concubine has a single-minded trend, it is that the emperor has a more equal attitude towards this concubine, which is detrimental to the dignity of the emperor and the discipline of the couple; If the emperor insists on such love, it will be considered stubborn. Class analysis since liberation denies the existence of love between the emperor and his concubines, and holds that an emperor can't have sincere and single-minded love for a 3,000 concubines with three palaces and six hospitals. Therefore, Li Longji's seemingly reasonable love behavior today was just unreasonable at that time. Indeed, these views are not groundless. Judging from the special status of the characters, Li's love for Yang inevitably has the limitations of court love: first, it is cruel, and the first reaction when he enters the palace is "There is no sorrow in the Sixth Hospital, and Qi Li Golden Street steals a glimpse." So their slim hope turned into despair. In the struggle between Fei Yang and Mei Fei, we saw the cruel crowding out and rolling in the court. The second is vulnerability. The love between the emperor and the princess is based on color, and the decline of color and love is its universal law. Standing at the height of history, Li Yang's love is closely related to Tianbao politics. The day Li Yang was born in love, it was the time when Ming Chengzu went bankrupt, and political bankruptcy would inevitably lead to the destruction of love. Third, it is political. The marriage between the emperor and the princess is not only a combination of the sexes, but also a political combination. The direct consequence of being favored is the emergence of a Yang privileged group headed by Yang. What this group did greatly accelerated the political corruption of Ming Chengzu. At the same time, Yang Fei's entry into the palace also contributed to Ming Di's extravagance, which made him sentimental and neglected political affairs. They are the innate dirt of Li Yang's love. The process of Li Yang's single-minded love was also more painful and cruel, which led to the Anshi rebellion and brought disaster not only to the country but also to his own love. Therefore, the process of realizing their ideal of love is also a process of overcoming the limitations of the court. Only by washing away the dirt can their love be purified. However, it is not easy, and it must be at the cost of Yang Fei's death.
However, Li Yang's love in Wu Tongyu and the Palace of Eternal Life is not a simple "love between the emperor and the princess", but more plentiful and credible in the author's works.
For example, there is more sympathy for Li Longji in Wu Tongyu. The Oath of the Immortal Palace and Dancing by the Aquilaria Pavilion highlight that Ming Chengzu has a special liking for Yang Fei. But the work was originally written by Princess Shou, who had an affair with An Lushan, so Yang and An were blamed for the national subjugation. Yang Guifei in the work is a character who is unfaithful to Ming Chengzu and has an affair with others. Although he criticized Tang for being wrong, the criticism was very slight. For example, although the work described Ming Taizu's debauchery and even "rejected the outline", it was out of love for Yang Fei. The fourth corner of the work depicts Tang's desolation in the night rain of the phoenix tree. Compared with carnival, it expresses a kind of loneliness and sadness after the dream of the good old days disappears (5), as well as the sadness and pain of the country's collapse, loss of power and prosperous life, in which there is a sense of rise and fall.
The Palace of Eternal Life embodies the author's ideal of love. The love between Ming Taizu and Yang Fei began with "commitment", while Ming Taizu was frivolous and affectionate. The former characteristic naturally brought many obstacles to the development of Li Yang's love, and the latter characteristic provided the possibility for the transformation of Ming Chengzu. Yang Fei's unremitting efforts may become a reality after experiencing two storms of "calling again" and "gathering the pavilion". In the "secret oath", their human love reached a climax. Ma Wei's transformation is a turning point. After that, Li Yang's love changed from human love to ghost (fairy) love, and romanticism appeared in large numbers. This change makes the content of Li Yang's love present new features. The first is that the palace limitations of love either disappear or retreat to a secondary position. This is because Li Yang withdrew from the political whirlpool, and their love no longer had an impact on politics. Secondly, Li Yang's love will no longer cause material extravagance and waste, as well as that annoying invasion. At this time, Li Yang's love is mainly manifested as a spiritual pursuit, so love has been purified. Works show that love will also happen in the most unlikely places; In the class that knows the least about love, there are also a few people who especially yearn for love, which proves the universality of love and wants to make "love last forever" [6].
There are genuine feelings, sincere feelings, melodramatic feelings and false feelings between Li Yang. On the one hand, this affectation is because Li Longji did not devote himself to Yang Yuhuan, which is reflected in the Palace of Eternal Life. On the other hand, their feelings hurt the interests of others and even the country. Li Yang pursues material and spiritual enjoyment to the maximum extent, and they regard luxury as a way to express their love. As the king of a country, Emperor Ming of the Tang Dynasty expressed his feelings blindly regardless of the national economy and people's livelihood. In this respect, the work touches a profound theme, linking love with current politics, the invasion of the ruling class and the sharp opposition between the ruling class and the people caused by Li Yang's relationship, which inevitably led to the "An Shi Rebellion" and the "Ma Wei Incident". For such a deeper political tragedy, Yang Yuhuan's death is only the beginning. After Burying Jade, the work mainly turned to the description of Li's tragic character.
2. Love between the monarch and the minister (the people)
In the Palace of Eternal Life, Hong Sheng also tied the foundation of loyalty, filial piety and patriotism to the word "affection"-"Seeing a minister's loyalty and filial piety always comes from affection". In the play, he shows various forms of loyalty and filial piety through a series of images. Guo Ziyi's deep concern for the country and the people, his great wisdom and courage to save the people from fire and water, Lei Haiqing's heroic behavior of sacrificing his life for righteousness, Li Guinian's pain of national subjugation and his thoughts on his motherland, Guo Congjin's loyal performance of covering the road to deliver meals, and so on. With these loyal ministers and dutiful sons, Ming Chengzu also felt sorry. For example, in "Offering Rice", I felt Guo Congjing's words, called the soldiers of the Sixth Army and gave them "Spring Lottery" to praise them. Intellectually, they can understand the just action of the Sixth Army and have a certain understanding of their mistakes in the country. Therefore, the Tianbao Rebellion can be restored, and the Tang Dynasty can turn the corner. This is also reflected in the third compromise in Wu Tongyu. Following the advice of the local elders, Emperor Tang left the Prince, Guo Ziyi and Li Guangbi to resist the rebels, and expressed his intention of spreading to the Prince, reflecting that Ming Di had lost his firm confidence in the past and was unable to resist the present fate.
These images and plot descriptions show the author's social and political ideals: an enlightened monarch plus a group of loyal ministers and dutiful sons. Of course, there is also the influence of feudal ethics.
3. The author's feelings
Of course, Li Yang's love is reflected and reorganized differently in Wu Tongyu and the Palace of Eternal Life. The fundamental reason is the author's love for the works and the influence of the social times.
Wu Tongyu entrusted Bai Pu's feelings of national ruin and family ruin. "When I was young, I lost my mother in a hurry and was everywhere. He lost his mother when he was young and was raised and educated by Yuan Haowen. He pretended to be a adherent, did not serve in the Yuan Dynasty, and was deeply dissatisfied with the current dynasty. Perhaps it was the great changes, fantastic life experiences and historical vicissitudes of changing dynasties that made Bai Pu and the Tang Dynasty disillusioned, and it was also their painstaking efforts and enthusiasm when they created Wu Tongyu that made it unique in the Yuan Dynasty.
This is the last play in which Tang was the lead singer. Ming Chengzu's "Song and Dance Destroy the Country" is also revealed in the play, which is not without condemnation, but the author's target is the "two classes of civil and military" who seem helpless in the face of foreign invasion. The author fully affirmed Ming Chengzu's persistence in love and praised his unswerving affection for Yang Fei. In order to alleviate Ming Taizu's serious responsibility for the Anshi Rebellion and strengthen people's sympathy for him, Bai Pu used artistic means to make Ming Taizu repent, such as The Fourth Compromise and Ming Taizu's Complaint of Sorrow in the Rain. His personality is more concrete and vivid. The works strongly exaggerate the pain of the demise of the Tang Dynasty and the nostalgia for the prosperous and happy life in the past. The whole work is permeated with a strong tragic atmosphere, and Ming Chengzu became a victim of foreign invasion. His sad songs represent the painful singing of a dead soul. There is no doubt that this can touch the hearts of countless people in the Yuan Dynasty, which has quite universal significance. In this sense, the rain in Wu Tong also reflects the sharp ethnic contradictions. Criticize the monarch's debauchery in the face of class contradictions; Sympathize with the monarch's misfortune in the face of ethnic contradictions.
In the Palace of Eternal Life, Hong Sheng's creative intention is to eulogize the love between Tang and Yang Guifei and express his ideal pursuit of love. At the same time, it also "warns the afterlife" with the historical implication that Kaiyuan and Tianbao turned from prosperity to decline.
Through Li Yang, two historical figures with serious defects, the author has placed an indescribable sense of rise and fall and his own love ideal. With such an example of "the country restored peace", the author took advantage of the fact that the emperor of the Tang Dynasty was extravagant and eager to cause disaster and revive the clan, and achieved the purpose of punishment. However, this kind of exposure to feudal society is limited. He believes that the cause of disaster and failure is luxury, as long as it can be realized.
The most outstanding work is the author's Love in a Woodbox (also mentioned in the previous Love in Li Yangli). Hong Sheng's "Emperor of the Tang Dynasty" is of course an image of loving the emperor, which obviously entrusts the author with his understanding of a good husband, and sometimes even has his own shadow. This is also related to the author and his wife's special love life experience and experience. The poem [the first branch of romantic love] in "Fixed Love" criticizes the cloud: "Ming is the emperor, English is the mainstay, and non-Chinese is the ratio of stupidity. Just because you want to eat and drink and be gentle, you will die voluntarily, which will lead to the disaster of Tianbao, and you will end up like Han Cheng. A dozen words is enough for a feast. " It can be said that it is Hong Sheng's basic attitude towards Ming Chengzu in the play. Hong Sheng is dissatisfied with and belittles this "British master" who thinks that "mountains and rivers are unified", "played early" and "enjoyed himself", and thinks that his "coming with great sorrow" is the best proof. However, Hong Sheng praised the love of the Ming emperor, which is rare in the imperial family. He exposed and criticized the "relaxation of imperial Taiwan", affirmed the "occupation of love", advocated the ideal of equality and singleness of love, and praised the immortal "love of children". The reason why the author tried his best to portray Tang's tragic character in the second half and fully exaggerated his loyalty and infatuation with sticking to the Covenant of firewood boxes is not only to deepen the theme of expressing national consciousness in the play, but also to pin his (and the broad masses of people at that time) equal and single-minded love ideal on Li Yang.
I think, in the Tang Dynasty, we can actually see that the image of Ming Di has a dual identity: the emperor and the civilian. His social status is emperor, but he is human in essence. In the Palace of Eternal Life, Hong Sheng dares to add or delete historical records and traditional stories from his own understanding, instead of describing an ordinary ruthless emperor, he describes a rare loving emperor and writes him as a special case to express his ideals. Li Longji, an emperor with little love, also wrote the common faults of ordinary emperors, and his ultimate love was in sharp contrast with the ruthless emperor. This can also be seen from the fourth compromise in Wu Tongyu. After the Anshi Rebellion, the Mawei incident happened. Ming Chengzu would rather be a civilian than be married to Yang Fei forever. Empresses are human beings, so their lust is reasonable. Then the integration of the author's subjective consciousness, which has been analyzed above. Therefore, from the plot evolution of the two works, it can be concluded that the emperor of the Tang Dynasty gradually changed from an emperor to a civilian, and in the process of national ruin, the love between the emperor and the princess was sublimated to the love of the civilian.