Writers › Writer / Poet
Shen Jing
Wujiang official turned playwright who wrote seventeen chuanqi plays and a southern prosody manual and insisted on strict metre against Tang Xianzu's freer style
In a study at night, a desk holds a brush pot, a porcelain vase with a plum branch, a lit red lantern, a folded fan and an unrolled blank scroll, with no one seated there, while through a round window the moon rises over a lake with a sailboat.
Also known as Zi Boying · Hao Ningan · Ci Yinsheng
- Roles
- Writer / Poet
Shen Jing, courtesy name Boying, came from Wujiang near Suzhou and gained his jinshi in 1574. In 1586 a memorial touching on the ranking of imperial consorts angered the Wanli emperor, who demoted him; soon afterwards he pleaded illness and went home, where he devoted the remaining thirty years of his life to the theatre. He wrote seventeen chuanqi plays, collected as the Shuyu tang chuanqi, of which seven survive, among them The Righteous Hero (Yixia ji), and he revised a register of southern tunes and modes that set metrical standards for southern drama. His insistence that words must fit the tunes put him at odds with Tang Xianzu, who valued expression over strict prosody, a dispute later known as the Tang-Shen controversy. He died in 1610, and the dramatists who followed his rules, including Lu Tiancheng, Wang Jide and Bu Shichen, came to be called the Wujiang school.
Life and times
Dates 1553 CE–1610 CE