Two dramatists, one world apart

Of all Shakespeare's works, the dream features most prominently in A Midsummer Night's Dream. The forest near Athens is akin to the family garden in The Peony Pavilion, a neighboring quarter that harbors the forces of seduction and sets free the desires of the young. It is not the island in The Tempest, nor the city of Verona for the star-crossed lovers. Despite the use of magical juice, it is not passion that is fueled but an amorous atmosphere in both Shakespeare's Dream and Tang's Pavilion. One can imagine Liu and Du singing a duet in that forest in the same way Puck would find himself at home in Du's garden.

For the deux-ex-machina happy ending, Pavilion is evocative of sadness that is absent from Shakespeare's Dream. But lyricism and earthy humor are present in both plays. And both tales can be sung or danced because they lend themselves to other forms of performing arts. Pavilion, intended as an opera, has also been adapted as a play but has been less successful.

On April 10, in Suichang, Zhejiang province, where Tang served as a local official and where he started writing Pavilion, two dozen scholars from China and the UK floated ideas and questions:

Shakespeare was a professional dramatist while Tang was a civil servant who happened to pen a few plays and thousands of poems.

They both represent peaks in culture, but we should refrain from measuring which peak is higher and focus instead on what's unique about each of them.

How can we free ourselves of the limitations of culture so that we can have better exchanges?

The comparison of Tang and Shakespeare can serve as a point of departure for meaningful conversations about art, literature and cultural inspirations, rather than being an end in itself.