Wang Shih-Fu

Wang Te-hsin. Year of birth unknown; died circa 1330. Chinese dramatist.

His main work is the 20-act play The Western Chamber, in the tsa-chü genre, which was based on the plot of the eighth-century poet Yüan Chen’s short story The Story of Ying-Ying, which, during the Sun dynasty, was reworked into tales and performed with musical accompaniment. In contrast to the original source, the play has a happy ending. The attitude of a new social class, the townspeople who became a social force during the Sun and Yüan dynasties, is apparent in the sympathy toward the servant heroine. The Western Chamber is outstanding among Yüan plays for its deep and careful development of the heroes’ psychology and its poetic virtues. In Soviet theaters the play is performed under the title The Spilled Bowl (rearrangement by A. Globa).