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• 1 2024-10-29T09:36:12+00:00 The Injustice to Dou E and Other Courtroom Dramas
  感天動地竇娥冤與其他公案劇 28 plain 2025-06-23T17:12:53+00:00

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  CONTENTS

  You can find modules that analyze various adaptations of The Injustice to Dou E 竇娥冤 at the links below. To get a sense of the main themes and historical import of the original The Injustice to Dou E, please consult the "General Background" below.
  1. Snow in June 六月雪 (1959)
     • "Constructing Shared Repertoires with Sign Language and Chinese Opera," a module on the Cantonese opera film adaptation of The Injustice to Dou E.
  2. The Injustice to Dou E 窦娥冤 (1959)
     • "Creating A Socialist Revolutionary Subject," a module on the Pu opera film adaptation of The Injustice to Dou E. 
  3. The Crimson Palm 血手印 (1964)
     • "From Love Story to Film Noir," a module on a Hong Kong Huangmei opera film adaptation of The Dream of the Crimson Robe 緋衣夢.

  GENERAL BACKGROUND

  Traditional China was among the first cultures around the world to make courtroom drama a major subgenre on the theater stage. It is not the presiding judges, who range from utterly corrupt to the preternaturally wise, that make Chinese courtroom plays from the Yuan dynasty (1260-1368) distinctive, but the vulnerable defendants. They, by virtue of their ingenuity, eloquence, and grit, defy the odds and extract justice for themselves and for the people in their lives. Typically, it is these underdogs who occupy the main singing role (dan 旦 or mo 末) and as such they offer a bottoms-up view of how to put judicial powers in the service of the play’s aesthetic design (Fig. 1). 
  
  Modern critics would have us believe that such courtroom dramas are a wholesale indictment of the ruling Mongol elites in general and the Mongol judiciary in particular, but such allegorical readings are anachronistic at best. The selectively realist interpretation of judicial practices—particularly the miscarriage of justice--neglects to consider how the courtroom functions as a literary device within the world of the plays. To be sure, China had promulgated legal codes, developed one of the earliest forensic traditions, and operated on the basis of written contract and official decrees long before the advent of the Yuan dynasty, but those judicial realities should not blind us to the fact that zaju 雜劇 theater had its own way of developing what is at the core of the genre, that is, a well-conceived dramatic conflict. 
  
  In the typical zaju play, the first act serves as an exposition of the central dramatic conflict, the second as its development, the third as a climax and turning point before the conflict is resolved in the fourth and final act. Generally, a courtroom play pits a humble or precariously situated protagonist against a rapacious or sexually predatory antagonist, but in the end, no matter the nature of the setbacks, the socially marginal character always prevails, either in their own lifetime or posthumously. Hence, neither a corrupt nor a wise judge should be read as realistic portrayals of contemporaneous courtroom practices, but rather as a means to construct a temporary setback (corrupt judge) and/or to achieve a resolution (wise judge) within the overall arc of the play. In short, the courtroom is a dramatic device designed to amplify and ultimately validate the voices of lowly characters as the play works toward resolving an underlying dramatic conflict.
  
  Guan Hanqing’s The Injustice of Dou E (Dou E yuan 竇娥冤) is a case in point. Featuring both a corrupt judge (act 2) and a skeptical, but ultimately just one (act 4), the play turns a young widow on the receiving end of many misfortunes into the central lever for the welfare of her community. The central ideological conundrum of the play resides in the quandary over whether or not a widow is at liberty to refuse remarriage. Guided by her desire to be loyal to her deceased husband (widow chastity) and her wish to be a responsive and devoted daughter-in-law (filial love), the main protagonist, young Dou E is adamantly opposed to the prospect of remarriage. By contrast, her mother-in-law gives in to the opportunity for remarriage in response to a complex emotional mix of coercion, indebtedness, and enchantment. The dramatic conflict arises from a clash between Dou E’s embrace of these normative virtues and the refusal of the people around her to honor her aspirations either on account of convenience, sexual aggression, greed, or worries over family reputation (Fig. 2).
  
  In a slow crescendo over the four acts, Dou E’s resistance to coercion of any sort is incrementally scaled up and intensified. In Act 1, Dou E (cast as “female lead;” dan 旦)  confronts her mother-in-law (cast as “old woman;” bu’er 卜兒) over the latter’s willingness to accept a dual marriage prospect at the hands of an unsavory duo, the young drifter aptly named Donkey Zhang (Zhang Lü’er 張騼兒, cast as “additional comic/villain;” fujing 付淨) and his father (cast as “old man;” bolao 孛老). Likewise, when the mother-in-law lets the two men take up residence in their home, Dou E virulently resists the predatory advances of Donkey Zhang. In Act 2, when Donkey Zhang schemes to do away with the mother-in-law with a bowl of poisoned mutton soup, but by mistake kills his own father instead, he issues an ultimatum to Dou E to either marry him or to go to court to be prosecuted for the murder of his father. Once again, Dou E rejects his marriage proposal out of hand, and convinced of her innocence, settles for court proceedings. By the end of this act, a corrupt judge (cast as a “clown/villain;” chou 丑) sentences her to death for the crime of killing her father-in-law. However, a reading that insists on the realistic nature of this miscarriage of justice misses how the unjust verdict amplifies the central conflict of the play: the reason Dou E makes a false confession is not because she herself is being tortured, but because she does not want her mother-in-law to be tortured in turn. Thus, as a plot device, the corrupt judge allows for Dou E to internally reconcile and publicly assert the two virtues that are her loadstar, even or perhaps especially at the expense of her own life.  
  
  Act 3 takes place on the execution grounds in the sixth lunar month. There, Dou E challenges the Executioner and, in a series of memorable arias, denounces a Heaven and Earth seemingly indifferent to the grievous turn of events. In the face of all the odds arrayed against her, she issues three famous prophesies. If she is innocent, it will snow in midsummer, her blood will not spill on the ground upon her being beheaded, but will instead be soaked up by fluttering silk banners (see Fig. 1), and the county will suffer three years of drought. At the end of this act, in an incipient sign that all the predictions will come to pass, it begins to snow. The signature plot element of this untimely snow, likely an elaboration created by Guan Hanqing out of earlier legends about other historical figures (Sieber 2022), has given the play the alternate name under which it circulates in many modern theatrical adaptations, that is, Snow in Midsummer (Liuyue xue 六月雪). 
  
  Act 4 takes place at night in the offices of Dou E’s father (cast as “senior additional male role;” wai 外), now an imperial censor tasked with oversight over local judicial affairs. He happens to be assigned to the county where, unbeknownst to him, his daughter was executed and where everyone is suffering from a prolonged drought. Through ghostly means, Dou E, in her guise as a ghost, draws attention to her case, and eventually appears to her father. Dou E once again encounters resistance to her truthful version of events, but after considerable back and forth, Dou E’s father lets himself be convinced by a reference to a historical precedent where another’s young woman’s wrongful conviction resulted in a prolonged drought. At last, he uses his judicial powers to rehabilitate Dou E, punish the appropriate parties, to make arrangements for the care of the mother-in-law, and to offer sacrifices to Dou E’s spirit. 
  
  Thus, in accordance with the readings presented above and as exemplified by other plays that appeared before and after The Injustice of Dou E, this cautionary tale of a play warns the elder generation (mother-in-law, father), ruthless outsiders (the Zhangs) as well as derelict and greedy officials (the corrupt judge) to respect the wishes of young women for a modicum of self-determination, lest these elders are willing to become the target of heavenly, ghostly, and judicial wrath (Sieber 2025). 

  WORKS CONSULTED CLICK TO EXPAND/COLLAPSE

  Patricia Sieber. “The Pavilion for Praying to the Moon and The Injustice to Dou E: The Innovation of the Female Lead.” In How To Read Chinese Drama: A Guided Anthology, edited by Patricia Sieber and Regina S. Llamas, 78-100. New York: Columbia University Press, 2022.

  -----. “The Thorn Hairpin.” In Routledge Handbook of Traditional Chinese Literature, edited by Victor H. Mair and Zhenjun Zhang, 452-58. New York: Routledge, 2025.

  AUTHOR

  Patricia Sieber