Chinese · 1250–1337
Almost nothing survives about Wang Shifu beyond a name in a fourteenth-century register of playwrights, a birthplace in Dadu, the Yuan capital that became Beijing, and fourteen play titles of which three survive. He wrote for the zaju theatre of the Mongol period, when Chinese scholars were shut out of official careers and turned to writing for actors. The Story of the Western Wing is his: a romantic comedy in twenty-one acts across five plays, far longer than the four-act norm, built from a Tang tale in which a scholar seduces and abandons a girl. Wang kept the seduction and threw out the abandonment, adding a maid called Hongniang whose name became the Chinese word for matchmaker. The play was banned repeatedly for indecency and reprinted constantly anyway; a copy of it is what Baoyu and Daiyu read together in the garden in Dream of the Red Chamber.