This paper examines the mode in which Korean historical play interacted with historical novel and historical romance, as a way of exploring its origin and establishment. In the process of historical play emerging and developing as a sub-genre of moder...
This paper examines the mode in which Korean historical play interacted with historical novel and historical romance, as a way of exploring its origin and establishment. In the process of historical play emerging and developing as a sub-genre of modern drama in Korea, historical novel and historical romance played an important role as the source of materials. While history was deployed and recreated by novel, romance and drama/play and enjoyed its popularity, the socio-cultural context such as colonial rule and censorship, and the dominant discourse of empire and nation at the time had a big influence. The writers and intellectuals desired ethno-nation(minjok), the imagined community as a sublime object that could replace the absence of the state and found its representations in history. History granted sense of continuity and dignity to the colonized subject that could replace the sense of gap and rupture that they experienced under the colonial rule; hence, it was accepted by the colonized along with the national discourse that was believed to implode the imperial discourse. It seems that most common ways for the writers from colonial period to approach history were divided into two. One was to choose a material from history in order to get by censorship and speak out about and criticize the reality indirectly. In this case, historical play took on the form of ``a prehistory of present`` and an allegory of reality. Many historical plays in colonial period dealt with the fall of a state, which could be seen to reflect the writers` consciousness to contemplate the fall of a state and replace its absence with the restoration of the nation(minjok). The other was to appropriate history and represent it as a discursive construct. Appropriation of history took on two modes. One was the writer appropriating history in order to create an ideological fantasy of his/her own; and the other was to involve socio-cultural context or discourse of the time in the process of summoning and appropriating history. Among the three plays that are based on Yi Gwang-su`s The Crown Prince in Hemp Clothes, Choe Byeong-hwa`s Princess Nak-rang is imbued with the tendency to enlighten people that is characteristic of national discourse. In Yu Chi-jin`s Mount Gaegol, a prince of a ruined nation falling in love with a princess from his enemy state appears as a metaphor for the conflict between empire and colony, and an allegory for the colonized nation. Han Sang-jik`s History of Long Nights reveals the undisclosed affairs that happened inside the court by choosing to tell the story only through female characters. In doing so, it succeeds in producing the ambivalence of achieving the gender effects by feminizing colonial Joseon through Shilla court and creating envy for the powerful masculinity of Japanese empire. The 1930s was the time in which historical romance flourished as popular readings and popular performance alongside the success of historical novel. Yi Dong-gyu`s Portrait of Falling Flowers which dramatized a historical romance is worth paying attention to, as an example in which colonial discourse penetrated into literature. In this historical play, which was published in 1940 during the war footing, the representation of ``mother`` differs from its original historical romance. In the historical romance, mother emphasizes the happiness of her son over nation, but in Yi Dong-gyu`s historical play, mother is represented as the ``militant mother`` who educates her son to give up his life for greater good, hence showing signs of subsumption by colonial discourse. Historical plays in colonial period are melodramas that exaggerates and emphasizes characters` emotions and tears. However, when read in the context of colonial/national discourse and social context, they uncover a much more complicated political geography. They are problematic texts that casts a complex ``shadow`` interwoven with the ruptures and ambivalent signification of colonial/national discourse.