Hong Shen
| Hong Shen | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Born | December 31, 1894 Wujin, Jiangsu, Qing Empire |
| Died | August 29, 1955 (aged 60) Beijing |
| Occupation | playwright, screenwriter, director, film theorist |
| Notable work |
Yama Zhao (1923) The Young Mistress's Fan Mrs. Shentu (1925) Wukui Bridge (1931) |
| Style | Chinese spoken drama |
Hong Shen (Chinese: 洪深; Wade–Giles: Hung Shen; 31 December 1894 – 29 August 1955) was a Chinese playwright, film director and screenwriter, film and drama theorist, and educator. He is considered by drama historians as one of the three founders of Chinese spoken drama, together with Tian Han and Ouyang Yuqian. He wrote the first Chinese film script, Mrs. Shentu.
Hong Shen was born in Wujin, Jiangsu Province, Qing Empire on 31 December 1894. After attending secondary schools in Shanghai and Tianjin, he entered the newly founded Tsinghua School (now Tsinghua University) in 1912, and graduated in 1916. He then left for the United States to study ceramic engineering at Ohio State University on a Boxer Indemnity Scholarship. While there, he wrote and produced two plays in English. A cast of Chinese students from OSU and Oberlin College performed one of them, The Wedded Husband, in April 1919 to an audience of 1300 in the university chapel. It was probably the first play written by a citizen of China to be performed in the United States. In the fall of 1919, he transferred to Harvard University and was selected as one of "Baker's Dozen" to study drama under Professor George Pierce Baker.
Hong Shen returned to China in 1922, with the ambition of becoming China's Ibsen. He taught Western Literature at Fudan University in Shanghai, as well as several other universities. He wrote and acted in the play Yama Zhao in 1923, which strongly opposed the brutal warfare that plagued China at the time, which is now known as the Warlord Era. The play was well received and established his reputation as a playwright. He joined the Shanghai Association for Dramatists, and made a number of plays, including the The Young Mistress's Fan, which was adapted from Oscar Wilde's Lady Windermere's Fan. The play was tremendously popular and was highly influential to the development of modern drama in China.
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