The Story of the Western Wing by Wang Shifu
Published 1300 · 75,000 words · about 6 hours at an average pace · Drama, Classic Literature, Romance
How hard is The Story of the Western Wing to read?
The Story of the Western Wing scores 58 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 80 out of 100
- Yuan northern-drama arias mix literary allusion with thirteenth-century Beijing slang and theatrical jargon; West and Idema annotate heavily and print the obscenities the standard versions cut.
- Sentence structure: 68 out of 100
- Sung suites in fixed tune patterns alternate with prose dialogue, and the aria grammar is elliptical to the point of telegraphy.
- Abstraction: 42 out of 100
- Concerned with people, letters and thresholds rather than ideas; the argument about desire and rank stays in the action.
- Information density: 58 out of 100
- Compressed plotting across five plays, with a large allusive apparatus in the arias and a cast whose ranks determine everything.
- Narrative indirection: 48 out of 100
- The plot is clear, but the lovers communicate by poem, zither tune and misdelivered letter, so intention has to be read at one remove.
- Symbolic density: 58 out of 100
- The wall, the western wing, the zither and the exchanged poems organise the play, though it stays closer to farce than to allegory.
- Ironic distance: 74 out of 100
- Hongniang mocks the lovers' self-dramatisation from within the play, and Wang Shifu is answering a famous Tang story that justified abandonment.
- Resolution withholding: 34 out of 100
- Ends in examination success and a wedding, the standard comic close, with the earlier tale's betrayal deliberately cancelled.
- Structural complexity: 64 out of 100
- Five linked plays of four acts each, far outside the Yuan norm, with singing duties passed between characters rather than held by one lead.
How The Story of the Western Wing is regarded
The Story of the Western Wing holds a literary regard score of 76 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.