Korean early modern popular theater started as an approach to the media closely related to the public rather than as realization of inner literary values or aesthetic reception. Those concerned with them emphasized public recognition because they were...
Korean early modern popular theater started as an approach to the media closely related to the public rather than as realization of inner literary values or aesthetic reception. Those concerned with them emphasized public recognition because they were interested in the approachability to the receptors in terms of the values of texts and the status of theatre was limited as the plots of content that promoted the interest of performances and made a compromise with the media. For these reasons, the popular theatre left in the form of a play or script have been very few. In addition, early modern theatre derived from entertainment-directed storytelling. Contemporary people recognized drama actors and actresses in the field of entertainment so that the then popular theatre belonged to part of entertainment activities. With the later genre process as dynamic storytelling, they were reorganized as a story of social communication in the enjoyment of carnivalesque stories. However, the audience was characterized by its female-biased attitudes. The tears of female spectators were the beginning of tolerating private freedom within a public area and the motive of forming public cultures as a sense of group solidarity and community.
The storytelling aspects of early modern popular theatre depending on narration structures could be integrated as the public variations of story values and the images of leaders. Early modern story values included maturity, punishment, sacrifice and so on. As the process of an adaptation to transplanted modernity, they implied periodic characteristics; thus, they were differentiated from universal concept.
Such story values became clearer with the behavior and selection of leaders on stage. They were depicted as a degenerative wise mother and good wife and unmarried women who enjoyed freedom limited as free love and showed the limitations of early modern image of a woman. In addition, the men who appeared as prosecutors, police officers and ministers and revealed the pre-modernity of power tended to take advantage of others for their success or show the aspects of familism and colonial traits.
The story values and characters were configured as an aesthetic experience within the structures of theatre. Early modern popular theatre attracted the sentiment of the public by using the facts of theatre, distortion of their characters and intersection of desire in theatre. These were the development of a story by information gap such as dramatic irony, which was the most basic form of enhancing the suspense.
The largest change in early modern popular theatre was the stage. The stage was perceived as one of the early modern media and played a role in segmenting the entertainment into a theatre. The treatment of home as an early modern daily life space or the appearance of students or gisaengs as an early modern social status or the depiction of a realistic stage with the old-story background and its subsequent increase in dramatic fantasy reflected the trends at the time. As a result, the productivity of the theater was found as well as the early modern lifestyles were strengthened. This phenomenon led immediately to the filling-up of the seats in the theaters and the expansion of performance spaces. The advertising of theatres was made on the newspapers and magazines and a system of celebrities was mobilized. The successful theatre filled up their story spaces not only on stage but also in other media such as radio and cinema.
The stage of early modern popular theatre reflected a colonial life and became a mirror of verifying oneself. Besides, it made people find newly emerging individuals in a whirlpool of social changes owing to the modernization and draw a communal compromise related to their growth. This created the time for people to share dramatic metaphor and resulted in the solidarity and communication of individuals.
Eventually, it has been observed that the appealing storytelling of popular plays did not lie in the schematism securing a success or the popularity compromising with the public, but lied in sincere communication. Such communication depended on how accurately it could grasp people's changing desire in the given period. Even if both schematism and popularity technically contributed to smooth communication, it could not be the core of popular theatre. It has been proved by the storytelling aspects of early modern popular plays that could be summed up as stage, maturity, punishment, sacrifice, unmarried women practicing free love, degenerative wise mother and good wife, disguise of nicheism, home, students, gisaengs, old tales, filling up theaters, a system of celebrities and the multimedia variations of a story.