This paper aimed to criticize the discussions on early Changgeuk mainly focusing on <Eunsaegye> and existing views that understood the history of plays during the 1910s mainly around Sinpaguek, and tried to identify the fact that early Changgeuk had been consistently performed in theaters as a genre, namely, Gugeuk, and their repertoires had also been expanded with a clue regarding performance advertising articles in 『Maeil Sinbo』 during the 1910s. There may not be sufficient data; however, based on these articles, the means of expanding their repertoires was to dramatize existing classical novels & tales, and this could have been the one expediency that pacified criticisms of the intellectual class by containing new contents while continuously ensuring popularity from existing classical narratives readers and Pansori spectators. Also, the dramatization of classical narratives was meaningful in that it was a dynamic phenomenon of the Pansori genre that was to extend the repertoires by adapting to a new environment. The themes including royalty, filial duty, and faithfulness, all of which were initially owned by classical narratives, are also supposed to be inherited in Gugeuk as they are. In this regard, there is no way but to make a negative evaluation in terms of their response to reality under the colonial rule. In the meantime, they are deemed to earn sympathy from spectators to some extent as filial duty and faithfulness are reinterpreted as the ethics of the family that appeared as the unit of modern society.

This paper aimed to criticize the discussions on early Changgeuk mainly focusing on <Eunsaegye> and existing views that understood the history of plays during the 1910s mainly around Sinpaguek, and tried to identify the fact that early Changgeuk had been consistently performed in theaters as a genre, namely, Gugeuk, and their repertoires had also been expanded with a clue regarding performance advertising articles in 『Maeil Sinbo』 during the 1910s. There may not be sufficient data; however, based on these articles, the means of expanding their repertoires was to dramatize existing classical novels & tales, and this could have been the one expediency that pacified criticisms of the intellectual class by containing new contents while continuously ensuring popularity from existing classical narratives readers and Pansori spectators. Also, the dramatization of classical narratives was meaningful in that it was a dynamic phenomenon of the Pansori genre that was to extend the repertoires by adapting to a new environment. The themes including royalty, filial duty, and faithfulness, all of which were initially owned by classical narratives, are also supposed to be inherited in Gugeuk as they are. In this regard, there is no way but to make a negative evaluation in terms of their response to reality under the colonial rule. In the meantime, they are deemed to earn sympathy from spectators to some extent as filial duty and faithfulness are reinterpreted as the ethics of the family that appeared as the unit of modern society.