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- Title
Reading and Acting in Early Modern Kabuki: Browsing the Library of Ichikawa Danjūrō II.
- Authors
Björk, Tove
- Abstract
This article investigates the literary sources available to early modern Japanese theatre makers through the lens of the kabuki 歌舞伎 actor Ichikawa Danjūrō II 二代目市川團十郎. Danjūrō II was a pioneering actor, active during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, a period that scholars agree is fundamental to the development of kabuki as the stage art we know today. Still, we have no written scripts on which to evaluate the contents of the plays of this period because the contents were constantly changed to fit the mood of the audience and because the production format was actor-based, which meant that plays were produced to showcase its lead actors and each actor often designed his own scenes. Here I look at the literary interests of Danjūrō II and notes on his acting in actor's reviews, focusing on the enacting of the Japanese medieval revenge drama of the Soga brothers, on the one hand, and on the staging of the hero Guan Yu from Sanguozhi yanyi 三國志演義 (Romance of the Three Kingdoms), on the other. Based on this, I consider how the literary sources were used when staging a historical play, in the hope of forming a base for a discourse on literacy and theatre in early modern Japanese society.
- Subjects
LITERARY sources; HISTORICAL drama; MODERN society; READING; EMERGENT literacy; JAPANESE literature
- Publication
JOSAH: Journal of the Society for Asian Humanities, 2022, Vol 53, p231
- ISSN
2653-0848
- Publication type
Article