Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 6.djvu/135

 fused history, if Japanese records be followed; a history in which the growth of the drama itself has no concern for the narrator in comparison with the biographies of individual performers and the vicissitudes of their enterprise. By the middle of the seventeenth century the student finds a term employed which indicates that the histrionic element of the dance had assumed prominence, but it may be broadly stated that until the early years of the eighteenth century theatrical performances were only a special variety of the mimes already described under the name of no-kyogen and popularised as kabuki. The dancers, by gesture and facial expression, pourtrayed the motives and sentiments attributed to them by a chorus of singers, but remained always mute themselves. Marionette shows had much to do with the development of the true drama. Their use in association with music and song dated from about the year 1605, and gradually attained such a degree of elaboration that the task of composing puppet plays began to occupy the attention of men of letters. Early in the eighteenth century two dramatists, Chikamatsu Monzaemon and Takeda Izumo, adapted for the marionette stage celebrated historical incidents, like the vendetta of the Forty-seven Ronin, and the expulsion of the Dutch from Formosa by the pirate King Kokusen-ya (known in European annals as Coxinga). These men were the fathers