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48 dance combined with a certain amount of miming. Some people believe that there was Chinese influence in the naming of this entertainment, if not in its form as well, but the early “monkey-music” was of so elementary a nature that it is almost impossible to prove whether or not it underwent foreign influence. Performances under this name go back at least as far as the tenth century, and there no doubt were similar forms of entertainment for many years previous. There was also a rival school of theatrical performances called dengaku, or “field-music”, which flourished especially in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and which seems to have had its origins in the festivities attending harvest celebrations and other agricultural holidays. “Field-music” came to be associated with various shrines and consisted of elaborate programmes of dancing and singing, together with playlets acted by the dancers. Our knowledge of the theatre of the thirteenth century and before is so imperfect that we are unable to ascertain just what relationship existed between the “monkey-music” and the “field-music”, and in fact it is often difficult to distinguish the two, for both came to be performances of much the same nature. What is perhaps most significant is that the Nō drama, in spite of its later themes, was apparently of secular origin, although it undoubtedly underwent some religious influence through the “field-music” and other dramatic forms.

By the middle of the fourteenth century the Nō had assumed much of its present shape; that is, it was a combination of singing, dancing and music, differing from earlier dramatic forms chiefly in that it had plots which unified the three elements. By the end of the same century this rather simple entertainment had been lifted to its highest powers of expression by two men: Kanami Kiyotsugu (1333–84) and his son Seami (or Zeami) Motokiyo (1363–1443). The Nō play, as it took final form