Page:Japanese Literature (Keene).pdf/76

64 unreality, but that in-between state that Chikamatsu sought or that Yeats meant when he spoke of the distance that imaginative art kept from the audience.

The puppet theatre, as might be deduced from the above, is an extremely demanding medium. As long as the texts of the plays are first-rate, their value is enhanced by having them performed by puppets which are, as Claudel said, the embodiment of the words. However, the faults in any second-rate play become all too apparent under such treatment. It is like having a company of actors whose exclusive concern is to pronounce the lines of a play perfectly, without any attempt at interpretation or characterization, thus suppressing their own personalities for the sake of the texts. If the plays thus being performed are by Shakespeare, they may well gain a great deal, but most plays will not stand up to such treatment. This is always true of the puppet theatre, for none of the charm or individual talent of the accomplished actor can save the faulty text.

The texts of Chikamatsu’s plays, masterpieces though some of them are, do not always read very well because they were designed with the special requirements of the puppet stage in mind. In contrast with the muted world of the Nō drama, we find elaborately framed speeches and descriptive passages, well suited to puppet performance. However, Chikamatsu wrote not only heroic plays like The Battles of Coxinga, but also domestic tragedies based on incidents of contemporary life. The principal characters of these plays are from the middle and lower classes—merchants, clerks, bandits, prostitutes. Although these are unmistakably puppet-plays, the subjects and the texts lend themselves far more readily to adaptation by actors than those of the heroic plays, as may easily be imagined. A battle between a man and a tiger can scarcely be made credible on a normal stage, but the tragic story of the love of a debt-ridden