Page:Japanese plays and playfellows (1901).djvu/98

 descriptions it will be evident that Mr. Kawakami brought us, if not entire plays, at any rate authentic glimpses of the unfamiliar world in which Japanese playgoers delight. It is an ingenious, palpitating world, richly stored with action and sentiment and lit with many cross-lights of allusive fancy. There is so much naïf and childish joy in it, so many pretty and grotesque details, that one easily is diverted by these from the consideration of its deeper aspects. Both are better comprehended by a retrospective glance at theatrical history.

It is rather interesting to observe that national drama began its career in England and Japan at about the same time. In 1575 Okuni, the pretty priestess who ran away from the Kizukt temple in Izumo with Nagoya Sanzaburo, and made her peace with the god Ōnamuji by devoting part of the receipts to repairing his shrine, gave her first theatrical performance at Kyōto. In 1576 "the Earl of Leicester's servants" erected the first public theatre in Blackfriars. The times were dramatic, and the excitement of foreign adventure quickened the impulse of the masses towards a more turbulent form of art than religious plays. The Spanish Armada was defeated in 1588, and in 1592 Hideyoshi's armada set sail for the conquest of Corea. The dramatists were men of similar stamp. Just as Greene and Marlowe were reckless rebels against tradition and convention, so Chikamatsu was a rōnin, or disgraced samurai, too headstrong to endure feudal discipline. Small wonder, then, that their plays were full of "coarse horrors and vulgar blood-shedding." Independence of Christian "Mysteries" and Buddhist Nō was a marked characteristic of the secular humanistic drama, but whereas England had not long