Page:Tales from old Japanese dramas (1915).djvu/49

Rh wrote for them. Then they began gradually to decline, and were closed towards the end of the same century. Then the centre of the marionette theatre, and of the epical drama, was transferred to Yedo, where they flourished for a little more than half a century. It must further be noted that, while the above-mentioned theatres flourished in Ōsaka, there were one or two small marionette theatres in Kyōto, and that the troupes of the Ōsaka theatres now and then visited Kyōto, and the chief towns in the vicinity of Ōsaka, to give their performances. It is said that the epical dramatists, who lived during this whole period, numbered about two hundred, and their compositions reached the enormous total of one thousand. But it is only about thirty of these writers, including those mentioned above, whose works are worthy of note, and most of these best authors were connected with the Ōsaka theatres.

As has just been remarked, towards the end of the eighteenth century the epical drama had declined in Ōsaka, and begun to bloom forth in Yedo, where it flourished until towards the middle of the nineteenth century. It is true that in the era of Kyōhō (1716–1735) and afterwards, many