Page:The Surviving Works of Sharaku (1939).djvu/27

 of 28 others, some few of which depict wrestlers rather than actors, or for other reasons stand apart from the rest of his work and are comparatively uninteresting. We are also able to show 6 prints not listed by Rumpf and hitherto unreproduced, but of undoubted authenticity. The addition of these brings the total number of designs by Sharaku now known to exist in prints to 136, of which 108 are represented by originals in the exhibition of which this is the catalogue, and are reproduced in the pages that follow. The photographs of the others are added so as to make the showing of his surviving work in prints complete.

Out of eight existing drawings of actors confidently, and we believe with justification, attributed to him, we can show three, with photographs of the others. We also reproduce two fans bearing his name, which may have been done by him.

It remains to state what other additions or corrections the present catalogue brings to the previous scholarship of the subject.

Theoretically the dating of actor prints should be a fairly simple undertaking. On each figure appears the private mon or crest of the actor, so that we have his name to start with, and all that should remain to be done would be to run through the list of parts that he is known to have taken, when that happens to exist, and decide which one is represented by the print being studied at the moment. But it is just here that the difficulty comes in. Sometimes the costume, hair arrangement and makeup are such that the print might equally well represent two or even three parts; sometimes the distinctive differences are so slight that they can be detected only by an expert well acquainted with the action of the plays and with the customs of the eighteenth century theatre. And then again the records of the stage, while fortunately fairly full, are widely scattered and by no means wholly complete. In fact those that cover the very period of Sharaku’s activity—the year 1794—are even more incomplete than most of the others. The documents on the subject possessed by Dr. Ihara, together with those in the Theatrical Museum of Waseda University, Tokyo, to which he has access, form a very notable collection, perhaps the greatest in the world; but the documents assembled in Berlin and Boston likewise are of importance, and each of the three centers apparently has a number of items not possessed by the others. Illustrated play-bills are among the most reliable sources of information in these collections, but those covering certain of the performances with which we are concerned seem no longer to exist and while the text of one of the plays