plays is probably the Chushingura, written in 1744 by Takeda Izumo and his collaborators. Both the subject, the revenge of their lord’s death by forty seven retainers, and the treatment which maintains a high degree of excellence throughout, make this play the most popular of all on the Japanese stage. It remains to this day the stock play, which is sure of drawing full houses when all others have failed; and such hold does it still retain on the Japanese audience that Danjuro, the leading actor in Tokyo, has played the rôle of the hero no less than forty-eight times. After the death of Chikamatsu Hanji (1725–1783), who makes with Chikamatsu Monzayemon and Takeda Izumo the great trio of lyrical dramatists, their school declined and few noted plays of the kind have been produced in this century.
With the decline of the Osaka school of lyrical drama, puppet-shows also fell out of favour. Though such shows are still held regularly in Osaka and occasionally in Tokyo, they may be said to have been entirely superseded by the theatre. The lyrical drama still holds the stage; but it is not the only form of drama. In the seventeenth century, crude plays were written by actors for their own theatres, who often added to their répertoire adaptations of lyrical plays when they were in want of original plots. In the following century when the lyrical drama was at the zenith of its prosperity under Chikamatsu Monzayemon and his successors, the prose drama also took a high literary form under Tsuuchi Jihei who died in 1760 at over eighty years of age. He was succeeded by many talented writers, the last of whom was Kawatake Mokuami (1816–1893); but even the high standard of their plays could not diminish the popularity of the lyrical drama, which, in addition to its superiority as literature by being couched in more poetic language, has the inestimable advantage of being better known to the public through gidayu-singers. The Restoration has not yet given rise to a new school of drama.
