The Japanese Theatre
ruined and lost their voices, and even burst blood-vessels, in the long-continued, unnatural strain of their recitatives. The children who take part equal the oldest members in their gravity and woodenness. In some delightful scenes the demons, with hideous masks and abundant wigs of long, red-silk hair, spread deliberate and conventional terror among the buckram grandees, and, stamping the stage wildly, leaping and whirling, relieve the long-drawn seriousness of the trilogy. It is only when the performers are without masks that the scene is recognized as intentionally a light and amusing farce, while the roars of the audience are elicited by stately, ponderous, and time-honored puns, and plays upon words that a foreigner cannot appreciate.
Fine representations of the No may be seen at the Koyokwan club-house in Tokio, and in the audiences one beholds all the bureaucracy, the court circles, and a gathering of aristocratic families not elsewhere to be encountered.
The existing theatre and the legitimate drama are not yet three centuries old, and the name shibai, meaning turf places, or grass plot, implies the same evolution from out-door representations that the occidental drama had. There is no Shakespeare, nor Corneille, nor, indeed, any famous dramatist, whose works survive from an earlier day, to align the stage with literature and make its history. Authorship is rarely connected with the plays, and authors’ royalties are unknown. Many of the novels of Baku have been dramatized, but most often anonymously. Plays are usually written in the simpler hirakana, or running characters, in which light romances and books for women are written, and this fact alone shows the esteem in which dramatic literature is held. Incidents in history, lives of warriors, heroes, and saints furnish themes for the drama, and all the common legends and fairy tales are put upon the stage.
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