16
Ichikawa Ebizō IV probably as Washizuka Kwandayū, the villain of the play.
Ever since Sharaku first became famous in the Occident a controversy has raged as to the part in which Ebizō is depicted in this print. For years the rôle was identified as that of the pompous, cowardly, treacherous, lecherous villain Moronao whose misdeeds gave the faithful forty-seven Ronin something to avenge, and the print was assigned to some indefinitely dated production of Chūshingura. Then, because the costume is not appropriate to the rôle of Moronao, the actor was said to be playing Kudō Suketsune in a Soga play, a part which he has been found to have taken before and after 1794, but not during the year in which Sharaku’s bust-portraits were produced. The next identification called the rôle that of Sadanoshin, a Nō player and the father of Shigenoi, the heroine of the piece we now are considering. Contemporary publications refer to Ebizō as Sadanoshin, and in the complete absence of a play-bill showing exactly what other parts he may have taken, the last-mentioned attribution seemed satisfactory until a discovery was made in Boston of play-bills of other productions of the same piece which give pictures of Sadanoshin as slightly built, comparatively young, and in general, a frail looking person with a totally different hair arrangement.
In the print under consideration the hair arrangement is appropriate to the rôle of a villain of not too exalted station, which is why Moronao and Suketsune first were thought of; and although the actual text of the play in which Ebizō appeared in the month when these bust-portraits were issued is known to us only through outline references, we do know that Washizuka Kwandayū was the arch villain of it, that we have no other portrait which could represent him, and that Ebizō, who was a great character actor, sometimes took as many as four different parts in one production but was especially noted for his representations of the base and treacherous people he loved to portray. Even if the hair arrangement did not combine with the apparent age and build of the character shown by Sharaku to forbid identification of the rôle as that of Sadano-
82
