University of Virginia Library

I

A form of drama, as primitive, as intense,
and almost as beautiful as the ancient Greek
drama at Athens, still exists in the world.
Yet few care for it, or see it.[2] In the fifth century
before Christ the Greek drama arose out
of the religious rites practised in the festivals
of the God of Wine. In the fifteenth century

after Christ, the Japanese drama arose out of
religious rites practised in the festivals of the
Shinto gods, chiefly the Shinto god of the
Kasuga temple at Nara. Both began by a
sacred dance, and both added a sacred chorus
sung by priests. The transition from a dance
chorus to drama proper consisted, in both cases,
in the evolving of a solo part, the words of
which alternate in dialogue with the chorus.
In both the final form of drama consists of a
few short scenes, wherein two or three soloists
act a main theme, whose deeper meaning is
interpreted by the poetical comment of the
chorus. In both the speech was metrical, and
involved a clear organic structure of separate
lyrical units. In both music played an important
part. In both action was a modification
of the dance. In both rich costumes were
worn; in both, masks. The form and tradition
of the Athenian drama passed over into
the tradition of the ancient Roman stage, and
died away in the early middle ages fourteen
centuries ago. It is dead, and we can study it
from scant records only. But the Japanese
poetic drama is alive to-day, having been
transmitted almost unchanged from one perfected
form reached in Kioto in the fifteenth
century.

It has been said that all later drama has been
influenced by the Greek; that the strolling
jugglers and contortionists, who wandered in
troupes over Europe in the middle ages, constitute
an unbroken link between the degenerate
Roman actors and the miracle plays of
the church, which grew into the Shakespearean
drama. It is even asserted that, as the Greek
conquest gave rise to a Greco-Buddhist form
of sculpture on the borders of India and China,
Greek dramatic influence entered also into the
Hindoo and Chinese drama, and eventually
into the Noh of Japan. But the effect of
foreign thought on the Noh is small in comparison
with that of the native Shinto influences.
It is as absurd to say that the Noh is an offshoot
of Greek drama as it would be to say that
Shakespeare is such an offshoot.

There is, however, beside the deeper analogy
of the Japanese Noh with Greek plays, an
interesting secondary analogy with the origin
of Shakespeare's art. All three had an independent
growth from miracle plays—the
first from the plays of the worship of Bacchus,
the second from the plays of the worship of
Christ, the third from the plays of the worship
of the Shinto deities and of Buddha. The
plays that preceded Shakespeare's in England

were acted in fields adjoining the churches,
and later in the courtyards of nobles. The
plays that preceded the Noh, and even the
Noh themselves, were enacted, first in the
gardens of temples or on the dry river-beds
adjoining the temples, and later in the courtyards
of the daimio. On the other hand, the
actual modus of the Shakespearean drama is
practically dead for us. Occasional revivals
have to borrow scenery and other contrivances
unknown to the Elizabethan stage, and the
continuity of professional tradition has certainly
been broken. But in the Japanese Noh,
though it arose one hundred years before
Shakespeare, this continuity has never been
broken. The same plays are to-day enacted
in the same manner as then; even the leading
actors of to-day are blood descendants of the
very men who created this drama 450 years
ago.

This ancient lyric drama is not to be
confounded with the modern realistic drama
of Tokio, with such drama, for instance, as
Danjuro's. This vulgar drama is quite like
ours, with an elaborate stage and scenery, with
little music or chorus, and no masks; with
nothing, in short, but realism and mimetics
of action. This modern drama, a ghost of the

fifth period, arose in Yedo some 300 years ago.
It was an amusement designed by the common
people for themselves, and was written and
acted by them. It therefore corresponds to
the work of Ukiyo-ye in painting, and more
especially to the colour prints; and a large
number of these prints reproduce characters
and scenes from the people's theatre.

As the pictorial art of the fifth period was
divisible into two parts—that of the nobility,
designed to adorn their castles, and that of
the common people, printed illustration,—so
has the drama of the last 200 years been
twofold, that of the lyric Noh, preserved pure
in the palaces of the rich; and that of the
populace, running to realism and extravagance
in the street theatres. To-day, in spite of the
shock and revolution of 1868, the former, the
severe and poetic drama, has been revived, and
is enthusiastically studied by cultured Japanese.
In that commotion the palaces of the daimios,
with their Noh stages, were destroyed, the
court troupes of actors were dispersed. For
three years after 1868 performances ceased
entirely. But Mr. Umewaka Minoru, who
had been one of the soloists in the Shogun's
central troupe, kept guard over the pure
tradition, and had many stage directions or

"tenets" preserved in writing along with the
texts. In 1871 he bought an ex-diamio's
stage for a song, set it up on the banks of the
Sumida river in Tokio, and began to train
his sons. Many patient pupils and old actors
flocked to him; the public began their patronage;
he bought up collections of costumes
and masks at sales of impoverished nobles;
and now his theatre is so thronged that boxes
have to be engaged a week beforehand, and
five other theatres have been built in Tokio. . . .

For the last twenty years I have been studying
the Noh, under the personal tuition of
Umewaka Minoru and his sons, learning by
actual practice the method of the singing and
something of the acting; I have taken down
from Umewaka's lips invaluable oral traditions
of the stage as it was before 1868; and have
prepared, with his assistance and that of native
scholars, translations of some fifty of the texts.