Japanese Theatre Studies: Home

This is a collection of the most important genres of Japanese performance--noh, kyogen, kabuki, and bamrili puppet theater--in one comprehensive, authoritative volume. Organized by genre, each section features a rich selection of representative plays and explorations into each theatrical style and is prefaced by an illustrative essay covering a wide range of subjects, from stage direction to musical accompaniment. With classic and new translations of more than thirty plays and scenes--along with Brazell's detailed, historically rich supplementary material and copious illustrations--no better anthology exists for students of this most fascinating and diverse dramatic tradition.

This comprehensive reference work covers all four forms of traditional Japanese theatre: nōh , kyōgen, bunraku, and kabuki. International tours by each have become commonplace, allowing audiences everywhere to broaden their understanding of theatre's possibilities, and inspiring artists to infuse their works with ideas sparked by Japanese theatre's conventions. Because of the great interest generated by increasing familiarity with these theatre traditions, along with a multitude of general and specialized publications investigating and describing them, there has developed a serious need for a work that allows for immediate access to specific information regarding many concepts, terms, and individuals. The Historical Dictionary of Japanese Traditional Theatre covers all four genres, providing information on nearly every aspect, including actors, theatres, companies, history, makeup, costumes, masks, biographies, theories, training, music, religion, criticism, and many more. This is done through hundreds of dictionary entries arranged alphabetically with abundant cross-references, a general introduction, a chronology, and a special glossary of all terms mentioned in the text but not provided with their own entries, all of which can be supplemented by consulting the most extensive bibliography of English-language Japanese theatre books, articles, and websites presently available.

In this book, originally published in 1999, leading Shakespeare scholars from Japan and the West broke new ground by studying the interaction of Japanese and Western conceptions of Shakespeare, and the assimilation of Shakespeare into richly traditional theatre practice. The first part deals with key twentieth-century moments in the production of Shakespeare, including the work of world-famous Japanese directors such as Ninagawa, Suzuki and Noda, while the second part considers parallels and differences between Japanese and western theatre over a longer timespan, focusing on the relationship of Shakespeare to traditional Japanese Noh, Kabuki, Bunraku and Kyogen. Additional features include full-colour illustrations, a comprehensive chronology of Shakespeare performances in Japan and the English text of a celebrated Kyogen adaptation of The Merry Wives of Windsor.

I: Noh and Kyogen
II: Bunraku and Kabuki