A Review of the Major Plays of Chikamatsu

8 Pages 2030 Words

ote most of his plays in the Tokugawa era.
In 1683 he completed his first known play, Yotsugi Soga ("The Soga Successors"). It was written for the puppet theater. It was highly acclaimed and his 1686 play Shusse Kagekiyo ("Kagekiyo Victorious") was even more popular for its originality.
Between 1695 and 1705, Chikamatsu primarily wrote for kabuki. Chikamatsu's writing for kabuki or live actors was mostly for Sakata Toujuuro, a top actor of the time. In 1705 Chikamatsu began writing exclusively puppet plays, when he moved to Osaka, the center of the joruri world. He became a playwright for the Takemotoza Theater. He wrote two types of plays, those that were about the recent past (jidaimono) and domestic plays about ordinary people (sewamano).
These plays attracted a lot of common people when they were first written. They tended to lose their appeal to the masses, as the events depicted were not so recent. After his death in 1725, several developments in joruri, including the introduction of the three-puppeteer puppet, caused Chikamatsu's plays to be largely ignored. The majority of his plays are now partially lost, mostly surviving only when adopted in part by others. Almost all of the music for his plays has been lost. Some of the history plays remain popular and are still presented on the stage, though often as kabuki rather than joruri.
“The Love Suicides at Sonezaki (Sonezaki Shinju)â€...