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Revenge Drama in European Renaissance and Japanese Theatre: From Hamlet to Madame Butterfly PDF

286 Pages·2008·1.138 MB·English
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Revenge Drama in European Renaissance and Japanese Theatre Revenge Drama in European Renaissance and Japanese Theatre From Hamlet to Madame Butterfly Edited by Kevin J. Wetmore, Jr. revenge drama in european renaissance and japanese theatre Copyright © Kevin J. Wetmore, Jr., 2008. Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2008 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. First published in 2008 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN™ 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 and Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, England RG21 6XS. Companies and representatives throughout the world. PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN 978-1-349-37127-3 ISBN 978-0-230-61128-3 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/9780230611283 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the Library of Congress. A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Scribe Inc. First edition: April 2008 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Transferred to Digital Printing in 2009 This book is dedicated to James R. Brandon and Samuel L. Leiter, ō pioneers, teachers, gentlemen, and Daimy in the world of kabuki scholarship. Sensei, arigato gozaimashita. Contents Acknowledgments ix Introduction: “Thinking Upon Revenge” 1 Kevin J. Wetmore, Jr. Part I: Revenge Contexts and Comparisons 1 Closed and Open Societies: The Revenge Dramas of Japan, Spain, and England 29 Leonard C. Pronko 2 Unsexed and Disembodied: Female Avengers in Japan and England 45 Carol Fisher Sorgenfrei 3 “Avenge Me!”: Ghosts in English Renaissance and Kabuki Revenge Dramas 75 Kevin J. Wetmore, Jr. 4 Kabuki Parodies of Blood Revenge 91 Laurence Kominz 5 Revenge on Screen: Imai Tadashi’s Night Drum 119 Keiko McDonald 6 Censoring Vengeance: Revenge Dramas and Tragedies during the Allied Occupation of Japan 129 David Jortner Part II: Chūshingura: East and West 7 The Horizontal Chūshingura: Western Translations and Adaptations Prior to World War II 153 Aaron M. Cohen viii Contents 8 Chūshingura in the 1980s: Rethinking the Story of the Forty-seven Rōnin 187 Henry D. Smith II Appendix: Chūshingura-Related Books of the 1980s 213 9 One Legacy of Madame Butterfly: Chūshingura as a Contemporary Opera 217 J. Thomas Rimer 10 Gender Construction and Chūshingura as a Japanese National Legend 237 Junko Saeki 11 “The Play’s the Thing”: Cross-cultural Adaptation of 245 Revenge Plays through Traditional Drama Kevin J. Wetmore, Jr. Contributors 267 Glossary 269 Bibliography 271 Index 285 Acknowledgments The editor would like to thank the contributors for their patience and their work, Farideh Koohi-Kamali and Julia Cohen at Palgrave, and the anonymous readers for their suggestions and insights, thus helping to make this volume the best possible anthology on the subject. Thanks are due to James Brandon, Leonard Pronko, and Carol Fisher Sorgenfrei for their kind feedback and words of encouragement. Henry D. Smith II was also very helpful and forthcoming with his expertise on the Ako-vendetta. Thanks are especially due to J. Thomas Rimer, whose graduate seminar a decade ago on the subject of revenge inspired this volume. I would like to acknowledge the support of Loyola Marymount Uni- versity, the LMU Department of Theatre Arts, and the College of Com- munication and Fine Arts, under whose auspices this work was finally completed. Due to the lengthy period of time spent developing the material, thanks are due to my former colleagues and the administrations of California State University, Northridge, and their Department of Theatre, and their School of Arts, Media and Communication, where I taught from 2002 to 2005, and my former colleagues and the administrators of the Theatre Department at Denison University, where I taught from 1999 to 2002. I would also like to thank the Denison University students in my “Revenge: East and West” seminar, whose discussion of many of the topics addressed in this volume helped shape my thinking and inspired this work: Jared Barton, Sean Bill, Allison Bowman, Katherine Bumgarner, Mary Ann Davis, Stefanie Davis, Adrienne Dillon, Meredith Farrar, Lindsay Gobin, William Kempey, Amy Landis, Sarah Meyers, Joseph Miller, Anjali Naik, Hillary Smith, and Heather Untied. Lastly, I would like to thank my family and my wife Maura Chwastyk, who has been living with a vengeance-obsessed man for so long. It is done. I NTRODUCTION “Thinking Upon Revenge” Kevin J. Wetmore, Jr. No more tears now; I will think upon revenge. —Mary, Queen of Scots, on hearing of Riccio’s death (March 9, 1566) Oft have I heard that grief softens the mind, And makes it fearful and degenerate; Think therefore on revenge and cease to weep. —Queen Margaret, Henry VI (act 2, bk. 4, scene 4, lines 1–3) The three “grand themes of Western literature,” according to Susan Jacoby in Wild Justice: The Evolution of Revenge, are love, “the acquisition of worldly goods” and power, and revenge.1 As much as love, as much as power, as much as wealth, revenge is a primary motive for the behavior of many dramatic characters and remains one of the major themes of world drama. A cataloging of the great plays of world drama demonstrates that revenge was an early, common, and important theme. Beginning with the Greeks and plays like Medea and continuing through the theatre of Rome, where Seneca’s plays of revenge such as Thyestes later served as a model for the Renaissance dramatists, the Western theatrical tradition is firmly rooted in revenge. Similarly, in Asia, especially in Japan, revenge also was and remains a major theme of drama. One might even note that the two plays generally considered the greatest and most emblematic of their respective tradi- tions—Hamlet in the English Renaissance and Kanadehon Chūshingura 2 Kevin J. Wetmore, Jr. from Tokugawa Japan—are both revenge plays. This book considers the revenge traditions of Japan and England and how those traditions have developed within their own cultures from the early modern era to the present, including a section focusing on Chūshingura. This book also addresses a gap in theatre and culture studies in Eng- lish. While numerous scholarly studies explore Western revenge trag- edy—such as Shakespeare in Japan or Chūshingura in and of itself—there have been no major works exploring the connections, similarities, and differences between the revenge traditions of the East and the West, nor any in English concerning the shaping influence of the West on mod- ern studies and adaptations of Chūshingura in contrast to Yoshiko Uéno’s fine volume Hamlet and Japan and Kawatake Toshio’s still authoritative study Nihon no Hamuretto (Japan’s Hamlet).2 Although Chūshingura is fairly well known and represented in Western scholarship, not much work has been done in English on revenge in Japan, with the very noteworthy exceptions of Laurence Kominz’s Avatars of Vengeance, an excellent over- view of the revenge of the Soga Brothers (described later in this introduc- tion), and James R. Brandon and Samuel L. Leiter’s outstanding Kabuki Plays on Stage series, the second volume of which is entitled Villainy and Vengeance, 1773–1799.3 If revenge is indeed one of the great themes in literature and the exemplary dramas of Tokugawa Japan, Elizabethan and Jacobean England, and Siglo de Oro Spain (Spain’s “Golden Age” of drama, which ran from 1580 to 1680) are all revenge dramas, a compara- tive study of these traditions opens new means for understanding all three traditions. This book is aimed at scholars, students, and artists engaged in all aspects of theatre and cultural studies in Japan and Renaissance Europe, as well as the afterlife of these dramatic traditions. After all, the plays studied in this book are all still being performed in front of contemporary audiences. As such, one reader may be more familiar with the English tra- dition than another; one reader may have encountered the kabuki plays in the original Japanese but may have never heard of Thomas Kyd. As such, we must occasionally give background information perforce that might seem readily apparent to scholars and students in one discipline but is necessary for those in another discipline to understand the text. There is also a glossary at the end of the book for easy reference. The chapters in this book cover all aspects of revenge drama, and some are more comparative than others. Some focus solely on Japan, simply because more information has been published in English on the Western revenge drama tradition than on the Japanese tradition. All the chapters,

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