SOURCE: “Tragedy and Emotion: Shakespeare and Chikamatsu,” in Shakespeare and the Japanese Stage, edited by Takashi Sasayama, J. R. Mulryne, and Margaret Shewring, Cambridge University Press, 1998, pp. 145-58.

[In this essay, Sasayama offers a comparative study of Shakespeare's and Chikamatsu's careers, including not only their dramatic works but also the material conditions of the theaters and their status as national poets. Sasayama focuses on tragedy and emotion, finding that for Chikamatsu, pathos can be distinguished from the moral judgement that is often a central part of Shakespeare's tragedies.]

Many attempts have been made by scholars and critics of drama in Japan since the Meiji era to compare Monzaemon Chikamatsu (1653-1724)—the greatest figure of the classical popular theatre of Japan—with Shakespeare. The aim of the comparison has often been to gain recognition for Chikamatsu in the world of theatre as a national playwright analogous to Shakespeare in Britain. The result is that Chikamatsu's plays have been ransacked for likenesses to those of Shakespeare in details of plot and characterisation as well as feelings expressed. But very rarely has there been awareness of the differences lying beneath these apparent resemblances, which arise from different cultural contexts.¹

Among the most notorious of these attempts was the case of a professor of English in Tokyo who in a fit of jingoistic zeal after the first World War, wrote a long literary comparison between Shakespeare and Chikamatsu in Japanese, in which he claimed to have clarified similarities, pseudo-similarities or at least negative similarities between them under no less than twenty-five heads.² Like his miserable translation of Chikamatsu's plays published in London in 1926,³ the essay is too shallow, too meagre in substance to deserve comment here. It only intrigues me to find that the last chapter of this high-spirited treatise is written in a somewhat lugubrious tone. The author here tries to catalogue the heavy handicaps under which the Japanese playwright had to work in an intellectual milieu dominated by rigid conformism with the feudalistic rules of conduct and the established principles of literary rhetoric based on Chinese classics. The essay concludes with words of keen chagrin: ‘If only Chikamatsu's genius had been given scope in the cultural climate in which Shakespeare breathed so freely.’⁴ Nothing shows more tangibly than this the self-evident truth that naive comparativism necessarily denies its own raison d'être once it makes itself open to historical perspective.

I do not mention this early Japanese attempt at comparative drama as a mere subject of ridicule; nor am I inclined to cry out complacently, ‘East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet.’ I only want to warn myself against the danger of succumbing to the lure of the romantic idea that two literatures or dramas far removed in time and space, have, unknown to each other, walked on a common path. It is true that analogues of certain elements of a literary creation in one cultural area are often found in the literature of a different area with quite different cultural traditions. One could pick up a couple of popular plays from among 100 attributed to Chikamatsu and say, ‘Here are themes and motifs that are common to Euripides and Shakespeare.’ This, however, requires close scrutiny, and I should like to look into the matter in concrete terms.

For an illustrative example I will take Kagekiyo Victorious,⁵ a tragical history in five acts, which Chikamatsu wrote for Bunraku in c. 1685. Resemblances between Kagekiyo Victorious and Western drama may be discovered on two levels of the action. The main plot revolves around Kagekiyo, the defeated warrior, seeking revenge on the patriarchal ruler of the enemy clan. There is something about the sinister figure of this vindictive hero which reminds us of Hieronimo or Titus Andronicus or even Hamlet. The subplot centres on a complication between the hero and his courtesan-wife, who, after giving him refuge and comfort, is driven by violent jealousy of the noble lady he is going to make his official wife to betray him and reveal his whereabouts to his enemy. Regretting her action immediately afterwards, the courtesan-wife returns to him in prison, craving his forgiveness. Kagekiyo turns her down; he even refuses to recognise her two sons as his own, whereupon she kills the boys before his eyes and then stabs herself. The intensity of passion in this tragic woman who ‘loved not wisely but too well’ mighty be associated with that of Medea, while the noble stubbornness the hero's legal wife shows when she resolutely refuses to submit under the severest torture has some likenesses to the stoic perseverance of certain heroines of John Ford's tragedies. It is also noteworthy that the hero, Kagekiyo, is an active agent of his fate and that the whole dramatic action depends upon his indomitable will to revenge, so that there is a unity of action in the Aristotelian sense, and all the melodramatic incidents and situations concerning his two mutually antagonistic wives are to be regarded as ‘episodes’ as they are defined in the Poetics.

This, however, does not clinch the argument. The problem starts here. With all those apparent similarities in the component parts of the drama, Kagekiyo Victorious creates for us a totally different impression from any European play. This is not, as we tend to think, because of its extravagant finale in which through the deus ex machina-like intervention of Kwannon, the Goddess of Mercy, the head of the executed hero is replaced by that of her statue, or because, having been reconciled to his mortal enemy, Kagekiyo plucks out his eyes to become absolved of his obsessive vindictive desire. We know very well that theatre audiences can always wink at the inorganic functional outer framework of narrative once they have set their minds on having a meaningful experience of the drama proper within the framework.

It seems to me that the difference of impression has more to do with the difference of emotions aroused in scenes with seemingly analogous narrative contents. For instance, if the agony of jealousy in Chikamatsu's courtesan affects us, it is not in the same manner as does the passion of Medea. The proud defiance and abysmal hatred that make Medea's appearance in the open air after the bloody murder of her children such a horrifying and yet moving spectacle in the Greek tragedy are quite out of the reach of a lady of pleasure in medieval Japan. Her atrocity to her own sons as well as to herself seems to be neither a form of protest nor even an act of despair. It is rather a submissive gesture, reconciling herself to responsibility for the sin of betrayal of her husband and lord.

The case is nearly the same with the theme of revenge, which is more closely connected with society's ethical foundations. With God's pronouncement ‘Vindicta mihi’ ringing in the public's ears, revenge never ceased to be a moral issue having eschatological implications for the Elizabethans. No wonder revenge tragedies in Renaissance England from The Spanish Tragedy down to 'Tis Pity She's a Whore and The Cardinal were more or less revenger's tragedies. Chikamatsu's revenge tragedies are also, nearly without exception, revenger's tragedies, but in quite a different sense. To the Japanese in Chikamatsu's age, revenge was nothing less than a sacred duty, the neglect of which had to be subjected to strict censure in the name of society. In most cases revengers were prompted to vindictive actions either by a samurai-like ideal of honour or a citizen-like sense of obligation or moral debt to one's masters or feudal lords. In a number of Chikamatsu's revenge tragedies, the plot so evolves that a husband whose devoted wife succumbs to temptation during his absence, and commits adultery, is forced to go on a long journey for honourable revenge and to kill his repentant wife as well as her seducer, often with the help of her brother or even her own father. These ill-starred ‘women killed with unkindness’ may indeed resemble some of those pathetic female figures who appear in the domestic tragedies and tragicomedies of Thomas Heywood and Thomas Dekker. But the fundamental difference between the two is that no moral consciousness either of sin or punishment is required of the audience of Chikamatsu. In fact, pity and fear are aroused, but they do not function as means for achieving catharsis, but remain submerged in the deeper layers of the audience's mind as emotions to be enjoyed independently of the moral implications of the tragic act.

Such is also the case with the murder of one's own children. Westerners interested in classical Japanese theatre are often perplexed when they see fathers, or even mothers, driven by various senses of duty and obligation, attack their children with daggers. In some cases the cruelty is committed by the parent in order to sacrifice his or her son as a substitute for the young heir of his feudal lord when there is a plot against the prince's life. In other cases like Kagekiyo Victorious the parent's slaughter of his or her children is just an act (or even a gesture) of atonement for the guilty and dishonourable deeds perpetrated by him- or herself against the patriarch of his or her family or clan. Chikamatsu wrote some such scenes, and no one can deny that they are moving. But here also feelings are given a free hand to liberate themselves from moral contexts, so that they may contribute to the emotional rhythms of scenes that are designed for aesthetic pleasure.

All these considerations lead us to realise the difficulties that beset our endeavours to draw direct comparison between the two dramatists, each with his own cultural tradition. Being at a loss to find an effective means of dealing with these difficulties, we are driven to doubt even the validity of the endeavours themselves. But are there other ways, we may ask, for us to compare Shakespeare and Chikamatsu so that one may illuminate the other on a level other than the superficial? It seems to me that audience response offers one such possibility.

Instead of looking for coincidences or correspondences between Shakespeare and Chikamatsu to be substantiated in general theoretical terms, I am more inclined to look into myself, or into the audience mind within myself, to see if there is any common factor in my response to each of the two dramatists. However, with a view to treating the subject as objectively as possible, I will start by asking in a general way how one's long-term familiarity with Chikamatsu affects one's reception of Shakespeare. Or it might be more appropriate to ask if it is likely that a theatre-goer whose theatrical experience has been limited to Chikamatsu's work will find anything in Shakespeare that strikes him as familiar. Actually, this is an extremely conceptual question capable of vast expansion, and in answering it in the concrete one is naturally obliged to confine oneself to a few material points. As for myself, I should like to set a framework for my discussion by concentrating on two of Chikamatsu's most popular love tragedies, The Love Suicides at Sonezaki and The Love Suicides at Amijima, representing respectively the earlier and later phases of his craftsmanship as a Bunraku playwright.

Bunraku, a common appellation for Ningyo-Joruri, is a genre of puppet theatre in which mute puppets of about half human size gesticulate behind a platform spanning the entire stage, each puppet being held against his chest by a puppeteer in ceremonious clothes. (Puppets in major roles are handled each by a master manipulator and two assistants in black gowns pulled over their heads.) On a dais on the left wing of the stage are seated several tayus or chanters who, while narrating the story of the play, declaim the speeches of the puppet characters, accompanied by the twanging of the shamisens played by musicians sitting beside them. Their narration includes descriptions of the scenery of the location, and the facial expressions and bodily movements, or even the psychology, of the puppet characters. Furthermore, scattered over the play, but most frequently at the beginning of a scene, are a number of lyric interludes of intricate poetic tissue. These characteristics of the language in Bunraku can partly be accounted for in terms of literary evolution. Bunraku originated in popular medieval narrative histories and moralities which were recited and chanted before the public by men who made this their profession. Chikamatsu's surpassing merit as an innovator of Banraku is that he achieved a superb success in integrating the dramatic and the narrative modes to create plays with enormous power. His language is extremely varied, and is flexible enough to switch between racy colloquialism (in speeches) and exalted poetical flourishes (in narrative passages).

In connection with this we must keep in mind that puppets in Bunraku are not mere counterparts of live actors in regular theatre. Indeed, the success of a theatrical performance largely depends on the quality of the puppets' ‘acting,’ which is identical with the skill of their manipulators, but they also have their raison d'être on the stage as symbolic images, incarnating the spirit of the words of the text recited by the tayu. Tayus on their part never aim simply to be vocal impersonators of the puppet characters. Although they have to colour their toning so as to make evident stereotypical characteristics such as the sex, age, social status, and so forth of each of the characters, they rarely alter their natural voice to the extent that they actually simulate a character's personality. The tayu is first and last an authorised mediator for the audience between the text and the puppets. The words of the text recited by the tayu inspire the audience to animate the puppets so that they can be seen to move freely without cumbersome materiality in a dynamic cosmos of fictive time and space. Paul Claudel, who was attracted by Bunraku while staying in Japan as French ambassador in the 1920s, wrote in a letter to his friend: ‘Ce n'est pas un acteur qui parle; c'est une parole qui agit.’⁶

It is nothing less than the mind of the audience that gives shape and meaning to the drama of puppets in order to complete it. Perhaps it is not amiss to recall here what Ernst Gombrich in a work that has become a classic in the psychology of pictorial representation calls ‘the beholder's share’. In Art and Illusion Gombrich points out as a necessary condition for effective ‘projection’ from the beholder the existence of a ‘screen’ or an ‘empty or ill-defined area’ onto which the expected image can be projected.⁷ And it need hardly be said that the stage with puppets whose physical movements are more or less stereotyped and whose speech has to be supplied by narrators is best qualified as a screen in this sense. The concept of ‘the beholder's share’ itself, as Gombrich amply illustrates in the same book, has long been a tradition of Japanese and Chinese art. A dry landscape garden is made only of several big stones scattered on smooth white sand, but it inspires us to imagine in our inner eye a vast land- or seascape, which can be philosophically cosmic or concretely picturesque according to our preference. In like manner, Chikamatsu audiences, especially of his love-suicide tragedies, are incited during the performance to picture a virtual world of drama within their imagination, where crude reality is sublimated and transposed into an upper order to produce a new dimension of meaning. Herein consists the essence of Chikamatsvian tragedy.

This special mode of theatrical response is more or less common to all kinds of classical Japanese drama and is indeed quite unique. But is it entirely foreign to our experience of Shakespeare? Is it probable that the Chikamatsu-conditioned theatre-goers first seeing Shakespeare whom we hypothesised earlier will take in the whole fictional reality of the play as a world with an autonomous meaning extractable from a structured sequence of behaviours exhibited by the characters who live that reality? Will they be content to see each of the speeches as no more than an expression of the speaker's inner self at that particular moment? The answer will be negative. I am almost certain that they will hear in some of the words spoken by Shakespeare's characters something beyond the voice of the speakers, something that belongs to a different dimension of existence from the immediate present on the stage. For instance, when they hear Hamlet speak those memorable ruminations on providence and human destiny before the fencing match or hear the mad Lear mutter words of existential sorrow to the blind Gloucester on Dover heath: ‘we came crying hither … When we are born, we cry that we are come / To this great stage of fools’ (IV.vi. 178, 182-5), the actors might appear in their inner vision somehow transformed into puppets that are being manipulated by ventriloquial narrators, so that it seems as if the voice of the play is reaching their ears through the mouths of the characters. And since through their theatre-going experience of Chikamatsu they are habituated to being disengaged from the phenomenal world on the stage by expository and narrative passages in the text which compel them to respond to the action with something of an epic detachment, it is possible that in seeing Shakespeare their mind will be acted on in like manner by dramatic narrative in the characters' speeches. They will probably make much of those narrational speeches of petty functional characters, in which beautifully worded accounts of moving scenes are given in King Lear, The Winter's Tale, and some other plays. They will be particularly interested in what Francis Berry calls the ‘inset’ effect of the narrative mode of speech,⁸ which they think somehow corresponds to the ‘spotlight’ effect in Chikamatsu.

That so little critical attention has been accorded to the dramatic use of narration in Shakespeare seems to me rather strange when in some of his plays, including King Lear, lines in the narrative mode occupy more than 25 per cent of the whole text. Perhaps it is because narration tends towards actional stasis and is therefore considered to go against the medium of drama. No one could deny, however, that whenever the narrative mode is successfully integrated with the dramatic within an action sequence, the effect is great and multifarious. There is not only a juxtaposition of past and present time, of what is physically before one's eyes and what is imagined; there is also a friction between the epic sense of time and the dramatic time governing the dramatic action. It serves to wean the audience's mind away from its preoccupation with the here and now on the stage and set it groping for a new perspective from which the speaker as well as the object of the narration can be viewed. Othello's long speech preceding his suicide is a notable case of this kind. When Othello starts speaking of the resolute patriotic justice he once inflicted on a Turk, we find ourselves ready to reminisce about the magnificent figure he used to cut in our eyes in the initial acts. Next moment, however, he himself becomes the Turk, the ‘circumcised dog,’ and stabs him, or himself. Thus, the punisher is transformed into the punished, and the heroic act of a Christian executing a pagan offender overlaps with the action of a civilised man annihilating himself in order to execute justice on the barbarian within himself. Narration is fused into speech, stasis into motion, tableau into drama.

Notoriously F. R. Leavis found in Othello at this last moment the posture of a self-dramatiser whose tears are shed for the self-felt pathos of ‘the spectacle of himself.’⁹ Leavis' view is anticipated by a severe moral criticism of the hero by T. S. Eliot who says that ‘Othello succeeds in turning himself into a pathetic figure, by adopting an aesthetic rather than a moral attitude, dramatising himself against his environment. He takes in the spectator, but the human motive is primarily to take in himself.’¹⁰ I did not quote Eliot to endorse this curious piece of pseudo character criticism; nor am I inclined to think that the human motive is primarily to take in himself. However, that Othello takes in the spectator is nothing less than true, not of course in the sense in which Eliot says this, but as a statement of theatre psychology working at the ending of a tragedy, for the root of tragic pleasure is evidently in being taken in—that is, in being so deluded as to believe in the reality of that which has no existence except as a psychic phenomenon in the audience's mind. As far as audience response at the finale of Othello is concerned, it does not matter what kind of personality the hero has ultimately proved himself to be. What is important is that a quiet upsurge of emotions evoked in response to the integrated effect of his narrative speech and his dramatic action works to make the audience free to be taken in and accept the beautiful image of a noble Moor into which Othello has fashioned himself at the last moment.

The vigour and intensity of this ending is indeed beyond the scope of Chikamatsu's tragic craftsmanship, but the pattern of audience response operating here seems to have something in common with that which is supposed to work in some climactic scenes of love-suicide tragedies of the Japanese playwright. The Japanese word for narration or narrative, katari, can also mean ‘deception’ or ‘delusion.’ This is not a mere pun. People in ancient times who believed in the soul of language thought that by narrating something with verve one could exert a miraculous influence on the hearers. And without doubt Chikamatsu was a great practitioner of katari, or the art of aesthetic deception in the theatre. Noh is also a theatrical form which is designed to release aesthetic energy for producing a self-deluding inner vision on the part of the audience. In Noh, however, tragedy is not enacted on the stage but is lived through in mime, song, and dance, usually by the ghost of one of its former participants. So the emotions aroused in the audience cannot but be emotions recollected in tranquility. There is indeed pain and regret mixed with them, but it is mitigated and mellowed by memory and nostalgia. On the other hand, in Chikamatsu's love-suicide plays, we are squarely confronted with hard tragic realities which are actually represented on the stage. Both in The Love Suicides at Sonezaki and The Love Suicides at Amijima, the action centres on a complicated relationship of the protagonist with his beloved prostitute. The adverse circumstances, both social and domestic, in which the lovers find themselves, together with their lively sense of honour and obligation, drive them finally into a tight corner, where they choose to die together.

Writing his plays like Shakespeare for a specific theatre in a big city, Chikamatsu must have thought it advisable in terms of box-office profits to attract those unsophisticated citizens who swarmed to theatres just to see the sensational incidents they had heard or read of enacted on the stage. Accordingly, his dialogues are generally close to everyday language, and his characters' words and conduct are easy to understand from the viewpoint of the behaviour patterns of common people in contemporary society. Yet nothing is more improper than to call Chikamatsu a realist in the normal sense of the word. Chikamatsu never ceased to be conscious of the play as an artifact, in which crude reality was sublimated and woven into fine traceries of emotional figures. Many of his characters are so artfully informed with life, ‘in the slender margin between the real and the unreal,’ as he reportedly put it,¹¹ that puppets incapable of subtle movement or expression can effectively function as emotive presences for the audience. The male heroes are mostly social misfits or uncontrollable self-wreckers, wanting in purpose and often easily jealous. On the other hand, women, who are usually wives or prostitutes, are possessors of noble and magnanimous hearts, ever ready to sacrifice themselves, even their lives, to the love they bear for their husbands or their lovers. This, however, is not what I meant when I mentioned Chikamatsu's artistic sublimation of crude reality. What I was actually referring to is the peculiarly Chikamatsvian manner in which the theatrical experience of certain catastrophic scenes is made to affect the audience's mental image of the whole play. Let me dwell on this point by taking as illustrative case the scene where the lovers journey through the night shadows towards the suicide spot.

A love-suicide journey is a theatrical set piece permeated by an atmosphere of lyric beauty and pathos which is enhanced by the narration of several tayus, now chanting in chorus, now declaiming solo for each puppet-character, accompanied by the continuous, orchestrated twang of shamisens. In this final scene there are no new developments of the plot; all that takes place on stage is a slow-paced peregrination in the dead hours of night, followed by the actual suicides at break of day. But the static stage business is amply supplemented by the poetical narration, which gives circumstantial accounts of the locations and scenery along the road, as well as the feelings of the lovers, alternating between agony and ecstasy. It is a critical commonplace to say that the character of the male lover undergoes a spiritual change in the course of this death-bound journey. Indeed, even those weakling protagonists who are so infirm of nature that their decision for a joint suicide with their beloved prostitute seems controlled by the stronger desire of the latter, appear to have grown to spiritual maturity if not heroic stature. But to say that a man's true character is made clear in the face of imminent death is to reduce the artistic problem to a familiar truism about human nature. The approach to this question must be phenomenological.

Let me first make clear that I do not quite agree with the popular notion of Chikamatsu's romanticism in which he allegedly tried to idealise love's consummation in death. In The Love Suicides at Sonezaki, there is certainly a sense in which the suicidal journey symbolises the alliance of eros and thanatos. ‘Let us secure our bodies to this twin-trunked tree and die immaculately,’ says the man, seeing that they have arrived at the prearranged spot. But it is also true that the lovers themselves are not entirely infatuated with death. Embracing each other, they continually weep over their hapless lot and the narrators give a rather objective description of the awkward and painful death the woman has to suffer at the hands of her lover as the blade deflects this way and that until it is thrust through her throat. In The Love Suicides at Amijima the lovers on their way to death constantly refer to their guilty feelings about those helpless innocents they are going to leave behind. Still conscious of earthly obligations to people around them, they cannot even die together. Cutting their locks to become a nun and a priest, they choose to die physically separated.

Notwithstanding all these points, it is indisputable that there is a metamorphosis of the protagonist's image in the inner eye of the audience during the suicidal journey, which in its turn contributes to the final configuration of its tragic experience. This is, I think, due to a change of the mental perspective on the drama that occurs in the deeper layers of the consciousness of the audience. As in the final act of Thornton Wilder's Our Town, in which some of the happenings in the earlier acts are re-envisioned by the audience sub specie aeternitatis, so in the last scene of Chikamatsu's love tragedies the entire action of the earlier scenes that has been experienced in terms of this world gradually withdraws into the distance, as if by a long pullback on a zoom lens, and assumes a new aspect in the light of the other world. The result is that the whole body of the unhappy human drama turns itself, as it were, into a long confessional protasis and epitasis for a requiem.

To put it more concretely, those unfortunate events and circumstances that led up to the lovers' double suicides are made to appear, in retrospect, to be episodes in their purgatorial journey through this floating world, of which the present suicide trip is the final phase. Being sinners who have corrupted themselves after the flesh and are experiencing torturing agonies, the lovers dream of being reborn together in the next world, in a lotus calyx. This does not necessarily mean that they are to be saved by Amida Buddha whom they repeatedly invoke before they die. Actually they have not had their earthly desires rarefied yet. Abandoned as they are, they are still not free from feelings that are all too human. However, the audience must be remembering all through this catastrophic scene that significant phrase in the concluding passage of the induction to The Love Suicides at Sonezaki in which Kwannon, the Goddess of Mercy, is alluded to as one who, ‘taking as many as thirty-three different shapes, appears in the nether world of dust, and guiding and teaching us by means of sensualities and carnal desires, makes love a bridge for us to cross to attain Salvation.’

Behind these homiletic words lies the conception of the prostitute as an incarnation of das Ewig Weibliche, an esoteric view which is rather familiar to Oriental religions. And partly because of this the audience is filled with intense anticipation when a group of shamisen players, to launch the scene, start twanging in animated concert; now it is about to experience an event which is at once the most horrid discomfiture and the most blessed consummation, at once the most piteous attempt at self-annihilation and the most joyous realisation of freed humanity. The excitement culminates in an ecstasy at the moment of the suicidal murder, when a cruel beauty is born.

Some of Shakespeare's tragedies also have a certain aspect in which the hero's bafflement, defeat or self-destruction can in itself be a realisation, a fruition of his fundamental life. But it is always accompanied by some higher awareness on his part, usually attained in the last phase of his long strife, whether of love, divine providence, or just the futility of all human endeavours. But protagonists in Chikamatsu's love tragedies make no effort to resist their fate, nor are they in any way enlightened on the meaning and values of man's life in this world. They even do not show any sign of conflict within themselves. Once enamoured of a young courtesan, a middle-aged clerk or the owner of a decent shop yields all too easily to temptations of the flesh and degrades himself in a most stupid way. Not knowing how to save himself, not even realising why he has to suffer, like a wild animal who, feeling that its time to die is near, slowly paces towards its death spot, he chooses, in what seems an instinctive manner, to obliterate himself in order to disappear from this transitory world of vanities. This meek submissiveness of the hero to his fate would give the audience an intimation of the existence of another order of nature to which man ultimately belongs. Perhaps it is because of this that the audience curiously feels at ease when the curtain falls on the final death scene of the tragedy.

Pathos is the chief emotional effect for which Chikamatsu seems to have exhausted all his resources as a poetic dramatist, and it is for an abundance of elaborately wrought effects of pathos that his plays, especially his domestic tragedies and some of his history plays, have received the highest praise as well as the severest censure. Pathos of course is not a quality alien to Shakespeare's drama. We do not need Bradley to point out that in a section of the play, immediately before the final movement towards the catastrophe, Shakespeare often appeals to a new emotion which is painful but is accompanied by a sense of beauty and an outflow of affection.¹² The Chikamatsu-conditioned audience may go so far as to find in Ophelia's madness or Desdemona's Willow Song the counterpart of the love-suicide journey in Bunraku. Taking care not to stumble into the fallacy of parallelism, this audience would contend that they are alike not only in their sweetly plaintive mood, but also in the somewhat hidden effect they are assumed to exercise on the structuring of the tragic experience. The deceptive cadence of lyric peacefulness with nostalgic overtones works as potential energy for engendering in the audience's mind a faint expectancy for a transposition of the tragic key.

To the audience who hear Gertrude's picturesque report of Ophelia's drowning, death, so far perceived, in the form of a poisoned or stabbed body, as nothing less than ugly, odious, and infernal, now becomes the alluring sight of a lovely maid's homeward return to her own element. And this can possibly stimulate the audience to fantasise a future in which the tragic agon is brought to a harmonious and meaningful conclusion. If the Hamlet experience could be likened to a long night's wandering with ever-growing pressures from the impenetrable darkness, this newly nourished wishful vision is like a glimpse of dawn appearing above the horizon to terminate the groping journey. It endears itself to the audience all the more because the audience knows that it is false. It is too well aware that nothing has changed in respect to the problem the hero is confronted with, and that the possibility of a resolution of the tragic conflict remains as poor as ever. But once a mechanism for such psychic response gets started by the energy of this deceptive vision, Hamlet is made to appear to have changed from an agonist rebelling against ‘the thousand natural shocks’ of life and the horror of the ‘undiscovered country’ to a mature, enlightened sufferer ready to resign himself to his fate and to death.

A similarly emotional atmosphere of deceptive peace pervades Desdemona's colloquy with Emilia and her singing of the Willow Song. Desdemona appears to have taken on a new aspect here. She is not merely a pathetic figure in wistful stasis. She also has a certain elusive opacity about her, a corporeality that has gradually been rarefied, while at the same time her symbolic spirituality has become so much the more impressive. This transformed image of Desdemona lingers in the depths of the audience's consciousness until the catastrophe, where her death strikes the audience less as a murder than a love-suicide à la Chikamatsu. Instead of recoiling from the pain and horror of her strangulation by her husband, which it cannot reconcile with the meaningful purpose of the universe, the audience ecstatically enjoys the pathetic beauty of the excruciatingly cruel scene.

What pathos means to Chikamatsu, however, is not the same as what it means to Shakespeare. Pathos is as old as tragedy, both in Europe and in Japan. Greek tragedy abounds in pathetic scenes; so does English Renaissance drama. But pathos in these Western dramas is not a mere quality of evoking a feeling of pity or compassion. It has something strong and positive in it. To be touched by pathos in Shakespeare or in Euripides is to be implicated in an implicit judgement of the human heart on whatever inhuman force has caused the pitiable situation. We all know that Shakespeare, in a well-known passage in Macbeth, likened pity to a ‘naked new-born babe, / Striding the blast,’ who ‘Shall blow the horrid deed in every eye, / That tears shall drown the wind’ (I.vii.21-5). In all his tragedies a pathetic scene is a scene where the audience is driven half-instinctively to enter a most vigorous protest in the cause of the holiness of human affections against their sacrilegious annihilators. Thus pity can somehow be linked with the spirit of tragedy. Commenting on the pathetic ending of The Bacchae, where Agave, whose sanity has gradually been restored, suddenly recognises what she has done—that is, the tearing of her son Pentheus to pieces—William Arrowsmith says, ‘[in pity] men declare their humanity and a moral dignity which heaven, lacking those limits which make men suffer into dignity and compassion, can never understand or equal. This is their moral victory … for by accepting their necessities in anguish, they claim the uniquely human skill of sophia, the acceptance of necessity and doom which teaches compassion.’¹³

In Chikamatsu, however, emotions aroused do not lend themselves to a humanistic moral judgement on the part of the audience. They are simply there to be enjoyed for their own sake; no order or value, either cosmic or social, is called in question through them. All that is required of us in a situation that strikes a responsive chord in our hearts is to abandon ourselves completely to the worked-up pathos which is so pure and ethereal because it is so free of moral implications. It is easy to call Chikamatsu a second-rate artist for this reason alone. Yet nothing will be harder for us, even for those of us who have been trained in the moral-intellectual literary tradition of the West, than to withstand the bewitching charm of some of his climactic scenes, where pain and pity fuse so sweetly with aesthetic delight.

Notes

1. The present essay is based on the plenary session lecture at the Fifth World Shakespeare Congress held in Tokyo in summer 1991.

2. Cf. Asataro Miyamori, Chikamatsu to Shekusupiya [Chikamatsu and Shakespeare] (Tokyo: Dobunsha, 1929).

3. Asataro Miyamori, Masterpieces of Chikamatsu, The Japanese Shakespeare (London: Kegan Paul, 1926).

4. Asataro Miyamori, Chikamatsu to Shekusupiya, pp. 108-13.

5. Among popular Noh plays is Kagekiyo, based on a story that is a sequel to that of the puppet play I am dealing with; the relation of the former to the latter is somewhat similar to that of Oedipus at Colonus to Oedipus Tyrannus, that is, the story of the self-blinded hero in exile to the story of his tragic life leading to his self-blinding.

6. Paul Claudel, ‘Lettre au Professeur Miyajima’ (1926), Oeuvres completes (Paris: Gallimard, 1952), V, p. 230.

7. Cf. E. H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1960), pp. 103-9, 207-8, passim.

8. Cf. Francis Berry, The Shakespeare Inset: Word and Picture (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1965).

9. F. R. Leavis, ‘Diabolic Intellect and the Noble Hero,’ Scrutiny, 6, 3 (1937) (rept. in The Common Pursuit (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1962)).

10. T. S. Eliot, ‘Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca,’ Selected Essays (London: Faber and Faber, 1932; new edn, New York: Harcourt, 1950), p. 111.

11. Ikan Hozumi reports in Naniwa Miyage [Souvenir of Naniwa] that Chikamatsu used this expression in his talk on his art.

12. A. C. Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy (London: Macmillan, 1904), p. 60.

13. Introduction to The Bacchae, The Complete Greek Tragedies, ed. David Grene and Richmond Lattimore (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1958), IV, pp. 540-1.

All quotations from Shakespeare are from The Riverside Shakespeare (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974).