Table Of ContentRevenge 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
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First published in 2008 by
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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,
