Early modern Japanese history–reading response
For this assignment, you have two options:
1.Try your hand at a bit of kabuki. Write a scene or a short act of a kabuki play, emulating the style and thematics of the examples you’ve read in Jones. (For additional examples, try these plays: Yotsuya ghost storyPreview the document, SukerokuPreview the document)
2.The shogunate regarded kabuki as scandalous and dangerous entertainment. appropriate only for commoners, and then only when carefully regulated. Why the concern? Assess the subsersive potential of kabuki theatre. Where did its “danger” lie?
Reading Epic Yotsuya Ghost Tale, Osome and Hisamatsu, and Benten the Thief, in Jones, 168-82, 219-46, 301-21.
“Portrait of an Onnagata: The Female Impersonator in Kabuki (Links to an external site.)” (Films For The Humanities & Sciences, 1990).
