Transforming Shakespeare into a Kabuki Pièce for the Modern Audience Ninagawa's Twelfth Night

• Published in: Theatre Translation in Performance pp. 223 - 239
• Main Author: Oki-Siekierczak, Ayami
• Format: Book Chapter
• Language: English
• Published: United Kingdom Routledge 2013; Taylor & Francis Group
• Edition: 1
• Subjects: Performance art; Theatre studies; Oxford University Dramatic Society; Tsubouchi Memorial Theatre Museum; Spring Onion; MND; Young Man; Kabuki Performances; Richard III; Kabuki Productions; Au Pair Girl; Syllable Metre; Direc Tor; Vice Versa; Rimini Protokoll; Male Series; Midsummer Night's Dream; Futabatei Shimei; Imperial Theatre; En Attendant Godot; Minami Ryuta; Overweening Rogue; Shakespeare's Dramatic Works
• ISBN: 9780415661416; 0415661412
• DOI: 10.4324/9780203073506-17

The end of the nineteenth century was a fortuitous time for the Japanese to be introduced to Shakespeare, fostering a fit environment for the development of a distinctively Japanese Shakespearean culture. The Victorian style of acting that Japan encountered owed more to Garrick and Victorian melodrama than to the Elizabethan Shakespeare's mixture of tragedy and bawdy comedy. It was well received in Japan, which had only recently opened up to the world. In a society that held decency and modesty in esteem, the Victorian Shakespeare seems to have been in high demand, favoured for its toned-down bawdiness and the prestige of the playwright himself as one of the 'great European figures'. Eventually, the Bard's work began to appear outside foreign quarters: in 1885, The Merchant of Venice became the first Japanese-language production of Shakespeare. Titled Sakuradoki Zani no Yononaka, or A Time of Cherry Blossoms: The World Where Only Money Mattered, the play was adapted to conform to a Japanese setting and the kabuki style for the benefit of a Japanese public unaccustomed to Western dramatic styles, having only experienced the dramatic paradigm of traditional theatre. The texts continued to be delivered in the style of traditional drama, as exemplified by Shōyō Tsubouchi's admired inpon (the style used for traditional drama, such as The Curious Tale of Caesar: The Sword of Freedom and the Sharpness of the Afterglow, 1884). Japanese translators applied the rules of Japanese poetry, composing lines in seven/five syllable metre (or an approximation of it) to replicate the effect of iambic pentameter. Certainly, the seven/five syllable metre was considered to be the closest Japanese poetic form to the English iambic pentameter. However, the Japanese language does not have stress accents and may therefore sound monotonous and grating, lacking the continuous rhythmic changes caused by accentual patterns and enjambment. Freeing his work from such restraints, translators, including Tsubouchi himself, started to tend towards translating Shakespeare's language without transplanting the text into Japanese metrical forms.