Kabuki’s Nineteenth Century: Stage and Print in Early Modern Edo
This talk reexamines the theater of the nineteenth century in a way that shifts our critical focus from performance to print and the public sphere, embedding theater within the larger world of printed matter by means of which theatricality circulated far beyond the stage and through which performance and spectacle were most often consumed. The archive of printed material related to the theater in nineteenth-century Japan (playbills, actor critiques, theater guides, maps, actor prints, calendars, and broadsheets) is something more than—and more complicated than—a set of materials out of which we might reconstitute the always transient event of performance. Rather, the archive constitutes an object of inquiry unto itself, an object that reveals as much about the interrelations between and among various printed media and genres circulating beyond the confines of the theater as it does about what happened on stage.
Reischauer Institute Japan Forum
