East Meets West: Japanese Theater in the Time of Shakespeare‪.‬

THE YEAR 2003 saw the four hundredth anniversary of the birth of Kabuki in Kyoto, the ancient capital of Japan. While Shakespeare and Lope de Vega were creating their rich dramatic world in Europe, Okuni (1) and her fellow performers were giving birth to a new form of theater seven thousand miles away. One may wonder whether there was any connection between these theaters of the East and the West at the turn of the seventeenth century. The answer has been, for a long period of time, basically "No"; or rather, not many people have seriously asked the question itself. Four centuries after the event, however, some scholars have started wondering whether the answer could be "Yes."