Shakespeare's plays, so that they constitute a truly formidable bulk of literary matter. The novelist Kiōden tells us that a three-act piece of his called Naga-machi onna Hara-kiri ("The Woman's Hara-kiri," a gruesome title) was written in a single night, and the statement, whether true or not, bears testimony to the opinion entertained by his countrymen of his facility of composition. His works deal with all manner of subjects. They show that he was well acquainted with the Shinto and Buddhist religions, and that he possessed a wide and varied knowledge of the history and institutions of Japan and China.
Of Chikamatsu's merits as a dramatist and poet it behoves a European writer to speak with some degree of reserve, more especially as it is impossible to read more than a tithe of his works. The admiration of his own countrymen for him is unbounded, some of them going so far as to compare him with Shakespeare. It is certainly possible to trace resemblances. Both in Shakespeare and Chikamatsu, comedy frequently treads on the heels of tragedy; in both, prose is intermixed with poetry, and an exalted style of diction suited to monarchs and nobles alternates with the speech of the common people; both divided their attention between historical and other dramas; both possessed the fullest command of the resources of their respective languages, and both are tainted with a grosser element which is rejected by the more refined taste of later times. It may be added that neither Shakespeare nor Chikamatsu is classical in the sense in which we apply that term to Sophocles and Racine. Chikamatsu in particular is very far removed indeed from the classical type.
But few such comparisons have any value, and it is
