ABSTRACT
THE LAST FEW YEARS have seen a remarkable flowering, to adapt one of Zeami's favorite words, of interest in the nō, much of which is reflected in new publications in English. Book-length studies such as Thomas Hare's Zeami's Style (1986) and Komparu Kunio's The Noh Theater (1983) have contributed greatly to our understanding of the classical principles of this venerable art. In her Twelve Plays of the Nō and Kyōgen Theatres (1988) as well as in her various other translations and publications, Karen Brazell has continued to make the discipline of nō both more accessible and, in a sense, more awesome still, as one comes to comprehend the kind of physical and mental discipline necessary to master its traditions. Shimazaki Chifumi continues her multivolume series of helpful line-by-line translations of important nō texts, and, most recently, Janet Goff's Noh Drama and ‘The Tale of Genji’ (1991) has brought us fifteen plays and a set of provocative essays to accompany them. Even in the esoteric field of nō music, a useful book by Tamba Akira, The Musical Structure of Nō, appeared in 1983. In terms of comparative studies, Mae Smethurst's groundbreaking The Artistry of Aeschylus and Zeami (1989) explores in considerable depth and sophistication the often suggested but little explored comparisons between the nō and the classical Greek theatre. It will be a long time, I believe, before those of us interested in pursuing further research on the nō can properly absorb and appreciate the full significance of all that has been recently accomplished.
