Japanese drama commenced around the 7th century and to date has evolved a wide variety of genres characterised generally by the fusion of dramatic, musical, and dance elements. The music and dance, as well as the subjects, settings, costumes, and acting styles, were rigidly stylised and, until recent times, offered relatively few realistic or naturalistic qualities. Some genres utilise almost exclusively a fixed repertoire of plays, often many centuries old. The earliest known type of Japanese theatrical entertainment is gigaku, which was introduced into Japan in 612 from southern China; it is thought to have been ultimately of Indian or possibly even of Greek origin. Gigaku dances, performed with masks, seem to have been humorous. In the 8th century gigaku fell into disfavour because its frivolous character displeased the Japanese rulers of the period. It was supplanted largely by bugaku, an entertainment introduced from China. Bugaku dances portrayed simple situations such as the return of a general from war.
The performers wore impressive robes, and their dances had exotic splendour. Japanese rulers, intent on imitating Chinese courtetiquette, favoured bugaku, both because of its solemnity and because of its similarity to Chinese court entertainments, and it quickly acquired a ritual character. Bugaku may now be seen only at ceremonies. A type of acrobatic entertainment known as sangaku, transmitted similarly to Japan from the Asian continent and popular in the 8th century, also influenced Japanese drama. Typical acts included tightrope walking, juggling, and sword swallowing. A Combination of these secular entertainments and the sacred dances and songs associated with the Shinto religion gradually evolved into more complex forms of drama. Surviving documents from the 11th century describe comic playlets, and one play still performed, the ritual dance Okina, may date from this period.
Plays were also performed at shrine festivals in support of prayers for harvests or to depict the history of the shrine. The actors and musicians were organised into troupes. By the 14th century the theatre had developed one of its foremost artistic achievements, No drama. These plays included solemn dances intended to suggest the deepest emotions of the principal character and were written in the poetic language of the Japanese classics. A program also often included kyo gen, or farces written in colloquial language. No was brought to the level of great art by the genius of two dramatists, Kanami Kiyotsugu and his son Zeami Motokiyo. No was patronised by the Ashikaga shogunate after a shogun saw the boy Zeami perform in 1374. Zeami developed No into refined aristocratic drama, but after his death it tended to lose its creative vitality and become ritualistic. Many No plays performed at present are by Zeami, and his books of criticism are considered the final authority on the subject.
For a short period after the Meiji restoration in 1868, No was threatened with extinction because of its connections with the discredited shogunate. It survived the threat, however, and thereafter enjoyed popularity with specialised audiences. An entire program of No drama traditionally consists of five No plays in poetry with music and four kyo gen farces in prose without music, performed alternately. Kyogen farces feature representational acting, and the actors wear neither masks nor makeup. No plays avoid representational accuracy in favour of a symbolic treatment of subjects concerning the worlds of the living and the dead. The principal types of No plays are those dealing with deities, the ghosts of warriors, women with tragic destinies, mad persons, and devils or festive spirits. The actors, who often wear masks, are richly and elaborately costumed. The No drama is performed in a theatre with a roofed stage. The audience is seated on two or, less commonly, three sides of the stage. The actors reach the stage by a passageway, called the bridge, which is marked by three pine trees. The only backdrop is a large painted pine. The scenery consists entirely of impressionistic props suggesting the outlines of a building, a boat, or any other object of importance to the play. Only male actors perform in No dramas. When they play the roles of women or of men whose age is markedly different from their own, they wear masks, many of which are exceptionally beautiful. The No drama also includes a chorus that sits at one side of the stage and recites for the actors when they dance, but the chorus has no identity in the drama. Full programs are seldom presented any longer, but kyo gen continues to be an indispensable part of the entire performance, for it presents the humorous aspects of life with which No is never concerned.
At the end of the 15th century two new popular forms appeared; they were the puppet theatre, jo ruri, also called bunraku, and a form known as kabuki. The puppet theatre combines three elements: the puppets; the chanters who sing and declaim for the puppets; and the players of the samisen, a three-stringed instrument, who provide the accompaniment. The greatest Japanese dramatist, Chikamatsu Monzaemon, wrote chiefly for the puppet theatre, the artistic level of which is perhaps higher in Japan than anywhere else in the world. The puppet theatre, after attaining its greatest popularity in the 18th century, lost in public favour to the kabuki, which has continued to be the most popular traditional dramatic genre. By the mid-1980s kabuki was popular with American audiences, and troupes made annual appearances in the USA Kabuki tends to be spectacle rather than drama. Original kabuki texts, as opposed to those adapted from the puppet theatre, are of lesser importance than the remarkable acting, the music and dance, and the brilliantly collared settings.
Kabuki plays are performed in large theatres, with a hanamichi, or raised platform, extending from the back of the theatre to the stage. In addition to the traditional drama, a modern theatrical repertoire consisting of original Japanese plays in a modern idiom and of translations of European plays has been active in Japan since the beginning of the 20th century. Some 20th-century playwrights have attempted to compromise between traditional Japanese forms and essentially Western idioms, either by introducing modern psychology into their treatment of the ancient tales or by making kabuki-style plays out of such European classics as Shakespeare's Macbeth. Highly successful modern presentations of traditional themes are offered in Five Modern No Plays (1956) by Mishima Yukio. Other plays, notably Twilight Crane, produced in 1949, by Kinoshita Junji, are derived from old folktales. Many contemporary Japanese playwrights deal with such themes as conflict in modern Japanese society and problems of social injustice; other playwrights prefer to work out Japanese equivalents of modern symbolic drama or of the American musical comedy. Research Japanese Drama
In psychology, a meme is a unit of idea, behaviour, culture or philosophy, etc which can self-replicate, change, and be transmitted to other people by non-genetic means, such as by imitation. Research Meme
Obedience is the carrying out instructions or commands; submitting to authority.
Obedience became an important topic in social psychology in the 1960s and 1970s as a result of extensive research by American psychologist Stanley Milgram which showed that a high proportion of ordinary individuals would obey instructions that involved inflicting severe pain on, and even the murder of others. Milgram had sought to show that German guards working at concentration camps during the Second World War were responsible for their actions, and that they couldn't use the argument that they were simply following orders. However, his research showed the opposite in a dramatic way. Obeying orders when disobedience results in punishment is understandable (even if not always morally justifiable), but Milgram claimed that many people would willingly obey orders, even if not threatened with punishment.
The subjects in his experiments were required to act as ' teachers' for a 'learner' who, unknown to them, was a confederate of the experimenter. Using a simulated shock generator, they were told to administer electric shocks, of increasing strengths, every time the 'learner' made a mistake. In some experiments as many as 60% of the subjects, when the experimenter told them to continue, administered shocks that they believed would seriously harm or kill the 'learner'. Although distressed by their actions, the subjects felt the experimenter was responsible. Milgram's work has not been accepted uncritically, most of the criticisms being levelled at the ethics of the experiment which led people to believe they had in fact killed an innocent man, although after the experiment they were reassured, but it has generated much discussion and stimulated further research. Research Obedience
Carl Gustav Jung was a Swiss scientist. He was born at Basle in 1875. He died in 1961. He is famous for developing a school of analytical psychology. Research Carl Gustav Jung
Friedrich Edward Beneke was a German philosophical writer. He was born in 1798 and died in 1854. He began lecturing at Berlin, but his lectures were at first interdicted on account of their supposed materialistic tendency, and he removed to Gottingen. He returned to Berlin in 1827, and after the death of Hegel, whose philosophical views he opposed, he was appointed extraordinary professor of philosophy. His more important works were Psychological Sketches, Text-book of Psychology as a Natural Science, System of Logic, Treatise on Education, Groundwork of a Physic of Ethics written in direct anatgonism to Kant's Metaphysic of Ethics, etc. Research Friedrich Beneke
Dr George Berkeley was an Irish philosopher and missionary. He was born in 1685 and died in 1753. He was educated and became a fellow of Trinity College, Dublin, in 1707. He went to England in 1713, and soon came to be on friendly terms with Steele, Addison, Arbuthnot, and Jonathan Swift.
In 1713 he went to the Continent as chaplain to LordPeterborough, and travelled as far as Leghorn, but did not stay long. He went abroad again in 1716, this time as tutor to a young man, and his stay lasted four years, the greater part of the time being spent in Italy. In 1721 he was appointed chaplain to the lord-lieutenant of Ireland, the Duke of Grafton. By a legacy from Miss Vanhomrigh (Jonathan Swift's Vanessa) in 1723 his fortune was considerably increased.
In 1724 he became Dean of Derry. Between 1721 and 1724 he held several offices in Dublin University, and in 1721 had been made DD. He now published his proposals for providing the American plantations with a better supply of religious teachers, and for the conversion of the American natives to Christianity by the establishment of a college in the Bermuda Islands; and subscriptions having been raised, he set sail for Rhode Island in 1728, proposing to wait there until a promised grant of 20,000 pounds had been obtained from the government. The scheme, which was not particularly promising, never got a start, however, and in 1732 he returned to London, where he stayed about two years.
In 1734 he obtained the bishopric of Cloyne, where he spent almost the whole of the remainder of his life. In 1752, giving up the cares of his bishopric, he went to England, and he died suddenly at Oxford in 1753.
George Berkeley holds an important place in the history of philosophy. His new theory of vision was his first remarkable contribution to the subject of philosophy or psychology. In it he maintains that sight gives us nothing beyond sensations that are quite incomplete in themselves, and must be supplemented by tactual sensations, or sensations derived from the sense of touch, and that sight by itself can tell us nothing of distance. By his idealistic metaphysical theory he maintains that the belief in the existence of an exterior material world is false and inconsistent with itself;
that those things which are called sensible material objects are not external but exist in the mind, and are merely impressions made on our minds by the immediate act of God, according to certain rules termed laws of nature, from which he never deviates; and that the steady adherence of the Supreme Spirit to these rules is what constitutes the reality of things to his creatures, and so effectually distinguishes the ideas perceived by sense from such as are the work of the mind itself or of dreams, that there is no more danger of confounding them together on this hypothesis than on that of the existence of matter.
Berkeley was admirable as a writer; as a man he was said by his friend Pope to be possessed of 'every virtue under heaven'. His most celebrated philosophical works are: Essay towards a new Theory of Vision, 1709; a Treatise concerning the Principles of HumanKnowledge, 1710, in which his philosophical theory is fully set forth; Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous, 1713; Alciphron, or the Minute Philosopher, 1732; and Theory of Vision, vindicated and explained, 1733. Another publication of some note in its day was Siris, Philosophical Reflections and Inquiries concerning the Virtues of Tar-water, 1744. Tar-water, the use of which he had learned in America, he regarded as a sort of panacea, good for man and beast, at all times and in all circumstances and all ailments. Other works of his are of a mathematical and theological order. The only complete collection is that of Professor A. CampbellFraser, first edition, three volumes, 1871, with a fourth volume containing Life and Letters; second edition, much improved, with new prefaces, annotations, and Life, 1901. Research George Berkeley
Gordon Allport was an American psychologist. He was born in 1897 and died in 1967. He developed a theory of personality that emphasised individual uniqueness, and was the editor of the 'Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology' from 1937 to 1949. He wrote 'Personality' in 1937 and 'The Nature of Prejudice' in 1954. Research Gordon Allport
Herbert Spencer was a British philosopher. He was born in 1820 at Derby and died in 1903. Privately educated, from 1837 until 1846 he was engaged in civil engineering, and from 1848 until 1853 was sub-editor of 'The Economist'. He was the first philosopher to apply Darwinism to psychology, publishing in 1855 'Principles of Psychology' - in the same year suffering a nervous breakdown - followed in 1860 by the first prospectus of his System of Synthetic Philosophy, the first of the ten volumes of which, 'First Principles', was published in 1862, the remaining volumes occupying him for a further thirty-six years. Research Herbert Spencer
Johann Eduard Erdmann was a German philosopher. He was born in 1805 and died in 1892. He studied theology at Dorpat and Berlin; in 1829 became a clergyman, but in 1832 returned to Berlin and took his degree in philosophy. In 1836 he became professor extraordinary of philosophy at Halle, being appointed ordinary professor in 1839. He wrote numerous philosophical works, mostly characterized by Hegelian tendencies, including: Body and Soul, Nature and Creation, Outlines of Psychology, Outlines of Logic and Metaphysics, Psychological Letters, Belief and Knowledge, etc. His greatest work is his Outlines of the History of Philosophy, which was translated into English in 1889. Research Johann Erdmann
The Probert Encyclopaedia was designed, edited and programed by
Matt and Leela Probert
Abbreviations
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