SOURCE: “Almanzor and Coxinga: Drama West and East,” in Comparative Literature Studies, Vol. 22, No. 1, 1985, pp. 97-109.

In this essay, Berry compares Chikamatsu's The Battles of Coxinga to John Dryden's The Conquest of Granada, one of the most important heroic dramas of the Restoration period in England. Despite some remarkable similarities in their performance contexts, Berry finds that the dramas differ in their treatment of man's place in the universe and in the nature of honor.

A good takeoff point for studying drama West and East is Antonin Artaud's 1944 essay collection Le Théâtre et son double, translated into English in 1958 by Mary Caroline Richards.¹ A, if not the, major theoretician of twentieth-century drama, Artaud proposes a) that Western drama has, since the Greeks and Shakespeare, greatly deteriorated by reason of excessive literalism (in the broad sense) and naturalism, and its concomitant diminishing of extra-literary aspects of drama intended...