SOURCE: Brandon, James. “The Theft of Chūshingura: or The Great Kabuki Caper.” In “Chūshingura”: Studies in Kabuki and the Puppet Theater, edited by James R. Brandon, pp, 111-46. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1982.

In the following excerpt, Brandon examines how the joruri play Chūushingura was stolen by Kabuki actors, which seems difficult to understand considering that the two forms were originally so different, and he argues that the Kabuki performers deliberately set out to transform the play and make it particularly theirs, so that it is now the most beloved Kabuki play.

It did not take kabuki producers and actors long to recognize that the jōruri play Kanadehon Chūshingura was a valuable stage property well worth the effort to appropriate for the kabuki stage. Even before the puppet play opened on the fourteenth day of the eighth lunar month in 1748 at the Takemoto...