SOURCE: Gerstle, C. Andrew. “Flowers of Edo: Eighteenth-Century Kabuki and Its Patrons.” Asian Theatre Journal 4, No. 1 (Spring, 1987): 52-75.

In the following essay, Gerstle argues that the Kabuki theater that developed in Edo in the eighteenth century is strikingly different from that seen in Kyoto or Osaka during the same period, and maintains that Edo Kabuki's amoral, outlandish image was fed by the Confucian government's stifling conservatism as well as the theater audience's desire and fascination for Kabuki's defiance of authority.

At Tokyo's National Theatre, kabuki plays conceived and premiered during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are performed today, yet the audience's experience is radically different from that of the period before 1868. Patrons of kabuki in Edo (Tokyo) in 1770 would not have felt comfortable at all in having their theatre so close to the seat of government (in view of the Diet and Imperial Palace and next to the...