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Mae Smethurst has followed up her pathbreaking book on The Artistry of Aeschylus and Zeami with a new study that compares Greek tragedy and realistic Noh drama with a plot and living characters. Drawing on Aristotle's views of the well structured tragic plot in his Poetics, Smethurst identifies common elements such as conflict, recognition, and fatal reversals in both genres as well as a similar pivotal role for the third actor in tragedy and a climactic stepping outside of character in Noh. The comparison is remarkably illuminating for students of both Greek and Japanese traditions. -- Helene Foley, Columbia University Mae Smethurst brings to her research a unique balance of expertise in Greek Tragedy and Japanese Noh drama. In a fitting sequel to her path-breaking earlier work 'The Artistry of Aeschylus and Zeami,' she here employs her understanding of Aristotle to investigate the workings of several relatively little studied Noh plays. This technique sheds new light on plays set in living reality, as opposed to the dream vision plays that tend to be viewed as the hallmark of Noh. Conversely, her approach to the Japanese works raises fresh issues to consider in the tragedies of Sophocles and Euripides. A core focus of comparison concerns the issue of distanciation in text and performance. This rich scholarship, comparing unique juxtapositions of plays, is replete with original insights on multiple levels of analysis. Despite vast differences in time, culture and language, Tragedy and Noh illuminate each other in this exceptional book. It will intrigue specialists of each tradition and engage anyone with an interest in the possibilities and realities of theater in general. -- Susan Matisoff, University of California, Berkeley

Mae Smethurst has followed up her pathbreaking book on The Artistry of Aeschylus and Zeami with a new study that compares Greek tragedy and realistic Noh drama with a plot and living characters. Drawing on Aristotle's views of the well structured tragic plot in his Poetics, Smethurst identifies common elements such as conflict, recognition, and fatal reversals in both genres as well as a similar pivotal role for the third actor in tragedy and a climactic stepping outside of character in Noh. The comparison is remarkably illuminating for students of both Greek and Japanese traditions. -- Helene Foley, Columbia University Mae Smethurst brings to her research a unique balance of expertise in Greek Tragedy and Japanese Noh drama. In a fitting sequel to her path-breaking earlier work 'The Artistry of Aeschylus and Zeami,' she here employs her understanding of Aristotle to investigate the workings of several relatively little studied Noh plays. This technique sheds new light on plays set in living reality, as opposed to the dream vision plays that tend to be viewed as the hallmark of Noh. Conversely, her approach to the Japanese works raises fresh issues to consider in the tragedies of Sophocles and Euripides. A core focus of comparison concerns the issue of distanciation in text and performance. This rich scholarship, comparing unique juxtapositions of plays, is replete with original insights on multiple levels of analysis. Despite vast differences in time, culture and language, Tragedy and Noh illuminate each other in this exceptional book. It will intrigue specialists of each tradition and engage anyone with an interest in the possibilities and realities of theater in general. -- Susan Matisoff, University of California, Berkeley Historically, Greek tragedy and Japanese noh have nothing to do with each other, having developed in different eras and geographical regions. Yet both theatrical traditions tell stories of human joy and suffering through characters and action, and they evoke emotional response in audiences past and present. Noh plays are most familiar as mugen or spirit noh, in which a wandering soul recounts an event in his or her life that is the cause of longing or torment. There are also genzai or realistic noh, which deal with living people and present action. Some of the best-loved plays in the repertoire are genzai noh: Funa Benkei, Sumidagawa, and Ataka. Smethurst (Univ. of Pittsburgh), author of The Artistry of Aeschylus and Zeami (CH, Oct'89, 27-0776) uses Aristotle's views on tragedy to analyze the plot structure in a group of lesser-known genzai noh texts, comparing them to examples of tragedies by Sophocles and Euripides. She examines the writers' use of action in these noh plays and their incorporation of third-person speech at the plot climax, features that correspond to Aristotle's principle that a tragedy can have only three actors. Smethurst's study of noh texts is uniquely illuminating for scholars of tragedy. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates, graduate students, and faculty. CHOICE

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Mae Smethurst is professor of classics and East Asian literature at the University of Pittsburgh. She has authored two books: The Artistry of Aeschylus and Zeami: A Comparative Study of Greek Tragedy and Noh (Princeton University Press 1989) and Dramatic Representations of Filial Piety (Cornell East Asia 1998). The first book won the Hitomi Arisawa Prize for an outstanding book published by an American university press in 1989-1990, and the second won the United States-Japan Friendship Commission’s prize through the Donald Keene Center at Columbia for an outstanding translation from pre-modern Japanese to English in 2002. She also edited with the help of co-editor Christina Laffin a volume on noh: Ominameshi: A Flower Viewed from Many Directions.

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