How Hamlet Found Peace in Japan: Shakespeare on the Noh Stage

For almost four centuries Hamlet stood on stages around the world and asked, "To be, or not to be?" — and never got an answer. Not until Shakespeare was staged in Japan.

On 24 March 1985 a wanderer walked out onto the stage of the National Noh Theatre in Tokyo. He was Shakespeare's Horatio. He explained that he had long been travelling the world, telling everywhere the sad story of the Prince of Denmark, and had now reached "a small island country". No sooner had he begun than he met Hamlet himself — or rather, Hamlet's ghost. Ophelia was there too: a woman's kimono, folded and laid on the stage, stood in for her. Hamlet chanted his famous soliloquy in English, and the Noh chorus sang back to him an answer to what is perhaps the most famous question in Western culture: to be or not to be is not the question; the only way of living is to live in the present.

The production was devised, directed and led by Munakata Kuniyoshi, a professor of English literature who had spent years studying Noh chant and dance with a master of the Kanze school. He had been staging his Hamlet since 1982, reworking it each time; the version at the National Noh Theatre was already the fifth. Donald Richie, the American authority on Japanese theatre and film, wrote in The Japan Times that Hamlet and Zen proved uncommonly complementary, and that Shakespeare and Noh illuminated each other.

After Hamlet

In Hamlet's wake, Noh took on Macbeth, Othello, King Lear and Romeo and Juliet — nearly all of Shakespeare's major tragedies — and his comedies as well. Munakata himself wrote a Noh Macbeth in 1987, playing both husband and wife, then an Othello and a Cleopatra; in 2007 came King Lear, now in Japanese and with professional Noh performers. In 2015 the National Noh Theatre premiered his Romeo and Juliet: at the end the lovers' spirits appear in white and, dancing, rise towards heaven.

Before long this was no longer one enthusiast's project. In 2005 Noh performers staged their own Macbeth to a text by Izumi Noriko, with the chant and staging by the actor Tatsumi Manjirō, and it was aimed not at Shakespeare scholars but at audiences who knew the conventions of Noh. The same year the director Miyagi Satoshi staged an Othello, of which more below. And from 1991 Shakespeare's comedies found a home in Noh's neighbouring genre, the comic theatre of kyogen.

Why did Shakespeare take root in Noh?

The answer is that the English and Japanese theatres share, to a surprising degree — and in exactly the right places — the same expressive system.

Start with what the eye can see. A Noh stage is a square wooden platform, open to the audience on two sides, with its own roof on pillars. The stage of Shakespeare's Globe is a platform thrust out into the crowd, with a canopy likewise held up on columns. Neither has scenery. In both theatres women's roles were played by men for centuries. And in both, the actors speak not in everyday prose but in verse.

This is not kinship but coincidence. Noh took shape in the fourteenth century, the Globe was built in 1599, and neither knew of the other. They came to resemble each other because they worked under the same conditions. They played by daylight, without artificial light, on an open platform, to spectators standing or sitting around them. When there is no way to show a forest or a castle, you have to name it in words. When an actor has nothing but his voice, the rhythm of verse carries it. And when the stage is bare, any object on it — a fan, a kimono — becomes a sign. The kyogen actor Nomura Mansai, who studied in London, put the essential difference precisely: Shakespeare's England left behind its plays but not the way they were acted, whereas in Japan the manner of acting has been handed down without a break for six hundred years.

But the decisive coincidence lies not in the architecture but in the characters. In Noh the protagonists are already dead. In the classic pattern a travelling monk comes to a famous place and meets a local who knows the old story of the place suspiciously well. The stranger vanishes, hinting at who he really is. In the second half he returns in his true form — as a ghost — and relives the moment that will not let him rest, then asks the monk to pray for him and disappears.

Why the dead? Noh grew out of temple and shrine performance, and it is steeped in the Buddhist idea of attachment: a soul that cannot let go of what it lived through — love, resentment, glory, guilt — cannot be released. A Noh performance is something like a memorial service: to tell and to dance one's story is to let it go.

Shakespeare had already written such stories — frame included. Hamlet opens with a ghost and ends with the dying prince forbidding his friend to follow him into death:

Absent thee from felicity awhile, And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain, To tell my story.

A witness who stays alive to carry another's story through the world is precisely the wanderer of Noh. That is why Munakata's Horatio is the first to walk on stage: Shakespeare himself had cast him in the part.

Scenes Shakespeare never wrote

Lay Shakespeare over this pattern and the plays begin to change. That is how the Japanese versions acquired Shakespearean scenes Shakespeare never wrote — and each has its reason.

Munakata's Hamlet puts on a mask only at the moment of his death. Throughout the second half he relives his duel with Laertes: every bout becomes a dance, his fan turns now into a rapier, now into the poisoned cup, and the chorus speaks for Gertrude, Claudius and Laertes. As he dies, stage attendants open his kimono to reveal silver brocade beneath and, for the first time in the performance, mask him with the face of a young man. Why only then? In Noh living men are played with the bare face; the mask is put on to become someone else — a woman, an old man, a god, a demon, a ghost. While Hamlet remembers, his face is human. The mask means that he has finally crossed over and been released.

The folded kimono in place of Ophelia is no accident either. The device comes from the classic Noh play Aoi no Ue (Lady Aoi), based on The Tale of Genji. There the sick Lady Aoi never appears at all: a kimono at the edge of the stage represents her, and the whole drama plays out between that garment and the jealous spirit of her rival. A woman on whom others' wills are worked and who never speaks a word — in this Ophelia and Aoi are sisters.

The heroine of King Lear became silent Cordelia, the daughter who at the start of the tragedy refuses to flatter her father. Shakespeare gives her very few lines. But in Noh the leading role goes not to whoever speaks most but to the one whose story is unfinished — and the whole tragedy of Lear begins with her silence. In 2007 Cordelia was played by Adachi Reiko, then 82, the oldest woman performing Noh in Japan. Under the mask age does not matter: an eighty-year-old woman plays a young queen just as men for centuries played young girls. At the end Lear holds his dead daughter in his arms — a precious kimono again stands in for her — and then her ghost appears, calls her father to follow, and the spirits of father and daughter dance together.

In the production by the director Miyagi Satoshi, to a text by the comparatist Hirakawa Sukehiro (2005), the strangled Desdemona re-enacts her own murder, and a single performer becomes both victim and killer: the hand in the warrior's gauntlet is Othello, the rest of the body is Desdemona. In Noh this is natural, since the protagonist's dance-narrative routinely depicts the actions of others. And why Desdemona?

Shakespeare has her smothered — literally deprived of breath and voice — and the tragedy remains the tragedy of the man who killed her. Noh exists for those whose story was cut off mid-sentence, and it gives the voice back to the one who lost it. Desdemona is played by a woman, the actress Micari, although for centuries Noh was a purely male art. The production was shown in New York in 2018 and at the Venice Theatre Biennale in 2026.

Falstaff becomes a samurai

Shakespeare's comedies found a place too — on the very same stage. For centuries short kyogen comedies have been played between Noh plays, and kyogen actors also perform the interludes inside the Noh plays themselves. Kyogen is not about ghosts but about people: the sly servant, the dim-witted master, the shrewish wife — the whole Shakespearean cast. Even masks are rare: people in kyogen are played bare-faced, and masks are left to animals and spirits. Shakespearean comedy and kyogen share one world: servants and masters, tricks, mix-ups, and beatings that never really hurt anyone.

In 1991 the Shakespeare scholar Takahashi Yasunari turned The Merry Wives of Windsor into the kyogen Hora-zamurai(The Braggart Samurai). It premiered on 11 August at the Tokyo Globe, at the opening of the World Shakespeare Congress.

Falstaff became the samurai Horata, and the name tells you everything: a hora is a conch-shell trumpet, and in Japanese "to blow the conch" means to brag. Here is a braggart samurai — the same Shakespearean fat man who claims deeds and victories that were never his. Horata was played and directed by the great kyogen actor Nomura Mansaku, now a Living National Treasure of Japan, and the servant by his son Mansai.

The scene in which Falstaff is hidden in a basket of dirty linen is played without a basket: two servants carry a pole, and Horata, in full view, dangles in the middle. This is not the theatre's poverty but its principle. Kyogen builds nothing on stage; it asks the audience to imagine the rest. Shakespeare asked the same in the prologue to Henry V, where the Chorus begs the audience to "Piece out our imperfections with your thoughts". Two theatres without scenery rest on one and the same pact with the spectator.

Thirty years later, in 2021, Horata was played for the first time by Mansai, with his own son as the servant. This matters more than it seems: in Japanese theatre a play becomes a classic when its roles pass from father to son. Shakespeare's Falstaff has entered the Nomura family repertoire just as fifteenth-century plays once did. In 2001 Takahashi and Mansai also turned The Comedy of Errorsinto a kyogen and took it to Shakespeare's Globe in London. Its refrain, Yayakoshiya! — "How complicated!" — caught on so widely in Japan that it found its way into a children's programme on NHK.

Father or devil?

So why was "to be or not to be" such an agonising question for Hamlet, and why did it go unanswered for centuries?

Begin with a detail that is easy to miss. Hamlet is a student. In the first act King Claudius asks him not to return to his studies:

For your intent In going back to school in Wittenberg, It is most retrograde to our desire.

To an audience of Shakespeare's day this was not just the name of a town. It was in Wittenberg, in 1517, that Luther began the Reformation — and he began it by attacking indulgences, that is, over purgatory: indulgences promised to shorten the time a soul would spend there. Hamlet was studying at the very heart of the Protestant world.

Shakespeare's England had by then rejected purgatory and prayers for the dead as well. In 1547 the last chantries were abolished — the chapels and endowments that paid priests to say masses for the souls of the departed. In 1552 the last prayers for the dead were removed from the burial service, and the Thirty-Nine Articles, the doctrinal foundation of the Church of England, called the Roman doctrine of purgatory "a fond thing vainly invented, and grounded upon no warranty of Scripture". Shakespeare, born in 1564, grew up in the new faith, but his parents' generation still remembered masses for the dead.

And now a father appears to this Protestant student and tells him where he has come from:

I am thy father's spirit, Doom'd for a certain term to walk the night, And for the day confined to fast in fires, Till the foul crimes done in my days of nature Are burnt and purged away.

Fire "for a certain term" that purges sins is not hell; it is purgatory itself. The ghost goes on to lament that he died "Unhousel'd, disappointed, unanel'd" — without communion, unprepared, without extreme unction. That is Catholic language again.

Should Hamlet believe him? By the new faith, no. There is no purgatory, and the souls of the dead do not return to this world. Luther himself, in the Smalcald Articles (1537), called purgatory "nothing but a specter of the devil" and wrote that evil spirits had "perpetrated much knavery" "by appearing as the souls of the departed". The Swiss pastor Ludwig Lavater devoted a whole book to the matter, Of Ghosts and Spirits Walking by Night: souls cannot come back to earth before the Day of Judgement, and what people see is sent to confuse and mislead Christians. It appeared in English in 1572. So the ghost is the devil in his father's shape — and Hamlet reasons exactly this way:

The spirit that I have seen May be a devil, and the devil hath power T' assume a pleasing shape.

That is why he does not take revenge at once but stages The Mousetrap, to test whether the ghost is lying.

By the old, pre-Reformation faith, however, this really is his father, and he really is suffering. A soul from purgatory could appear to the living, and to refuse it help was to leave it in the fire. But there is a subtlety. What helped a soul in purgatory was prayers, masses and alms, and that, by tradition, is what such ghosts asked for — Luther complains precisely that the "souls" "demanded masses, vigils, pilgrimages, and other alms". Hamlet's father asks for something else: to be remembered and avenged. Revenge purges no soul under any Christian teaching. Scholars still argue about where the cry for vengeance comes from: Stephen Greenblatt traces it to the classical tragedy of Seneca rather than to Catholic folklore, and his reviewer John Bossy disagrees. Either way, even the old faith gives Hamlet no simple answer: if this is his father come from purgatory, why does he demand a killing?

Hamlet turns out to hold two maps of the afterlife, and neither leads all the way. By the new one there is no father, only the devil. By the old one the father is there, but what he wants will not save him.

The undiscovered country

It is at exactly this point that Hamlet speaks his soliloquy. He is thinking not only about whether to live or die but about what lies beyond:

To die, to sleep; To sleep, perchance to dream — ay, there's the rub: For in that sleep of death what dreams may come When we have shuffled off this mortal coil, Must give us pause.

A little further on he calls death "The undiscover'd country from whose bourn / No traveller returns".

This sounds very Protestant. Death as sleep was one of Luther's favourite images: "We shall sleep, until He comes and knocks on the little grave and says, Doctor Martin, get up!" he told his congregation in a sermon of 1533. The thought that no one comes back from there is itself old — it is in the Book of Job and in the Roman poets. But in an England without purgatory it had become official doctrine: the dead do not return.

And yet a traveller has just returned. Hamlet saw him in the first act and spoke with him. The prince's old map of the afterlife, with purgatory and prayers for the dead, had already been taken from him, and the new one cannot explain what he has seen with his own eyes. Hence the question without an answer.

And hence, too, the one request that can still be fulfilled in this world: the ghost leaves with the words "Remember me". Remembering is possible. Helping is not.

The map Noh still has

Noh has such a map. Its protagonists are souls bound to the past. A ghost appears to a traveller, relives what holds it, and asks to be prayed for. To tell one's story is to let it go.

This map contains exactly what Shakespeare's characters had lost: someone to listen to the dead, and a prayer after which one can leave. The ghost asked Hamlet to remember. The dying Hamlet asked Horatio to tell his story. Remembering and telling were all that England had left after the Reformation. In Noh, the telling is itself the rite: once the story has been told and danced to the end, the soul is free.

That is why Munakata's Hamlet stops asking. Already masked, after his death, he speaks the only Japanese line in the production: omoeba kari no yado — "when you think of it, this is only a temporary lodging".

The words come from the close of the classic Noh play Eguchi, in which the ghost of a courtesan recalls that she herself once taught others not to fix their hearts on this world, and before the monk's eyes is transformed into a bodhisattva. To a Japanese audience the words mean one thing: the soul has let go of what held it.

And so it was in Tokyo that Hamlet, for the first time in four centuries, left the stage at peace: slowly, along the long bridge to the wings, to the sound of the flute. The chorus sang that angels might bear him to his rest: "And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest." These are Shakespeare's own words, spoken by Horatio over his friend's body. On the stage of the Globe they were a farewell. On the Noh stage they became a prayer.

---

Author: Alec Sheremetev