Charles Bronson: …later films were action-thrillers, including Love and Bullets (1979), The Evil That Men Do (1984), and Murphy’s Law (1986). In other movies he revealed humanity and tenderness beneath the toughness, as in Sean Penn’s The Indian Runner (1991) and the TV movie Yes Virginia, There Is a Santa Claus (1991).

Woody Allen: The 1970s: Love and Death (1975), a parody of Leo Tolstoy’s fiction, Sergey Eisenstein’s filmmaking, and a clutch of other landmarks of Russian culture, was less universally applauded.

Llewelyn Powys: …an exploration of spirituality; and Love and Death (1939), a partly fictionalized account of and reflection on a love affair.

American literature: Literary and social criticism: …Leslie Fiedler, as, for example, Love and Death in the American Novel (1960), was marked by its provocative application of Freudian ideas to American literature. In his later work he turned to popular culture as a source of revealing social and psychological patterns.

John Hurt: …young male movie idol in Love and Death on Long Island (1997). Hurt also enjoyed smaller parts in such films as The Field (1990), a drama set in an Irish village, and Rob Roy (1995), about the Scottish outlaw. On television he appeared as the title character in the children’s…

Alison Lurie: …all set in academia, include Love and Friendship (1962), The Nowhere City (1965), Imaginary Friends (1967; television miniseries 1987), Real People (1969), Only Children (1979), and The Truth About Lorin Jones (1988). A collection of ghost stories, Women and Ghosts

Ivan Klíma: …and Láska a smetí (1988; Love and Garbage), the narrator of which is a banned Czech writer who sweeps streets for a living while meditating on Franz Kafka and other momentous matters. Klíma’s later fiction included Čekání na tmu, čekání na světlo (1993; Waiting for the Dark, Waiting for the…

motivation: Genetic contributions: In a book entitled Love and Hate: The Natural History of Behavior Patterns, he summarized many years of cross-cultural research on human genetic behaviour patterns. Interestingly, research on the facial expressions associated with emotion has provided some support for the existence of innate motivations in humans.

Caryl Churchill: Her subsequent works included Love and Information (2012), Escaped Alone (2016), and the short play What If If Only (2021).

H.G. Wells: Early writings: …middle-class life, most notably in Love and Mr. Lewisham (1900), Kipps: The Story of a Simple Soul (1905), and The History of Mr. Polly (1910). In these novels, and in Tono-Bungay (1909), he drew on memories of his own earlier life, and, through the thoughts of inarticulate yet often ambitious…

Aleksandar Hemon: He followed this with Love and Obstacles (2009), a collection of short stories narrated by a young man who leaves Sarajevo for the United States when war breaks out in his home country. The Making of Zombie Wars (2015) chronicles the quotidian difficulties of a workaday writer attempting to…

D.M. Thomas: …collections, including The Shaft (1973), Love and Other Deaths (1975), and The Honeymoon Voyage (1978), won praise for their examinations of death, loss, and aspects of sexuality. For Mrs. English and Other Women (2014), Thomas drew inspiration from his own life. Vintage Ghosts (2012) is a verse novel.

Dawn French: …Prisoner of Azkaban (2004) and Love and Other Disasters (2006), and provided the voice for characters in The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (2005) and Coraline (2009). She had a small role in, and was an executive producer of, Absolutely Fabulous: The Movie (2016). In…

Alan J. Pakula: Films of the 1970s: Love and Pain and the Whole Damn Thing (1973) was a smaller, less-commercial enterprise, with Maggie Smith and Timothy Bottoms as a couple involved in a September-May romance.

St. John Paul II: Decision to join the priesthood: …his first book of nonfiction, Love and Responsibility (1960), an exploration of the several graces available in conjugal sexual relationships. The work was considered radical by those who held the traditional church view that sex was solely for the purpose of procreation.

William Trevor: His last novel, Love and Summer, was published in 2009.

Dante: Dante’s intellectual development and public career: …gentil sono una cosa” (“Love and the Noble Heart Are the Same Thing”), the first line of which is clearly an adaptation of Guinizelli’s “Al cor gentil ripara sempre amore” (“In Every Noble Heart Love Finds Its Home”). This was the beginning of Dante’s association with a new poetic…

Bob Dylan: Elder statesman of folk and rock: …Dylan’s way in 2002, for Love and Theft (2001).

Brad Paisley: …in the Trunk (2014) and Love and War (2017) were both solid country albums, the latter featuring duets with Mick Jagger and John Fogerty.

Jean-Pierre Léaud: …L’Amour à vingt ans (1962; Love at Twenty), Baisers volés (1968; Stolen Kisses), Domicile conjugale (1970; Bed and Board), and L’Amour en fuite (1979; Love on the Run). Léaud was perfectly suited to play the part of Doinel, an engaging and innocent young man who is not particularly well equipped…

PCP, hallucinogenic drug with anesthetic properties, having the chemical name 1-(1-phenylcyclohexyl)piperidine. PCP was first developed in 1956 by Parke Davis Laboratories of Detroit for use as an anesthetic in veterinary medicine, though it is no longer used in this capacity. Used for a brief time

American Broadcasting Company: Focus on television: …dramatic series (Charlie’s Angels [1976–81], The Love Boat [1977– 86], and Fantasy Island [1978–84]), Silverman rapidly elevated ABC to the coveted number one slot. Perhaps to counteract criticism of its lowbrow entertainment fare, the network offered a number of prestige projects during the Silverman years, notably the blockbuster miniseries Roots…

The Love Bug, American live-action comedy film, coproduced by Disney and released in 1968, that centred on “Herbie,” a Volkswagen Beetle that has human qualities. The film spawned a loyal fan movement and numerous sequels. Disney regular Dean Jones played Jim Douglas, a down-and-out race car driver

Nirvana: …recorded their first single, “Love Buzz” (1988), and album, Bleach (1989), for Sub Pop, an independent record company in Seattle. They refined this mix of 1960s-style pop and 1970s heavy metal–hard rock on their first album for a major label, Geffen; Nevermind, featuring the anthemic hit “Smells Like Teen…

Love Canal, neighbourhood in Niagara Falls, New York, U.S., that was the site of the worst environmental disaster involving chemical wastes in U.S. history. The Love Canal area was originally the site of an abandoned canal that became a dumping ground for nearly 22,000 tons of chemical waste

Jack Conway: The 1940s: Conway had another hit with Love Crazy (1941), a deft comedy about a couple (Powell and Loy) whose marriage becomes strained after the wife’s mother comes for a visit. Honky Tonk (1941) cast Gable as a gambler romancing a judge’s daughter (Lana Turner), and Powell and Lamarr played newlyweds whose…

Sade: In 1992 Sade released Love Deluxe, which featured the Grammy-winning single “No Ordinary Love.” After a subsequent world tour, Sade enjoyed life away from the limelight. She became a mother, while other members of her band recorded separately as Sweetback. The band reunited to produce the critically acclaimed Lovers…

Michelle Pfeiffer: …Fabulous Baker Boys (1989) and Love Field (1992).

William Congreve: Literary career: Love for Love almost repeated the success of his first play. Performed in April 1695, it was the first production staged for the new theatre in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, which was opened after protracted crises in the old Theatre Royal, complicated by quarrels among the…

Cole Porter: …One of Those Things,” “Love for Sale,” “My Heart Belongs to Daddy,” “Too Darn Hot,” “It’s Delovely,” “I Concentrate on You,” “Always True to You in My Fashion,” and “I Love Paris.” He was especially adept at the catalog song, his best-known efforts being “Let’s Do It” and “You’re…

Tony Bennett: Cross-generational collaborations: …subsequently released their second collaboration, Love for Sale (2021), a collection of Cole Porter songs; it earned the duo another Grammy for best traditional pop vocal album. To promote the recording, they performed two shows in 2021 that were Bennett’s last public concerts.

Sergey Prokofiev: Pre-Revolutionary period: …he planned a new opera, The Love for Three Oranges, after a comedy tale by the 18th-century Italian dramatist Carlo Gozzi, as translated and adapted by Meyerhold. In the summer of 1917 Prokofiev was included in the Council of Workers in the Arts, which led Russia’s left wing of artistic…

love grass, (genus Eragrostis), genus of about 350 species of tufted annual and perennial grasses in the family Poaceae. Love grasses are native to tropical and temperate regions of the world, and several are cultivated as forage or as ornamentals. Love grasses are typically bunched or tufted with

Marx Brothers: …Casablanca (1946) and the embarrassing Love Happy (1949), the latter being most notable for a cameo appearance by the young Marilyn Monroe.

Love in a Cold Climate, novel written by English author Nancy Mitford and published in 1949. Love in a Cold Climate, a comedy of manners, is set in roughly the same time and place as Mitford’s earlier novel The Pursuit of Love (1945) and delves into British aristocratic society between the two

Isaac Bickerstaffe: His first theatrical success, Love in a Village (1762), was followed by many others, including The Maid of the Mill (based on Samuel Richardson’s Pamela), The Padlock, and The Hypocrite. A frank plagiarist, he depended for his success on his lively lyrics and his sparkling dialogue. Bickerstaffe’s future appeared…

William Wycherley: …he drafted his first play, Love in a Wood; or, St. James’s Park, and in the autumn of 1671 it was presented in London, bringing its author instant acclaim. Wycherley was taken up by Barbara Villiers, duchess of Cleveland, whose favours he shared with King Charles II, and he was…

Elliott Nugent: …helps hide a murder witness; Love in Bloom (1935), with George Burns and Gracie Allen; and Professor Beware (1938), starring Harold Lloyd, in his penultimate film, as a hapless Egyptologist.

Billy Wilder: Films of the 1950s of Billy Wilder: With Love in the Afternoon (1957), Wilder began working with a new writing partner, I.A.L. Diamond, though this first collaboration between them is generally held to be one of their lesser efforts. This homage to Lubitsch’s sophisticated comedies, based on the novel Ariane by Claude Anet,…

Lawrence Ferlinghetti: …Ferlinghetti published a short novel, Love in the Days of Rage, about a romance during the student revolution in France in 1968.

Walker Percy: …included The Last Gentleman (1966); Love in the Ruins: The Adventures of a Bad Catholic at a Time near the End of the World (1971), a science-fiction novel that brings a lighter comic touch to Percy’s treatment of “Malaise”; Lancelot (1977), an allegory of the King Arthur legend told through…

Alexander McCall Smith: …Door of Life (2015), and Love in the Time of Bertie (2022). The Professor Dr. von Igelfeld/Portuguese Irregular Verbs series of comic novels, which concerns the misadventures of German academic Dr. Moritz-Maria von Igelfeld, began with Portuguese Irregular Verbs (2003)—a short run of which had been produced in 1997—and progressed…

Love in the Time of Cholera, novel by Gabriel García Márquez, published in 1985 as El amor en los tiempos del cólera. The story, which treats the themes of love, aging, and death, takes place between the late 1870s and the early 1930s in a South American community troubled by wars and outbreaks of

Fernanda Montenegro: …outside her native Brazil in Love in the Time of Cholera (2007), an adaptation of Gabriel García Márquez’s 1985 novel.

Robert Johnson: …on My Mind,” and “Love in Vain”—are his most compelling pieces. Unlike the songs of many of his contemporaries—which tended to unspool loosely, employing combinations of traditional and improvised lyrics—Johnson’s songs were tightly composed, and his song structure and lyrics were praised by Bob Dylan. Despite the limited number…

Charles Bukowski: …Mockingbird Wish Me Luck (1972), Love Is a Dog from Hell (1977), War All the Time (1984), and You Get So Alone at Times That It Just Makes Sense (1986). Though he had begun his career as one of the ultimate “cult authors,” his work was so popular and influential…

Irna Phillips: (1956–2010), Another World (1964–99), and Love Is a Many Splendored Thing (1967–73), and she created (with Allan Chase and Ted Corday) Days of Our Lives (1965– ).

Henry King: Later films: …biggest hit of the decade, Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing, a rare venture by the director into contemporary romance. It starred Jones and William Holden as a widowed doctor and a journalist, respectively, who fall in love in Hong Kong. The film received eight Oscar nominations, and its wins included…

Irving Stone: president; Love Is Eternal (1954), a fictionalized account of the marriage of Mary Todd and Abraham Lincoln; The Agony and the Ecstasy (1961), a life of the Renaissance artist Michelangelo; The Passions of the Mind (1971), about Sigmund Freud; and The Origin (1980), a life of…

Tony Bennett: Cross-generational collaborations: Love Is Here to Stay (2018), a tribute to George Gershwin, was recorded with jazz vocalist Diana Krall.

Banksy: Banksy at auction: …art with a new name, Love Is in the Bin. The work sold in 2021 for $25 million, beating Banksy’s previous auction record, which had been set by Game Changer in 2020, when it sold for $22 million.

Bruce Sterling: (1998), The Caryatids (2009), and Love Is Strange (2012).

Buddy Holly: Influences and musical style: …by Bo Diddley, and “Love Is Strange” by Mickey and Sylvia. Guitar riffs and rhythmic ideas from these three records crop up repeatedly in his work. Already well versed in country music, bluegrass, and gospel and a seasoned performer by age 16, he became a rhythm-and-blues devotee.

John Lithgow: Other credits, including The Crown: In Love Is Strange (2014) he portrayed a painter whose life is upended when his husband is fired from the Catholic school where he teaches following the revelation of their marriage. He took supporting roles as the father-in-law of a spaceship pilot (played by Matthew McConaughey)…

Roxy Music: … and its hit single “Love Is the Drug” in 1975. Splitting, re-forming, and splitting again, Roxy Music had commercial success with its albums in the late 1970s and early 1980s, most notably with its final studio album, Avalon (1982), but failed to regain its earlier critical acclaim. After a…

James Tiptree, Jr.: …psychology was shown in “Love Is the Plan the Plan Is Death” (1973; winner of a Nebula Award for best short story), which is told from the viewpoint of a giant alien arachnid.

Alice Cooper: …Ezrin, and their third album, Love It to Death (1971), found an audience and yielded the hit single “I’m Eighteen.” The follow-up, Killer (1971), was another success. The title track of School’s Out (1972) was a Top Ten hit in the United States and reached the top of the British…

romantic comedy: Resurgence and attempts to broaden the appeal: …age for the genre, including Love Jones (1997), How Stella Got Her Groove Back (1998), and The Best Man (1999).

Carol Burnett: Gurney’s Love Letters (2014). Burnett voiced the character Chairol Burnett in the animated film Toy Story 4 (2019).

William Dieterle: Middle years of William Dieterle: Love Letters (1945) was another glossy Selznick melodrama, with Jennifer Jones as an amnesiac accused of murdering her husband whose memory is restored after she reads old love letters; it was scripted by Ayn Rand and was hugely popular. At about this time, at the…

Mariana Alcoforado: …long believed to have written Lettres portugaise (1669; “Portuguese Letters”), a collection of five love letters, though most modern authorities reject her authorship.

Kristen Stewart: Later performances: …O’Brian in the erotic thriller Love Lies Bleeding (2024), directed by Rose Glass; and is slated to play Susan Sontag in Sontag, an unconventional biopic of the bisexual intellectual’s life.

Bobbie Ann Mason: …her other short-story collections were Love Life: Stories (1989), Midnight Magic (1998), and Nancy Culpepper (2006). In 2003 Mason wrote a biography about Elvis Presley. Clear Springs: A Family Story (1999) is a memoir.

Anna Lea Merritt: 1883), Camilla (1882), and Love Locked Out (1889), which in 1890 became the first work of a woman artist to be purchased for the Tate Gallery, the museum that houses the national collection of British art. Merritt’s Eve Overcome by Remorse and a mural decoration for the Woman’s Building…

Charles Vidor: Later films: Love Me or Leave Me (1955) was a critically acclaimed biopic of singer Ruth Etting, with Doris Day in the title role and James Cagney as her gangster boyfriend (in an Oscar-nominated performance). The Swan (1956), a pleasant romance among royalty, was Grace Kelly’s penultimate…

Rock and film: …1956, Elvis Presley appeared in Love Me Tender, a Civil War-era melodrama that had little to do with rock and roll but sought to capitalize on Presley’s stardom, a formula that would be used throughout his unremarkable movie career. Indeed, of Presley’s films, only Jailhouse Rock (1957) captured rock’s spirit.

Rouben Mamoulian: Films of the 1930s: Mamoulian’s next effort, Love Me Tonight (1932), has come to be regarded as one of the most accomplished of the early musicals. It starred Maurice Chevalier and Jeanette MacDonald, featured a delightfully sardonic performance by Myrna Loy, and was grounded in strong songs by Richard Rodgers and Lorenz…

Louise Erdrich: Novels: …basis of her first novel, Love Medicine (1984; expanded edition, 1993). That book began a tetralogy that also includes The Beet Queen (1986), Tracks (1988), and The Bingo Palace (1994), about Native families living on or near an Ojibwe reservation in the fictional town of Argus, North Dakota, and the…

Marilyn Monroe: Stardom: …Let’s Make It Legal (1951), Love Nest (1951), Clash by Night (1952), and Niagara (1953), she advanced to star billing on the strength of her studio-fostered image as a “love goddess.” With performances in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953), How to Marry a Millionaire (1953), and There’s No Business Like Show…

Ben Elton: Published novels and other works: Ireland during The Troubles, and Love Never Dies (2010), a sequel to The Phantom of the Opera. He also wrote the popular jukebox musical We Will Rock You (2002) in collaboration with and inspired by the English rock band Queen. In 2023 he wrote and directed Close-Up, a musical based…

Edna O’Brien: Other works: …of O’Brien’s short stories include The Love Object (1968), A Scandalous Woman and Other Stories (1974), A Fanatic Heart (1984), Lantern Slides (1990), and Saints and Sinners (2011), the last of which won the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award.

Alice Munro: Later work: …A Wilderness Station (1994), and The Love of a Good Woman (1998). The latter volume received both Canada’s esteemed Giller Prize (later the Scotiabank Giller Prize) and the National Book Critics Circle Award in the United States. Her book Open Secrets (1994) contains stories that range in setting from the…

history of publishing: The revival of the secular book trade: This is evident in Philobiblon, a book finished in 1345 describing the book-collecting activities of Richard de Bury, bishop of Durham. The book relates how the bishop established good relations with stationers and booksellers in England, France, Germany, and Italy by sending advance payments. Evidence from the same century…

Federico García Lorca: Early poetry and plays: …jardín (written 1925, premiered 1933; The Love of Don Perlimplín with Belisa in Their Garden in Five Plays: Comedies and Tragi-Comedies, 1970), a “grotesque tragedy” partially drawn from an 18th-century Spanish comic strip. Both plays reveal themes common to Lorca’s work: the capriciousness of time, the destructive powers of love…

G.W. Pabst: …Liebe der Jeanne Ney (1927; The Love of Jeanne Ney) incorporates documentary shots to heighten the realism of its postwar setting. These three films sealed Pabst’s international reputation.

Kola Ogunmola: A typical play is Ife Owo (performed c. 1950 and widely played under its English title, Love of Money, published 1965), which depicts the sufferings of a polygamous husband who tries to satisfy the greed of his second wife. Ogunmola’s greatest fame, however, came from Omuti Apa Kini (performed…

Mary Gordon: >The Love of My Youth (2011), There Your Heart Lies (2017), and Payback (2020). The Rest of Life (1993) and The Liar’s Wife (2014) are collections of novellas. Among Gordon’s works of nonfiction are Spiritual Quests: The Art and Craft of Religious Writing (1988) and…

Italo Montemezzi: …L’amore dei tre re (1913; The Love of Three Kings).

Leo Pinsker: …a newly formed Zionist group, Ḥibbat Ẕiyyon (“Love of Zion”), made him one of its leaders. In 1884 he convened the Kattowitz (Katowice, Pol.) Conference, which established a permanent committee with headquarters in Odessa. Although Ḥibbat Ẕiyyon (later Ḥovevei Ẕiyyon [“Lovers of Zion”]) was crippled by lack of funds, it…

English literature: The 1930s: Walter Greenwood’s Love on the Dole (1933) is a bleak record, in the manner of Bennett, of the economic depression in a northern working-class community; and Graham Greene’s It’s a Battlefield (1934) and Brighton Rock (1938) are desolate studies, in the manner of Conrad, of the loneliness…

Jean-Pierre Léaud: …and L’Amour en fuite (1979; Love on the Run). Léaud was perfectly suited to play the part of Doinel, an engaging and innocent young man who is not particularly well equipped to meet the responsibilities of adult life. Léaud appeared in several other films by Truffaut, including Les Deux Anglaises…

W.S. Van Dyke: Powell and Loy, Eddy and MacDonald: Love on the Run (1936) featured Gable and Franchot Tone as foreign correspondents and Crawford as the woman they both desire. Van Dyke’s sixth release of 1936, After the Thin Man, may have been even better than the popular original. In addition to Powell and…

The Love Parade: Germany’s annual Love Parade was the temporary centre of the world of electronic dance music during its two-decade run. First organized in 1989 in West Berlin by planetcom, a company affiliated with the defunct E-Werk club, the parade was registered with the city as a…

Ernst Lubitsch: Transition to sound: …was the inventive 1929 musical The Love Parade, in which Maurice Chevalier and Jeanette MacDonald (in her film debut) find romance in the mythical land of Sylvania. With songs composed by Victor Schertzinger, this pleasant operetta was nominated for an Academy Award as best picture, and Lubitsch was nominated for…

ghazal, in Islamic literatures, genre of lyric poem, generally short and graceful in form and typically dealing with themes of love. As a genre the ghazal developed in Arabia in the late 7th century from the nasib, which itself was the often amorous prelude to the qaṣīdah (ode). Two main types of

Carol Ann Duffy: …well, notably issuing the collections Love Poems (2010), The Bees (2011), and Sincerity (2018), and her stage credits included retellings of the story of Casanova (2007) and of the morality play Everyman (2015).

Nikki Giovanni: Giovanni’s later poetry collections include Love Poems (1997) and Bicycles (2009). Chasing Utopia (2013) and Make Me Rain (2020) feature poetry and prose. In Gemini: An Extended Autobiographical Statement on My First Twenty-Five Years of Being a Black Poet (1971) she presents autobiographical reminiscences, and in Sacred Cows…and

Anne Sexton: …was followed by, among others, Love Poems (1969), Transformations (1971), The Book of Folly (1972), and The Death Notebooks (1974).

ghazal, in Islamic literatures, genre of lyric poem, generally short and graceful in form and typically dealing with themes of love. As a genre the ghazal developed in Arabia in the late 7th century from the nasib, which itself was the often amorous prelude to the qaṣīdah (ode). Two main types of

Sandra Bullock: Rise to stardom: …charm in the romantic comedy Love Potion No. 9. This led to a series of films the following year, including the thriller The Vanishing; Demolition Man, in which she starred alongside action star Sylvester Stallone, and the drama Wrestling Ernest Hemingway. Her big breakthrough, however, was the thriller Speed

Joe Pesci: …Helen Mirren in the comedy Love Ranch (2010). He then reunited with Scorsese and De Niro in the mob drama The Irishman (2019), for which he earned his third Oscar nomination.

short story: The Greeks: The Love Romances of Parthenius of Nicaea, who wrote during the reign of Augustus, is a collection of 36 prose stories of unhappy lovers. The Milesian Tales (no longer extant) was an extremely popular collection of erotic and ribald stories composed by Aristides of Miletus in…

love seat, wide chair capable of, if not necessarily designed for, accommodating two people, whose intentions are implied in the name. The makers of early examples, in the late 17th and the 18th centuries, were not motivated by the amorous considerations with which later generations have credited

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, dramatic monologue by T.S. Eliot, published in Poetry magazine in 1915 and in book form in Prufrock and Other Observations in 1917. The poem consists of the musings of Prufrock, a weary middle-aged man haunted by the feeling that he has lost both youth and

Ntozake Shange: Fuji (1987), and The Love Space Demands: A Continuing Saga (1992).

Arthur Hiller: Films of the 1970s: …Segal adapted from his best-selling novel. The tearjerker about Harvard and Radcliffe students (played by Ryan O’Neal and Ali MacGraw) who fall in love was a huge blockbuster and earned seven Academy Award nominations, including best picture and Hiller’s only Oscar nod for directing.

Arthur Hiller: Films of the 1970s: …his second effort from 1970, Love Story, which Erich Segal adapted from his best-selling novel. The tearjerker about Harvard and Radcliffe students (played by Ryan O’Neal and Ali MacGraw) who fall in love was a huge blockbuster and earned seven Academy Award nominations, including best picture and Hiller’s only Oscar…

John Cassavetes: 1980s: …moving and unusual love story Love Streams (1984) as a brother and sister who lead wildly differing lifestyles but who care deeply about each other.

The Love Suicides at Amijima, classic Bunraku (puppet theatre) play by Chikamatsu Monzaemon, written and performed about 1720 as Shinjū ten no Amijima. Like most of Chikamatsu’s more than 20 love-suicide dramas, it was based on an actual event, the outcome of the brothel system. These works made

Chikamatsu Monzaemon: Sonezaki shinjū (1703; The Love Suicides at Sonezaki), for example, was written within a fortnight of the actual double suicide on which it is based. The haste of composition is not at all apparent even in this first example of Chikamatsu’s double-suicide plays, the archetype of his other…