Hagitsubo - A Parody of Shibaraku

Designed in 1785, Torii Kiyonaga's "Hagitsubo - A Parody of Shibaraku" reworks one of the most iconic moments in kabuki, the entrance of the heroic Shibaraku character, into a mitate or parody starring elegant women. In the original kabuki sequence the male hero appears in massive aragoto costume to halt a villain's outrage. Here, Kiyonaga replaces him with a stylish female figure named Hagitsubo, transposing the bombastic gesture into the cool register of Edo bijin-ga while keeping enough of the original iconography for the audience to recognize the source. The image rewards a viewer who knows both the kabuki canon and the conventions of late-eighteenth-century beauty prints. The Torii school had historically been the master of Shibaraku imagery, since its founding members produced the billboards and prints that fixed the role's visual identity, and so Kiyonaga's parody is also an in-house joke on the school's own tradition. The Art Institute of Chicago preserves this design, where it stands as a vivid example of how Kiyonaga, at the height of his career, fused the Torii school's theatrical authority with his dominant bijin-ga style. The print testifies to a sophisticated Edo audience that delighted in seeing famous theatrical icons rephrased through the body language of beautiful women.