EP. 1 Sa’ey, tha’s foanny! Madame Butterfly’s accent in David Belasco’s tragedy

Hello and welcome all to Victorian Time Travel, the podcast where we get ready to travel back in time. We’ll pick a very, very, very specific Victorian time and place each episode, and try to learn everything we can about it so we don’t put our foot in it once we’re there. I’m Emi, your time travel researcher, and just to put you all at ease, there is some method to the madness, I do have an education in this historical period, but, of course, I’m not an expert on everything, so I’d be really grateful, if you have the time and energy, if you could let me know when there’s anything that you want to correct, especially when it comes to the sadly inescapable oppressive systems that permeated this period.

For every episode, check out the transcript for full citations, so you can find my sources and prepare even more thoroughly for your journey!

[Music]

Today we’re travelling back in time for a trip to the theatre. We’re going to go and see Madame Butterfly at the Duke of York in May 1900. Now this is the play which Puccini saw in London and was inspired by, and on which he based his much better-known-today opera.[1] We’re not talking about the opera, we’re talking about the David Belasco one-act play. We’re looking at this because I love theatre, and I’m half-Japanese, and the opera is constantly being produced today, at the Royal Opera House, at the MET Opera, so I was curious to find out what the original play was like. In this episode we’re going to prepare so we can have a good chat with our fellow audience members after the show.

A content warning that although it is not a focus of today’s episode, if you’re not familiar with the Madame Butterfly story, the main character does die by suicide at the end.

One thing that really jumped out to me as I was reading the script of the play, is the way in which Madame Butterfly’s lines are written. They’re spelled out phonetically to represent, I guess, the accent the author wanted. And it’s quite wild, so that’s going to be the focus of this episode, to get us ready to enjoy the show and so that we don’t spend the whole hour baffled by what’s in front of us.

But of course, as always, to truly blend in in our time travel, first we need a little bit of ~context~!

So, this was by no means the first play set in Japan to grace the London stage. If anything it joined a whole host of Japan-themed entertainment. Now we could go on forever, or at least certainly I could, going into the Japan craze of the late 1800s, its influence on art, and theatre, and all sorts, and I’ll certainly make more episodes about this, but for today I’ll just drop a few names so hopefully as we chat to our fellow audience members at the Duke of York we can nod along and follow.[2] For theatre, I’ll rather crudely start in 1885, with The Mikado by Gilbert and Sullivan, which was a huge success, it kept being staged into the 1900s, I mean, of course, it’s still staged today, but I mean it continued to enjoy great success throughout Gilbert and Sullivan’s careers.[3] One of the origin stories of The Mikado is that it was inspired by the Japanese Native Village,[4] which was a recreated village with real Japanese people living in it, where you could get a ticket and look at them go about their lives in Knightsbridge.[5] Maybe it wasn’t the original inspiration but it definitely influenced the production a lot. So already there London audiences could see English actors playing Japanese roles but also real Japanese people, and the village even had its own theatre.  There were other productions in the same vein, such as The Geisha, a 1896 comic operetta. But the most relevant here in 1900 is the Japanese troupe headed by Otojiro Kawakami and Sadayakko. They were a Japanese touring theatre company and they were actually on London performing in May 1900. I’ll certainly make an episode about them, don’t worry, but I’m just flagging that if we go and see a later performance of Madame Butterfly, we could make that comparison with the real Japanese troupe playing over in Notting Hill. Basically, Madame Butterfly is coming to the stage at a time when there is an interested in all things Japanese that’s been going on for a couple of decades.

Before moving onto the background of the play, I’ll do the quickest recap of the plot, in case you’re not familiar and you don’t mind spoilers for a 120-odd year old story. The premise is that Cho-Cho-San, a Japanese woman who has had a child with an American man, is waiting for said man to return, because he had gone back to America, after two years of absence, and the play joins Cho-Cho, the Madame Butterfly of the title, on her final day and night of waiting. While he was away, her American husband remarried, Cho-Cho is heartbroken and takes her own life.[6] If this story sounds familiar, it’s because it’s been done over and over and over again, the musical Miss Saigon is an updated version of this same story. It’s an enduringly popular narrative.

David Belasco’s one-act play is an adaptation of a short story by John Luther Long. The plot is broadly the same, and Belasco and Long collaborated on the script, although there were some significant changes between the short story and the play which I’ll cover in a moment. In terms of the origin of the John Luther Long story, the two main origin stories I’ve found are that it was inspired by Madame Chrysanthème by Pierre Loti, a French novel from 1887, or that it was based on an anecdote he heard from his sister, Mary Jane “Jennie” Long Correll, who lived in Japan for over fifty years as a missionary with her minister husband.[7] I’ll flesh out both origin stories, it’s perfectly possible that the truth is a combination of both. So, the one that we’re most likely to be talking about with our fellow audience members after the show, is the Pierre Loti novel. Now this is fairly commonly referred to as the original inspiration in scholarship today, for whatever reason I don’t quite see it, but I’m sure that’s me, I’ll lay out the facts and you can decide for yourselves.[8] So in Madame Chrysanthème we have a semi-autobiographical lead character, a French man, who goes to Japan and takes on a temporary wife. They don’t really talk to each other very much, she doesn’t speak French, he speaks a little bit of Japanese, he tells us, but we don’t really get to see him do it very much, so his level isn’t very clear, it’s mostly about physical companionship for them. The story is a fairly sombre one of a guy, you know, hoping that if he runs far enough away he’ll finally be happy. And then he goes all the way to Japan and gets his live-in temporary wife, and it doesn’t make him happy, and they’re both miserable. It’s not really a tragedy in the classical sense, nobody dies, the stakes are pretty low, it’s just depressing in the way that regular lives are depressing. In the end, spoiler alert, he leaves, everyone could see it coming, it was a temporary arrangement all along, he leaves behind some money and the final view he gets of his companion is her counting the money, not even looking up. It’s not a very sentimental novel.[9]

Now as you can see, beyond the premise of a Western man going to Japan and taking on a temporary wife, there’s not a huge amount more that overlaps with the Madame Butterfly narrative. Of course, John Luther Long may have been intrigued by the setting and inspired by its popularity.

Long’s sister, Jennie Long Correll, gave talks about how her experiences in Japan as a missionary were the inspiration for the short story. Now she wouldn’t give these talks until much later on, when the play and the opera had become very popular, so the average theatre-goer of 1900 wouldn’t know this story, but I’ll give it here just for us. Her version is that she was visiting her brother back in the US, and told him about an anecdote, depending on the source this is something she witnessed or that an acquaintance of hers witnessed. In this story, we get the name, Cho-san, turned into Cho-Cho-San; the abandonment at the hands of a young American man; the young Japanese woman waiting for his return with a baby by the shoji, which is the paper screen sliding door.[10] Two big things that are not present in Jennie Long Correll’s anecdote, nor in John Luther Long’s short story, are that Cho-Cho-san is not a former geisha, and very significantly, she doesn’t die. In the original anecdote she’s a tea-girl, and she’s a quite pathetic figure (I’m using pathetic in the literary sense, she has pathos), but there is no indication as to what happens to her following her abandonment, we are free to believe that she just keeps living her life. In John Luther Long’s story, it’s hinted at that she may have been a geisha but this is not made explicit, and at the end she tries to slit her throat but is saved by her maid, and she survives. So it’s David Belasco’s play that confirms the geisha background and the tragic death at the end. Why did he do it? Maybe because those things “feel” very Japanese, whether they are or not, plus he wanted the play to have a neat tragic ending rather than an open-ended one, perhaps.

What both these origin stories have in common is that they are from the perspective of the Western people telling it, we don’t really know what was going through the minds of the Japanese people involved. And while both Pierre Loti and Jennie Long Correll had been to Japan, as far as I can figure out, John Luther Long and David Belasco had not. There were Japanese communities outside of Japan at this point, including in the US, so I’m not saying that they wouldn’t have met Japanese people, but it’s something to keep in mind when considering the way in which Madame Butterfly expresses herself in this play.

Now onto the event we’re attending. It’s May 1900, Madame Butterfly has already been running at the Duke of York for about a month to largely positive responses, it’s a success. I’m choosing this time because, as mentioned, there was a Japanese troupe of actors performing in London at the same time in May, and I think it’ll be interesting to hear what people who’ve seen both are saying. The play opened in New York in March 1900, then David Belasco himself travelled to London and directed the production here, so it should be his original vision.[11] The title role was performed by popular London actress Evelyn Millard.

So our evening starts at 8pm at the Duke of York Theatre.[12] But we won’t be sitting down to watch Madame Butterfly at this time, we’ll be seeing Jerome K Jerome’s comedy Miss Hobbs. Theatre-goers and theatre companies in 1900 were hardcore, and we’re going for a double-bill, with much of the same cast and presumably backstage crew, with Miss Hobbs at 8pm, and then Madame Butterfly at 10pm.[13] Actress Evelyn Millard will play the lead character in both. It’s intense!

We won’t go into Miss Hobbs here, we’ll just have to watch it and enjoy, but I’ll link the script in the transcript if you want to prepare.[14] For our purposes, suffice to say that it’s a romantic comedy in four acts, about a ‘strong-minded’ woman trying to resist falling in love, and it’s set in New York. Following this, reviewers of the time noted that ‘the Japanese story enjoyed the benefits of effective contrast.’[15]

At 10pm, presumably after an appropriate interval to allow for the extensive set and costume and make-up changes, Madame Butterfly starts. In order to transport us from a New York drawing room to a village in Japan, this is what happened, as described by a Sporting Gazette review: ‘two Japanese servants were… sent to bow before the tableaux curtains, and then followed a succession of curtain drops representing scenes in Japan—dawn, sunset, and night, and watching these the audience felt that they had spent days in the country, and now only longed to see the inside of the little house at the foot of Hujashi Hill.’[16] That should be Higashi Hill, it’s an error in the review. I believe here by “Japanese servants” they mean actors or stagehands dressed in the Japanese style. I really can’t wait to see these tableaux live when we time travel, as the visuals were a large part of the attraction in Belasco’s plays. Osman Edwards, who wrote a book titled Japanese Plays and Playfellows in 1901, notes of Belasco, in a sort of back-handed compliment way, that, as a director, he ‘relies greatly […] on the electrician and the limelight man,’ and it is to them that credit should go for the ‘most exquisite’ scenes in Madame Butterfly.[17] Ouch.

So we’ve been eased into the change in setting. Now we see Evelyn Millard, transformed into a young Japanese woman. According to promotional photos from the time, she wore a big black wig in a kind of stereotypical Japanese updo shape, with flowers adorning the hair, and a light-coloured kimono. As far as I can tell, the makeup is kept minimal and neutral, the only change I can see by comparing Evelyn Millard’s Madame Butterfly portraits with other portraits of her is the shape of the eyebrows, which are made to be straighter at the ends rather than curving down at the temple.[18] The visual transition is complete. And then, she talks!

Millard in an English actress, she may have been using an American accent for Miss Hobbs, I’m not sure but I’d assume so. But what she uses as Madame Butterfly is certainly a different accent. Although there are sadly no recordings, we can try and prepare ourselves by looking at the script, and at contemporary reviews. Let’s start from the script, which, by the way, retains a lot of the non-standard spellings from John Luther Long’s short story. Belasco isn’t adding the accent in, although he’s definitely taking it and running with it.

Here are the “rules”, I use that term very loosely, that I could identify:

1)     Madame Butterfly appears to struggle with multi-syllabic words, and this is shown in the script by breaking up words with dashes, such as ‘Lef-ten-ant Pik-ker-ton.’ The first time this appears in the script, it’s followed by the stage direction ‘she pronounces his name with much difficulty’ (MB 13)

2)     She makes grammatical errors such as ‘That grandmother—how are she?’ (MB 16)

3)     She often drops the end of words, ‘tellin’’, ‘anythin’’, ‘Unite’ State’’, ‘mos’ gone’, eliding -ing endings as well as -d, -s, -t

4)     Her lines are often spelled phonetically in idiosyncratic ways, such as ‘aeverybody’, ‘whichaever’, ‘moaneys’, presumably making the vowel sounds stretched out.

The in-world explanation for Cho-Cho-San speaking in English even when she’s alone at home with her Japanese maid Suzuki is that she wants to keep her house as American as possible while her husband is away. In the first few lines she tells off her maid for counting in Japanese, because, and I will attempt a read here, in my own accent but with the alternative spellings, ‘how many time I tellin’ you—no one shall speak anythin’ but those Unite’ State’ languages in these Lef-ten-ant Pik-ker-ton’s house.’ (MB 13)

Since Pinkerton has been gone for two years when the play opens, this suggests that Madame Butterfly hasn’t been able to communicate freely with anyone for the past two years, even when in private and with other Japanese people, which is a rather sad thought. She’s made herself talk in a language that the stage directions state she has ‘much difficulty’ with, all the time.

One thing that really confused me at first when it comes to how her lines are written in the script is that it’s quite inconsistent. As mentioned, what I called “rules” are more like inconsistent patterns. She struggles to pronounce her own husband’s name, which she presumably has quite a lot practice with, yet at one point she says ‘I have brought a sacrifice of flowers and new rice,’ with no alternative spellings at all (MB 13). Her level of understanding varies as well. Early on she sings a made-up song that Pinkerton used to sing to her, with simple lyrics such as “I call her the belle of Japan—of Japan / Her name it is O Cho-Cho-San, Cho-Cho-San!”, and the stage direction, you’ve guessed it, directs the actress to sing ‘as though not understanding a word of it.’[19] But later on, when another character tells her that life for her son would be difficult should he move to America, by saying ‘such unfortunates […] never rise above the stigma of their class. They are shunned and cursed from birth,’[20] she understands that, no problem. Why is that? I have my theories, so hold onto that thought and we can make some guesses later.

Before doing that, let’s try and figure out how the actors interpreted these alternative spellings by looking at some writing from the time.

So, here’s a little round up:

-        The Pall Mall Gazette review says that the ‘broken English’ of the Japanese characters is ‘often barely intelligible’[21]

-        The Glasgow Herald noted that Cho-Cho-san’s ‘broken English is apt to be intermittent’, so they picked up on the inconsistencies.[22]

-        A collection about the year’s premieres called her accent ‘Anglo-Japanese’ and ‘fairly interesting’[23]

-        Edwards, in that Japanese Plays and Playfellows collection mentioned earlier, notes that the ‘strange “broken American” jargon and the silly monotonous song which Miss Evelyn Millard had to say and sing, though legitimate enough, were tiresomely out of harmony with the grace and beauty of her movements, her looks, her costume.’[24]

What we can gather is that it definitely sounded distinctive to contemporary audiences, a bit strange and foreign, possibly hard to understand. The effect was varied, some found that it made her more sympathetic by showing her isolation,[25] others, such as the reviewer for the Pall Mall Gazette who found her ‘barely intelligible’, found that it made it hard to empathise with her and her broken speech was one of the reasons he was little moved by the heroine’s death.[26]

Now, one last thing to consider before we start speculating about why Madame Butterfly might have been written like that, is how Japanese actually sounds. Now, I’m not a linguistics expert, and I will base what I say on how Japanese sounds now, as a little disclaimer. One thing about the Japanese language is that it’s syllabic, so there’s almost never a consonant or consonant cluster without a vowel. So for example there’s no “k” sound in isolation, it’s always ka/ki/ku/ke/ko. Japanese also typically has no diphthongs as in English, gliding vowels that morph into other vowels, like “o” in “hello”. This really added to my confusion and curiosity when reading the script, because Cho-Cho-san’s accent is very inconsistent with this. For example, a Japanese speaker would typically be more likely to stress the final consonant in “United States” by adding a vowel at the end of each word, rather than elide it as in the script, “Unite’ State’”. They would also tend to turn vowels into monophthongs and Japanese vowels rather than distort them and stretch them out, for example, “money” may perhaps become “mah-nee” or “moh-nee”, perhaps, if they learn the word by reading, sooner than becoming, as in the script, “moaney”.

Finally, let’s speculate about the reasons behind her being written this way.

One inescapable thing is that, while the way Cho-Cho-san speaks doesn’t really line up with how a Japanese speaker specifically would sound, it does look a lot like the way in which another kind of speaker was written, and that’s African American characters in stories, plays and songs.[27] Now this could be as simple as the authors, Long and Belasco, somewhat lazily defaulting to a kind of non-standard speech pattern that sounded familiar and plausible. Or it could be them deliberately conflating all people who spoke English in a non-standard way.[28] But, whether it was their intention or not, the effect is that we have the American characters speaking with an American accent, presumably, and the Japanese characters using an accent somewhat adjacent to one that the audience might recognise as the African-American accent, at least on stage, if not that of real African-American people. This, whether on purpose or not, comes with rather heavy connotations in terms of the dynamics between characters. So, the purpose of having Cho-Cho-San speak in this way, may be to make her generically “other” to the reader or audience member, whether the similarity with the stage version of the African American accent is deliberate or not.

One thing to keep in mind though is that we’ll be watching the play in London, rather than in New York, and here, people perceive Pinkerton and the other American characters as “other” too, to some extent. In fact, that reviewer in The Sporting Gazette noted that ‘the civilised American judged everyone from his own standpoint, and being incapable of fidelity himself imagined that no one could love, and trust, and wait.’[29] In this way, it’s almost as if the distance created by the Western character being American helps the British reviewer to feel sympathetic towards the Japanese character.

Another effect of this “othering,” that the speech pattern is part of, is that much of the script doesn’t read like a tragedy at all. In fact, the Morning Post praised Belasco in its review for not labelling it as a tragedy, as it had, according to the reviewer, a ‘comedy spirit.’[30] Belasco did call it a tragedy when he published the script years later by the way, but not in the 1900 promotional materials I guess.[31] Here we can return to Pierre Loti, author of Madame Chrysanthème, who had his narrator muse that his story might have developed into a drama, were it not for the ‘narrowing and dwarfing influence’ of Japan, turning ‘everything into ridicule.’[32] The Morning Post reviewer wasn’t the only one to find the play comedic, audiences laughed,[33] and other reviewers found that the ending didn’t quite fit with the rest of the play, as it was too violent compared to the “prettiness” and “gentleness” of the rest of the play.[34] And this doesn’t seem to be a mistake, as the play does include sequences that read like slapstick comedy, for example where the characters of Nakodo and Sharpless first visit and they start this routine where everyone stops talking and bows every time a family member is mentioned, and of course, family members keep getting mentioned so we can see them do it again and again.[35] The unusual way in which Madame Butterfly speaks is not dissimilar from how comic characters spoke.[36] Perhaps the jump in tone from the first half of the double bill, Miss Hobbs, wasn’t quite so jarring after all.

So the accent may be used to create distance between the audience and the characters, to suggest a power dynamic, to make the play lighter and funnier. One more guess is… for flavour. Possibly the same reason Long and Belasco set the story in Japan in the first place, to be able to use the pretty outfits and sets and props, to ‘experiment with new aesthetic styles’—actually, quite a few reviewers do note that really the only thing that’s new in this play is the setting and the identity of the heroine, and that apart from that, it’s just another ‘miserable-marriage’ play, which apparently were a popular trend.[37] Another reviewer, rather matter-of-factly, says ‘in reality it is a very commonplace story of betrayal and desertion, but its setting and the manner in which the plot is developed are entirely new.’[38]

Overall, my perhaps not-too-generous feeling is that David Belasco didn’t mind that the way in which Cho-Cho-san was written may have made her less sympathetic to some audience members, that it may have alienated them or made her feel too different and “other” to identify with. I think it seems that he was quite happy for the Japanese identity of the character to just be an element of interest, and didn’t really try to make her Japanese-ness an embodied characteristic. If we were meant to identify with Cho-Cho, I think her level of understanding of English would be consistent, because we, as the audience, should be able to follow with her what she understands and what she doesn’t. But since we’re very firmly on the outside looking in, I think Belasco is fine with the fact that sometimes her understanding doesn’t really make sense, or that the ending is somewhat spoiled by the fact that there’s a great big sword in the room from the start, and one of the characters reads the inscription on it, something about dying with honour when one can no longer live with honour, after which, some reviewers pointed out, they kind of saw it coming.[39] He’s not concerned with the verisimilitude of Madame Butterfly having been a geisha, rather improbable at her age, or of her feeling that she must die because of dishonour, never mind that that’s not really something women did, and that the concept of dishonour isn’t really applicable here.[40] You know, Cho-Cho-san could have died of a broken heart, but Belasco doesn’t give her this sympathetic motivation, preferring to go with the pseudo-Japanese honour explanation. I think he’s just playing with the theme and the setting and the tone, and, you know, he’s doing it well, since the play is a great success.

So, now that we’re psychologically prepared for the show, we’re ready to travel back in time and go to the Duke of York. Some of the talking points with our fellow audience members could be about how transformed the actress Evelyn Millard was, how great the contrast was from the first play of the evening. Be prepared to either use, if you really want to fit in, or at least be ready to hear, the word “little” being used a lot—little play, little tragedy, little dollhouse, for Cho-Cho-san’s abode.[41] That keeps coming up in reviews. If we want to sound a little intellectual, since it’s May 1900 already, we can mention that yes, this was great, but it can’t really compare to the real thing. A Morning Post reviewer points this out, once Kawakami and Sadayakko’s troupe open in Notting Hill: ‘beautiful and fascinating though it be,’ Madame Butterfly had lost some of its ‘convincing power’ once its audience attended ‘the real Japanese play’ at the Coronet Theatre.[42] Some audience members may be quite observant, and point out that the play is quite Western in content, despite the visuals.[43] Others, such as a certain Penelope writing in a “Ladies’ Column” in a weekly magazine in June 1900, may quite disagree. Sure, the authentic Japanese performers in Notting Hill are an interesting novelty, but, in her words, ‘Evelyn Millard, as Madame Butterfly at the Duke of York’s Theatre in London, makes a much more fascinating Japanese beauty than any of the real Japanese Geishas I have lately seen.’[44] When I get there, I mostly just want to listen and find out what the average theatre goer thought. We can read the opinions of professional critics in the papers, but did the average person think more like Penelope? Did they find the play funny? Sad? How many stopped to think about whether this was a fair representation of Japanese values, and how many didn’t even stop to question it? Really, what I want is to stand there with a clipboard and do a survey, but I fear that may well and truly give me away as a time traveller.

Thank you for all listening to Victorian Time Travel, dress up in period-appropriate warm clothes, have a good trip and stay safe!

[1] Madama Butterfly: fonti e documenti della genesi, ed. by Arthur Groos and others (Lucca: Centro studi Giacomo Puccini : M. Pacini Fazzi, 2005), p. 13.

[2] Toshio Yokoyama, Japan in the Victorian Mind: A Study of Stereotyped Images of a Nation 1850-80, St. Antony’s/Macmillan Series (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Macmillan, 1987), pp. xxi, 51–52; Linda Gertner Zatlin, Beardsley, Japonisme, and the Perversion of the Victorian Ideal (Cambridge ; New York, NY, USA: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 24; Josephine Lee, The Japan of Pure Invention: Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), p. xiv; Grace E. Lavery, Quaint, Exquisite: Victorian Aesthetics and the Idea of Japan (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2019), p. 9; Wendy S. Williams, ‘“Free-and-Easy,” “Japaneasy”: British Perceptions and the 1885 Japanese Village”’, in BRANCH: Britain, Representation and Nineteenth Century History, Extension of Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net <https://branchcollective.org/?ps_articles=wendy-s-williams-free-and-easy-japaneasy-british-perceptions-and-the-1885-japanese-village> [accessed 5 May 2023].

[3] Gayden Wren, A Most Ingenious Paradox: The Art of Gilbert and Sullivan (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 162, 323 <https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/bbk/reader.action?docID=241407&ppg=8> [accessed 5 May 2023].

[4] Arthur Sullivan and W.S. Gilbert, An Entirely New and Original Japanese Opera, in Two Acts, Entitled The Mikado; or, the Town of Titipu (London: Chappell & Co., 1885), p. 2 <https://archive.org/details/entirelyneworigi1885sull/page/46/mode/2up> [accessed 5 May 2023].

[5] Hugh Cortazzi, Japan in Late Victorian London: The Japanese Native Village in Knightsbridge and the Mikado, 1885 (Norwich: Sainsbury Institute for the Study of Japanese Arts and Cultures, 2009), pp. 9, 47.

[6] David Belasco, ‘Madame Butterly’, in Six Plays: Madame Butterfly, Du Barry, The Darling of the Gods, Adrea, The Girl of the Golden West, The Return of Peter Grimm (Boston: Little, Brown and Co, 1928) <https://www.proquest.com/publication/2068173?parentSessionId=lxZhpWhkM996oCkJYi6x201eGJjqytObZL%2FDiq9W6iA%3D&accountid=14565#> [accessed 17 February 2023].

[7] Groos and others, p. 19.

[8] Richard Steadman-Jones, ‘The Depiction of the Non-Native Speaker in Two Versions of the Madame Butterfly Story’, in Dialect and Literature in the Long Nineteenth Century, ed. by Jane Hodson (London ; New York: Routledge, 2017), sec. Introduction.

[9] Pierre Loti, Madame Chrysanthème (Paris: Calmann Lévy, 1888).

[10] The Japan Times, 15 March 1931, qtd. In Groos and others, pp. 21–22; Vera Micznik, ‘Cio-Cio-San the Geisha’, in A Vision of the Orient: Texts, Intertexts, and Contexts of Madame Butterfly, ed. by Jonathan Wisenthal and others (Toronto; Buffalo; London: University of Toronto Press, 2006), pp. 36–58 (p. 38).

[11] Groos and others, p. 13.

[12] ‘Duke of York’s Theatre’, Daily Telegraph & Courier (London), 12 July 1900, p. 8.

[13] ‘Plays and Players’, The Sporting Gazette, 30 June 1900, 809, Nineteenth Century UK Periodicals.

[14] Jerome K. (Jerome Klapka) Jerome, ‘Miss Hobbs’, a Comedy in Four Acts (New York, London: Samuel French, 1902) <http://archive.org/details/misshobbsacomed00jerogoog> [accessed 28 February 2024].

[15] ‘Duke of York’s Theatre’.

[16] ‘Plays and Players’, The Sporting Gazette, 5 May 1900, 553, Nineteenth Century UK Periodicals.

[17] Osman Edwards, Japanese Plays and Playfellows, with Twelve Coloured Plates by Japanese Artists (New York: John Lane, 1901), p. 64 <https://archive.org/details/japaneseplayspla00edwarich/page/n7/mode/2up>.

[18] Alfred Ellis, Evelyn Millard, 1900 <https://www.vandaimages.com/2009CB2083-Evelyn-Millard-photo-Alfred-Ellis-London-1900.html> [accessed 28 February 2024].

[19] Belasco, p. 16.

[20] Belasco, p. 25.

[21] ‘MADAME BUTTERFLY’, Pall Mall Gazette, 30 April 1900, British Library Newspapers <https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/Y3200497908/GDCS?sid=bookmark-GDCS&xid=74d57af5> [accessed 22 August 2023].

[22] ‘MUSIC AND THE DRAMA’, Glasgow Herald, 30 April 1900, British Library Newspapers <https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/BC3203904487/GDCS?sid=bookmark-GDCS&xid=9a425523> [accessed 22 August 2023].

[23] J.T. Grein, Premières of the Year (London: John MacQueen, 1900) <https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=chi.087513408&seq=7&q1=butterfly> [accessed 22 August 2023].

[24] Edwards, p. 65.

[25] Joseph L. Anderson, Enter a Samurai: Kawakami Otojirō and Japanese Theatre in the West (Tucson, Ariz: Wheatmark, 2011), p. 371.

[26] ‘MADAME BUTTERFLY’.

[27] Anderson, p. 371; Steadman-Jones, sec. John Luther Long and Madame Butterfly.

[28] Tawata Shintaryo, ‘19世紀西洋演劇におけるジャポニズム : 「日本」の表象の変遷 (19 Seiki seiyō engeki ni okeru japonizumu: “Nihon” no hyōshō no hensen)’ (unpublished PhD, Gakushuin University, 2017), p. 236 <https://glim-re.repo.nii.ac.jp/index.php?active_action=repository_view_main_item_detail&page_id=13&block_id=161&item_id=3892&item_no=1> [accessed 17 February 2023].

[29] ‘Plays and Players’.

[30] ‘DUKE OF YORK’S THEATRE’, Morning Post, 30 April 1900, p. 6, British Library Newspapers.

[31] Belasco, p. 11.

[32] Jonathan Wisenthal, ‘Inventing the Orient’, in A Vision of the Orient: Texts, Intertexts, and Contexts of Madame Butterfly, ed. by Jonathan Wisenthal and others (Toronto; Buffalo; London: University of Toronto Press, 2006), pp. 3–18 (p. 17).

[33] Anderson, p. 371.

[34] ‘MUSIC AND THE DRAMA’.

[35] Belasco, pp. 18–19.

[36] Anderson, p. 371.

[37] Esther Kim Lee, Made-up Asians: Yellowface during the Exclusion Era (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2022), p. 132; ‘THEATRICAL NOTES’, Pall Mall Gazette, 4 August 1900, British Library Newspapers <https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/Y3200500131/GDCS?sid=bookmark-GDCS&xid=5443f012> [accessed 22 August 2023].

[38] ‘MUSIC AND THE DRAMA’.

[39] ‘MADAME BUTTERFLY’; Belasco, p. 18.

[40] Micznik, p. 38.

[41] ‘DUKE OF YORK’S THEATRE’.

[42] ‘THE DUKE OF YORK’S THEATRE’, Morning Post, 14 July 1900, p. 4, British Library Newspapers.

[43] ‘DUKE OF YORK’S THEATRE’.

[44] Penelope, ‘OUR LADIES’ COLUMN’, Wrexham Weekly Advertiser, 9 June 1900, 2, British Library Newspapers.