The playwrights of Joruri Gidayu were responsible for the best dramas that have been produced in Japan. Especially were they highly successful in a new kind of play, the jidaimono, having historical personages for characters, fashioned out of the most fascinating imaginative material that brought the dolls into full play as creatures of a world of fantasy. In time Yedo actors who were removed from the doll atmosphere of Kyoto and Osaka were obliged to journey down to these towns that they might know how to play the characters of the Doll-theatre plays. The jidaimono became all the rage in Yedo, and the actors could no longer remain indifferent to the activity of the doll performers. But the movements of the dolls were not the only attraction, for stage costumes were purloined as well, and Kabuki appropriated unto itself all the novelties and ideas of the Doll-theatre one after the other. Something of an influence was exerted upon the Doll-theatre by the legitimate plays and players, but it was small in comparison with the highway robbery of everything of interest from the Doll-theatre carried on for years by the actors and stage managers of Kabuki. Chikamatsu, who never hesitated to take his ideas, plots, and materials from any source that suited his purpose, borrowed to some extent from Kabuki. One of his plays, _Tamba Yosaku_, was originally played twenty years before his own composition by the first Arashi Sanyemon. _Yuki-Onna-Gomai-Hagoita_ (lit., the Snow-Woman-Five-Battle-dores), a Chikamatsu masterpiece, was in reality one of Arashi Sanyemon’s favourite plays. The dolls also took for model the gestures and style of living actors, closely following their specialties, young women, heroes, and villains. Sakata Tojuro’s most popular rôle, that of Izaemon, in the play concerning Yugiri, a heroine of the gay quarters, influenced Chikamatsu, for he took Tojuro’s one-act play and made it over into one of his masterpieces, _Yugiri of Awa in Naruto_. Moreover, the doll-handlers imitated Tojuro’s manner and gestures as Izaemon. Chikamatsu also modelled his characters on such actors as Yoshizawa Ayame, Midzuki Tatsunosuke, and Kataoka Nizaemon. Sawamura Sojuro played as Yuranosuke, the leader of the Forty-seven Ronin, and this Kabuki piece was the basis of _Chushingura_, the masterpiece of the Doll-theatre playwright, Takeda Izumo, in which the Yuranosuke doll portrayed the manners and gestures of Sojuro. Lovers of Kabuki do not like to acknowledge the extent to which the actors borrowed from the stage of the inanimate players, but it was very great. Sometimes famous actors were sons of the ningyo-tsukai, or puppet performers, and young actors who went to the dolls to study soon discovered that they were able to see themselves as others saw them.