Nisanji was followed by Sakurada Jisuke, who became the first playwright of Yedo, and wrote during a period of forty years. He was associated with such distinguished actors as the fifth Ichikawa Danjuro, the fourth Matsumoto Koshiro, the first Nakamura Nakazo, and the fifth Iwai Hanshiro. He excelled in plays depicting real life, or sewamono, and took his characters from the varied life about him,—handsome young samurai, heroines of the gay quarters, and brave men of the people. The play of his that has lived longest is _Sukeroku_, one of Kabuki’s most characteristic pieces, with scenes laid in the gay quarters, and Sukeroku, the very personification of bravery and loyalty, as the hero. The periods of Bunka and Bunsei, or from 1804 to 1817, saw the beginning of Kabuki’s decline, and for fifty years before the Restoration in 1868 there was little development. It was a time of stagnation, and the people shut up within their own country were beginning to suffer from lack of outside stimulus. A distinct loss of originality began to show itself in the theatre, and there was a dearth of good playwrights, while the Doll-theatre had taken a plunge downward, and there was little activity among the writers for the marionettes. Kabuki had depended largely upon the Doll-theatre playwrights, and failing these fell back upon dramatisations of popular fiction. The novels of Bakin, Tenehiko, and Kyoden were dramatised for the stage. Although the theatre had become more complex, and material for plays was abundant, the period did not produce the playwright. The position of the sakusha, which in the beginning had been of great dignity, changed for the worse. They became mere slaves of the actors. There was a stage writer called Nagawa Shimesuke, son of the keeper of a theatre tea-house, who did not create, but patched and altered at the bidding of the actors, so that he was nicknamed Sentaku-ya Shimesuke, or Laundry-Man Shimesuke, which gives a good idea of the playwriters’ low estate at this time.