How popular or well-known was the Tale of the Heike (平家物語) in the 16th & 17th centuries in Japan?

Title pretty much says it all. As for why, it’s a convoluted story:

There’s a Middle Japanese compound verb suffix 〜てんげり expressing the past perfective (similar to modern 〜てしまった) that appears suddenly in the early 13th century as a variant of regular 〜てけり. According to the online [Corpus of Historical Japanese,](https://chunagon.ninjal.ac.jp/chj/search) this suffix occurs…

* twice in the Uji Shūi Monogatari (宇治拾遺物語)
* twice in the Hōgen Monogatari (保元物語)
* a whopping **70 times in the Heike Monogatari** (平家物語)

…and then it vanishes as quickly as it came, with no more attestations after the century’s end. Its next—and final—recorded occurrence in the corpus is roughly **400 years later** in 1653, in a kyōgen (狂言) of the Ōkura (大蔵) tradition.

I *really* don’t want to have to read through an entire kyōgen script just to contextualize a single verb, so I’m just wondering whether it’s within the realm of *possibility* that the usage in the kyōgen *could be* referencing this suffix’s frequent usage in the Tale of the Heike. Otherwise, I’ll have to look into other possible reasons why 〜てんげり was used in such a late text (such as a simple gap in attestation in the corpus).

https://www.reddit.com/r/japan/comments/yc4jdj/how_popular_or_wellknown_was_the_tale_of_the/