Teaching and Studying Shakespeare in Higher Education in Early Twentieth-Century Japan

Abstract

This chapter considers how teaching and studying Shakespeare evolved in higher education institutions in early twentieth century Japan. The first section demonstrates that Shakespeare was deeply incorporated and institutionalised within the English-language curriculum in order to reveal how powerful Shakespeare’s presence was in early twenty-century classrooms in contrast to that in classrooms today. The next section examines how early professors of Shakespeare at the Imperial University of Tokyo, with their increasingly more specialist concerns, sought to make Shakespeare studies academic based on philological and literary-historical research. Their attempts to confine Shakespeare to a small corner of specialism, however, were questioned by the likes of Okakura Yohisaburô, who preferred equation pedagogy to explore the possibilities of literary studies as liberal education and to take local initiative in interpreting Shakespeare’s plays.