The Transnational Spread of ‘Whiggish Shakespeare’ in School Education from Britain to Japan, 1870–1945

This article examines the transnational spread of Shakespeare, particularly his biographies and prose adaptations of King Lear, from Britain to Japan, focusing on locally produced English readers for use in secondary schools between 1870 and 1945. Such materials were largely derived from school readers produced in Britain to educate working-class children, following the Education Act of 1870. Those British source texts were informed by Whig–Liberal narratives of progressive history. In that framework, Shakespeare became a self-made and civic figure, while Cordelia served to challenge the misuse of political and parental authority. When introduced into Japan’s educational context, the Whig interpretation of Shakespeare intersected with intellectual efforts to pursue social and political reform to build a nation-state and an empire compatible with Great Britain. Because Japanese intellectuals perceived Whig–Liberal thinking as indispensable for Japan’s modernisation, the poet was mobilised as a liberal cultural resource able to bolster reformist aspirations. By the 1920s, however, as liberal elements became subsumed within a more explicitly nationalistic educational agenda, Shakespeare became a figure institutionally oriented towards the cultivation of imperial subjects and thus marked Japan’s gradual departure from British liberal paradigms.