ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the evolution of the discourse of William Shakespeare's fitness as educational material and the struggle for control of ideas that has constituted the application of his works as such in key national and temporal contexts. It provides the proliferation of modern-day teaching approaches by identifying the two main streams of literary-studies discourse from which they stem: the practical or moral philosophical stream; and the elite scholarly linguistic stream. The use of Shakespeare in university education began in Scotland. If reader omit William Hawkins's peculiar mid-eighteenth-century Latin Shakespeare at Oxford, the uptake of English literary studies – and particularly of Shakespeare – by English universities lagged behind that in Scotland, India, and the United States. In 1822, six years before English literary study was introduced at the London colleges, the India Gazette records that students of Hindu College, Calcutta, performed scenes from Shakespeare's plays.
