ABSTRACT
This chapter highlights some of the dominant stylistic features of the early twentieth-century Shakespeare translations of Tsubouchi Shōyō, namely their basis in native syllabic meter, their use of repetitive keywording, of phonetic rubi glossing and archaisms as a means of enhancing their textuality, and finally of multiple collocations to translate a single Shakespearean item such as “nature.” These features correspond broadly with what Shōyō admired as the rhythm, warmth, and diversity of Shakespeare’s style, although while the syllabic “feel” of much of the translations is “warm” as well as rhythmic because of the use of syllabic meter in traditional Japanese drama, Shōyō tends to avoid exact imitations of Edo writers such as Chikamatsu and Bakin. Especially after 1914, when he entered the final stage of his Shakespeare translations in which by far the majority of them were completed, Shōyō’s translating style can be considered hybrid rather than either strictly classical or contemporary.
