ABSTRACT
Between 1751 and 1759 William Hawkins, Professor of Latin at Oxford, gave the first ever series of lectures on Shakespeare at an English university. Published as Praelectiones Poeticae, the lectures translated quotations from the plays into Latin with the original provided in the footnotes (Dobson 1992: 205).This act of reverent mutilation, consistent with Hawkins’s and many other contemporary adaptations of Shakespeare, provides an excellent preface for what this chapter explores as the unlikely marriage of Shakespeare and education. Here, as in so many subsequent instances, Shakespeare’s fitness for educational purposes was improvised at the expense of his works’ identity as drama.
