抄録
Tsubouchi Shoyo's intention in renderingJuliusCaesar into a Joruri play may have required the then Japanese people to call their minds to th.e democratic society which he thought desirable for the future of Japan. Reciting Joruri was then so popular among the common people that his Joruri version ofJulius Caesarprobably was, I think, most suitable for him to enlighten them about what democracy was. He seems to have taken great pains over putting the characters' names into Japanese. He adopted the two ways of expressing them in Japanese. One is the way called 'Yutb-Yomi.' This is the peculiar way of expressing Japanese personal names in Chinese characters. The first character is pronounced in Chinese, while the second one is rendered into Japanese. Another is the way called 'Manyo-Yomi.' In theManyoshuthe Japanese people employed Chinese characters phonetically for representing Japanese sounds. He expressed the characters' names in Chinese characters following the manner of theManyoshu. He used some rhetorical devices in his Joruri version. The chief one may be the 'Makura-Kotoba.' or the 'pillow-word, ' which consists almost invariably of five syllables. Another may be the 'Kake-Kotoba' or the 'pivot-word, ' which makes possible the expression of double meanings. He translatesJulius Caesarfaithfully in spirit and writes his translation in Joruri-styled sentence making suitable combinations of five- and seven-syllable words. We cannot fail, I think, to notice some rhetorical influence of Chikamatsu, Mokuami and Bakin on Shoyo's Joruri version of Shakespeare'sJuliusCaesar.
