Todokoro’s Study Room on Shakespeare
The site starts with a welcome phrase that claims to be a web interested in doing a thorough investigation of the amusement that goes from the printed Shakespeare’s words to their representation on the stage. This page is much more elaborated than the previous ones. It was created by Hiroyuki Todokoro, a Gunma Prefectural Women’s University professor from the English department who has been dedicated to the study of Shakespeare through his career and who just retired last year at the age of 60.
The main page remains very simple and clear. It offers the visitor two ways to travel through the links. The first one starts by clicking on the link that could be translated as “quick reference matrix” that takes you to a simplified chart or site map. The other way to surf the web by clicking on any of the five unfolding menus that spread open from the boxes placed on the right side of each of the five pictures.
The first box is a list of Shakespeare related activities carried out in the Gunma Prefectural Women’s University. The second box offers all sort of information about Shakespeare that goes from an introduction on the author, all his plays, the way to understand Shakespeare, famous quotes, editions on books, representations on stage in and outside Japan, etc. The third box is a record of the different representations carried out by the students of the English Department of Gunma Prefectural Women’s University. The forth box is a list of all the seminars, workshops and academic activities done on Shakespeare that not only includes its contents but offers the resulting papers and texts of each one of them. The fifth and last box is a series of links about Todokoro, the creator of this page. It contains a series of papers and articles written by himself on the playwright and his works, and also includes an extensive self introduction, short autobiography and/or résumé.
It is worth mentioning how Todokoro introduces himself. He does it by using the famous “"All the world's a stage, and all the men and women are merely players” discourse by Jaques in “As You Like It”. The page quotes the whole discourse, and five words within the text are underlined and work as links. The words are: the infant, the whining school-boy, the lover, the solider and the justice. Each of them corresponds to a part of the Todokoro’s life. Thus, the link INFANT takes us to his early days, SCHOOL-BOY takes to his school days, the LOVER takes us to his university days and his initialization on Shakespeare’s world, the SOLDIER, takes us to his days as a teacher and researcher, and JUSTICE takes us to the day he retired from university and the academic world. It is difficult to think about any other form or method to relate one’s life to our famous playwright.