“HAMLET” FORBIDDEN

Greymouth Evening Star, 7 February 1939, Page 4

“HAMLET” FORBIDDEN

INJURIOUS TO PUBLIC MORALS. The police of Osaka, the second city of Japan, have forbidden a performance of “Hamlet,’ ’on the ground that it might be "injurious to public morals.” While this alleged threat to public morality is uot« more clearly defined, I it is believed that there were two obI jeetions to the play: Firstly, that Royalty was shown in an uncomplimentary light, and secondly, that) Ham let’s own thoughts deviated from the normal and the respectable. “Hamlet." was the first of Shakespeare’s plays to be translated into Japanese, and no objection has hitherto been raised to its performance. A well-known Japanese scholar, Professor Tsubouchi, has translated all of Shakespeare’s plays and a, museum in big honour is niain-

tained at Wastda University, in Tokio. The “Japan Chronicle,” an English language newspaper in Kobe, which is British-owned and British-edited, finds in the imposition of the ban by the Osaka police an occasion for the following lamilia.r quotation: “There are more things in heaven and earth. Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”