SIMON BARKER
A cartoon that appeared in the Manchester Guardian on Thursday, 21 February 1946,1 shows William Shakespeare arriving with his suitcases at a Stratford-upon-Avon hotel during the Second World War. We know it is Shakespeare from the ‘W.S.’ printed on one of his two suitcases, as well as from his Elizabethan costume and his general demeanour: he is balding, bearded, and sexily English – imagined, perhaps, from the statue above his tomb in nearby Holy Trinity Church. We also understand from a label on a second suitcase that he is attempting to check in for the annual Shakespeare Festival. Lounging across the entrance to the hotel and blocking Shakespeare’s way sits a bowler-hatted figure from the middle of the twentieth century – a caricature of a civil servant perhaps, or at least someone who has taken officialdom to heart in that he clearly does not acknowledge the celebrity of the figure he confronts. He is a picture of nonchalant self-importance: his hat is tilted forwards, his feet are propped up against the doorway, and he is more interested in his newspaper than in this new arrival. A dog sleeps nearby. The contrast with the upright, expectant Shakespeare is complete: enervation versus energy, complacency versus creativity. The hotel front is plastered with posters declaring that the building had been requisitioned during the emergency of 1939 and is now closed to the public. Although nothing in the scene itself hints of emergency, we know when it is set since the newspaper headline reads: ‘Hitler invades Poland.’ The caption of the cartoon gives a voice to the bowler-hatted guardian of the commandeered hotel, declaring to Shakespeare, in very bold type, ‘Rooms? Rooms?? My good man, don’t you know there’s a war on?’
The cartoonist’s reflection on Stratford-upon-Avon during the Second World War accurately represented something of the crisis that faced the town. Anyone trying to book into a hotel in Stratford during the conflict may have been disappointed. Hotels were indeed requisitioned as government agencies were relocated to the town, and there were also, as we shall see, elaborate plans in place for the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre itself. What the cartoon does not reveal, since the image of the lounging civil servant and sleeping dog suggests a rather uninterested, even hostile, attitude to Shakespeare, is the enthusiasm with which those involved with Shakespearean production in Stratford-upon-Avon strove to keep the theatre alive during the hostilities. This chapter describes something of these efforts, as a salute to the persistence of these theatre practitioners, whilst also trying to determine the ideological sense of the productions that emerged in the context of wartime Stratford. What emerges is something of a contrast with other manifestations of Shakespeare during the 1930s and 1940s.
Over recent years an international body of research has grown which has addressed the abundant historical connections that can be made between Shakespeare and warfare.2 Some scholars have focused on the particular relationship between Shakespeare and the Second World War. Others, understandably enough, and alongside theatre historians, directors, actors, and critics, have been concerned with the way that Shakespeare’s plays can be reread and newly performed in order to address more recent or present-day military conflict. As far as the specifics of the Second World War are concerned, there are numerous instances of the way that Shakespeare’s texts were employed during the years leading up to the war and throughout the period of hostilities itself. One example would be the use of Coriolanus. Hans Rothe’s 1932 German translation, broadcast to an emerging Nazi Germany, led to his exile the following year because of the way that he had adapted Shakespeare’s play as a critique of Adolf Hitler. Meanwhile, a French translation of the play by René-Louis Piachaud for a performance during the Christmas and New Year of 1933–4 led to royalist/fascist clashes with critical Parisian citizens in the streets around the theatre. In this instance, as a response to these disturbances, the director of the play was replaced by the chief of the Sûreté. In locations as far away from each other as Pasadena and Moscow there were corresponding left-wing, or anti-fascist productions.3 Finally, though, Coriolanus enjoyed a firm place in the Nazi education machine throughout the Second World War, Shakespeare’s text being deemed an exemplum of the virtues of the strong military leader.
Examples of an understanding of Shakespeare as somehow in tune with Nazi values are unsurprising given Hitler’s own evaluation of the playwright’s standing in relation to German culture – and this evaluation may even have contributed in part to the prevailing atmosphere in Stratford-upon-Avon during the war. In his compelling study, Hitler’s Private Library, Timothy W. Ryback notes that Hitler’s favourite books were ‘Don Quixote along with Robinson Crusoe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Gulliver’s Travels’ and quotes Hitler as saying of these books, that ‘each of them is a grandiose idea unto itself’ (Ryback xi). In Robinson Crusoe Hitler apparently perceived ‘the development of the entire history of mankind’ (xi). Hitler’s library of sixteen-thousand volumes also included the collected works of William Shakespeare, ‘published in [a] German translation in 1925 by Georg Müller as part of a series intended to make great literature available to the general public’ (xi). According to Ryback,
[Hitler] considered Shakespeare superior to Goethe and Schiller in every respect. While Shakespeare had fuelled his imagination on the protean forces of the emerging British Empire, these two Teutonic playwright-poets squandered their talent on stories of midlife crises and sibling rivalry. Why was it, he once wondered, that the German Enlightenment produced Nathan the Wise,4 the story of the rabbi who reconciles Christians, Muslims and Jews, while it had been left to Shakespeare to give the world The Merchant of Venice and Shylock?
Hitler appears to have imbibed his Hamlet – favourite phrases included ‘To be or not to be’ and ‘It is Hecuba to me’ – and he was especially fond of Julius Caesar. In a 1926 sketchbook he drew a detailed stage set for the first act of the Shakespearean tragedy with sinister façades enclosing the forum where Caesar is cut down. ‘We will meet again at Philippi,’ he threatened an opponent on more than one occasion, plagiarizing the spectral warning to Brutus after Caesar’s murder. He was said to have reserved the Ides of March for momentous decisions. (Ryback xi–xiii)
Hitler’s interest in Shakespeare had existed for some time. With characteristic loathing for what he perceived as a narrowing of German culture, particularly under the influence of Jews, he had written in Mein Kampf of his desire to restore Shakespeare to his rightful place on the German stage (Hitler 236). In fact, however, despite Hitler’s endorsement and the role of the texts within the state education system, Shakespeare struggled under Nazi rule as far as the live theatre was concerned. Gerwin Strobl has noted in The Swastika and the Stage that, once restored following early condemnation, Shakespeare probably only received attention in the theatre due to Hitler’s personal support.
Since the Führer took only an intermittent interest in the non-musical stage, control over German theatre essentially devolved to Joseph Goebbels. Goebbels was, however, overruled by Hitler on a number of occasions. These ranged from the appointment of prominent Intendanten [artistic and managing directors] to the issue of salaries for the Reich’s theatrical stars. Once or twice, Hitler even intervened in repertoire policy: the initial ban on Shakespeare as an enemy dramatist after the outbreak of war, for instance, was lifted on the Führer’s personal orders. Yet Goebbels was left to implement the Führer’s wishes, and thus enjoyed some leeway in interpreting Hitler’s commands. In the case of Shakespeare, Goebbels instructed his own subordinates to limit all theatres to one play by the Bard per season, even though Hitler had not suggested any limitations; and Goebbels saw to it that his own order was enforced. (153)
As Werner Habicht and Zeno Ackermann have demonstrated in their essays for this volume, tension over the status of Shakespeare in the Nazi sphere of influence continued throughout the war, with competing agencies at work in determining both frequency of performances and the interpretation of the plays. The complexity of the ideological apparatus underpinning the staging of Julius Caesar and other Shakespeare plays is matched only by the brutality of the ideological aims that were to be fulfilled. Despite clear disagreements among those at work behind the scenes, Nazi aesthetics, with respect to Shakespeare in general and The Merchant of Venice in particular, seem ultimately to have been mediated by a recognition of Hitler’s profound interest in the playwright.5
There are many other examples of the ways in which Shakespeare had a significant role in the years leading up to the Second World War and during the 1940s. In diverse contexts and national cultures, Shakespeare was recruited as a ‘voice’ in support of various contrasting political allegiances.6 In Britain, there was the work of the academic George R. Wilson Knight (1897–1985) whose wartime production This Sceptred Isle was staged at the Westminster Theatre in London in 1941. This production was conceived as Shakespeare’s contribution to the war effort, as Britain had stood for a while isolated but defiant in the face of German aggression. Its tone captured the spirit of much of the orthodox criticism of the 1930s and 1940s.7 Knight had experienced war first hand, having served as a dispatch rider in Iraq in the First World War. His early theories about the relationship between Shakespeare and Empire were further developed during the years he spent teaching at the University of Toronto (1931–40).8
Laurence Olivier’s enduring film version of Henry V, released in November 1944 and famously dedicated to ‘the Commandos and Airborne Troops of Great Britain,’ had developed from his performances of the play in the years before the war. Given the energetic and understandably propagandist nature of these largely metropolitan contributions to the war effort, it is surprising not to find an equivalent forthright approach to the performance of Shakespeare in Stratford itself.
As Timothy Ryback has commented, the contents of Hitler’s library became clear to those beyond his immediate circle only after the war had ended, but his views on Shakespeare were known long before the beginning of hostilities. Thus a rumour to the effect that Hitler said that he would never bomb Stratford-upon-Avon because of the centrality of Shakespeare to Germany’s national culture was of considerable importance to those living in the town in 1939. This rumour has to be seen in terms of wartime debate about mutual aerial bombing. There was, at first, some tacit agreement that cities and towns of significant cultural and architectural significance might be spared.9 This quickly changed to a policy involving the deliberate bombing of such places on both sides, most notably Germany’s ‘Baedeker Blitz’ of Bath, Canterbury, Exeter, Norwich, and York, seen by the German High Command as a reprisal for the British bombing of Lübeck. These targets were chosen from a guide to the most historically interesting British cities. Whatever the truth about Hitler’s rumoured attitude to Stratford-upon-Avon (as somewhere apparently excluded from this policy) it is the case that the town remained surprisingly unscathed by enemy action.
It is tempting to think that the British authorities in London also held some belief in the idea that Stratford-upon-Avon was somehow exempt from the extreme dangers that faced other wartime communities. The town is, after all, not far from cities that suffered some of the most severe bombing of the early years of the war. Medieval Coventry was devastated by ‘Operation Moonlight Sonata’ in November 1940, and Birmingham suffered continual attacks during 1940, 1941, and 1942. Both cities were associated with industries that were critical to the British war effort; but Stratford, despite its reputation as a quintessential rural market town, was also the site of significant small-scale wartime production, particularly to do with aviation. This, and its proximity to the larger centres of manufacture, would hardly make Stratford an obvious place of safety, especially given the indiscriminate nature of so much of the nocturnal bombing principally aimed at nearby centres. Although a stray German bomb fell in Maidenhead Road on one occasion, and a plaque in Evesham Place still commemorates the two Fleet Air Arm personnel who were consumed by fire when their aeroplane crashed there in September 1941, Stratford’s citizens largely escaped such airborne peril.10
It is a measure of how secure government officials considered the town that in the early years of the war Stratford-upon-Avon afforded a temporary home for children evacuated from urban areas. Yet, as was suggested by the Manchester Guardian cartoon, the war quickly brought other kinds of relocations. The town’s main hotels, including the Shakespeare, the Falcon, the Arden, and the Swan’s Nest were requisitioned by various government and military departments; surviving records, including personal accounts by hotel workers, reveal the elaborate and hasty contingencies that came into force.11 The hotels were stripped of their furniture in favour of more functional office equipment; walls were reinforced, communication systems were installed, and coded notices signalling (to those that could interpret them) the accommodation’s new significance were posted. For a while the town became a kind of extension of Whitehall as civil and military personnel arrived with lorry loads of files and the associated paraphernalia of wartime administration. Although the hotels could no longer accommodate what must have been but a meagre trickle of casual tourists and Shakespeare enthusiasts, the new occupants, and those who visited them on official business, provided ready audiences for the productions at the Memorial Theatre. The earlier playhouse, constructed in 1879, had been almost entirely destroyed by a fire in 1926. Elizabeth Scott’s design for the replacement had been controversial, partly because the new building resembled a cinema, but also because of its limitations as a performance space. In some quarters, however, the facilities of the new theatre apparently found great favour. Archival records in the library of the House of Lords reveal the precise detail of secret manoeuvres to take place in case of an invasion that threatened London as the seat of the British Government. In such an event, parliamentary personnel were to be evacuated to Stratford-upon-Avon by special trains and buses that were kept prepared for the purpose; these papers include precise details of the mode of transport afforded to each type of traveller, according to his or her status. In Stratford itself, billets would be allocated according to the rank of each parliamentary member or official, with the best granted to those who would sit in the conference hall in the Memorial Theatre as the newly established alternative House of Lords. These plans, code-named ‘Operation HK,’ are of interest for their precise and even fussy attention to social class that would prevail despite the gravity of the situation that would see them activated.12 I have written elsewhere of the image of members of Parliament making a last-ditch stand against an invading German army from within the very epicentre of Shakespearean production.13 Yet, the plans speak seriously of the centrality of Stratford-upon-Avon in terms of its geographical situation at the ‘heart of England’ and, without doubt, of a cultural symbolism associated with the life and work of William Shakespeare. It is perhaps too fanciful to suggest that government planners also believed the rumour that Hitler would use every opportunity he could to avoid the destruction of a town so associated with a playwright considered central to his own view of German culture. It is significant, however, that the Rt Hon. Anthony Eden, a leading figure in the early wartime cabinet, had visited Stratford-upon-Avon to speak to Warwickshire hoteliers on ‘the subject of commandeering of hotels’.14
The deployment of government officials to Stratford-upon-Avon during the war therefore provided one source of audiences for productions at the Memorial Theatre. Another was a constant stream of military personnel from the various camps and airforce bases established in the countryside around the town. As the war progressed the area became a significant point of mobilization for soldiers and aviators from Canada, the United States, and other Allied nations, and Canadian service personnel had, in fact, been visiting from the earliest months of the war. A newspaper cutting from the Stratford-upon-Avon Herald of 29 March 1940 has the headline ‘Canadian Smiles.’
About 40 members of the Canadian Expeditionary Force visited Stratford-on-Avon on Friday. Their first port of call was the picture gallery at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre where they were met by the Mayor and Mayoress (Councillor and Mrs. T.N. Waldron), Sir Archie Flower (Chairman of the Governors), and Lady Flower. Having been shown around they went on to the Theatre, where, as a compliment to their hosts, they mounted the stage and gave a stirring rendering of their regimental song. They evinced great interested in the workings of the stage, which they examined thoroughly, even descending into the depths. They also ‘took trips’ on the rolling stage. They finished at the Theatre café, where coffee and sandwiches were served. The officers and men chatted with their hosts, one of them saying that he had been afraid to visit Stratford because he had heard it praised so highly by his own countrymen and he was certain it could not be all that it was ‘cracked up’ to be. ‘Actually,’ he added ‘it has surpassed my expectations.’ (Herald 29 March 1940: 3)
Thomas Holte’s accompanying photograph of the Canadian soldiers is a compelling image. The kilted Canadians and their hosts are indeed smiling, and the article insists on a mutual interest in Shakespeare as Flower ‘contented’ himself with a quotation from King John: ‘Nought shall make us rue if England to itself do rest but true’ (3).
As it turned out, these Canadian soldiers were pioneers in attempts to link activities at the theatre to the war effort. An article published in the Herald on 13 September 1940, quoting Flower, described the first wartime Shakespeare Festival held over the course of twenty weeks. Echoing his speech to the visiting Canadians earlier that year, Flower noted that the
Governors were happy at the result of their experiment, and though there would be a loss, as was expected, they had the satisfaction of knowing that 80,000 had attended Shakespeare’s plays. Those people had derived encouragement and recreation, and those who saw King John, and particularly the last act, must have gone away full of the idea of England at her very best. (qtd in Herald 13 Sept. 1940, 1)
Flower had also noted the practical difficulties faced by those involved with the productions due to the war.
The War had given them a great deal of extra work. In the course of the 20 weeks between 20 and 30 of the staff had joined the Forces, and their places had to be filled, which entailed additional rehearsals. But the company had tackled it, and he believed they had enjoyed it. In addition, over thirty of them had joined the Home Guard. (1)15
Shortage of staff was not the only problem facing Sir Archibald, the Festival Governors, and the early wartime director, Ben Iden Payne. Productions had to be scheduled to fit in with blackout times and there is evidence of the way that plays were cut to accommodate these regulations. There were also restrictions on supplies for the creation of sets and costumes, leading to the recycling of materials from prewar productions. Shortages of fuel affected the management of the productions and, it was feared, threatened audience attendance. Despite these challenges, however, audiences for this (and subsequent wartime Festivals) were not in short supply. The Herald happily noted that: ‘In conclusion, Sir Archie mentioned that many men of the Forces had been among the audiences, and there was now a prospect that the Company would have an opportunity of carrying Shakespeare to the troops in various parts of the country’ (1).
Indeed, a few days earlier the Herald had reported that under the auspices of the Entertainments National Service Association (ENSA) the Festival Company was to tour garrison theatres with ‘potted’ productions of The Merry Wives of Windsor and Twelfth Night.
The 20 weeks’ Festival at Stratford-on-Avon will close to-morrow (Saturday) after a season that has fully justified the bold policy of the Governors. The audiences have included many members of the Forces, drawn from all the Services, from all ranks, and including representatives of the Empire contingents. This feature of the Festival led to the conception of a scheme for providing the troops with potted versions of Shakespeare … Mr Iden Payne has already experimented along these lines, for a few years ago he presented 50-minute productions of Shakespeare to enthusiastic audiences in the Globe theatre at the Chicago World Fair … The difficulties can well be imagined, especially when it is remembered that Mr Payne had a delicate task when he had to restrict this year’s Festival productions to two-and-a-half hours. (Herald 6 Sept. 1940: 1)
By 1944 the Memorial Theatre was offering weekly ‘leave courses’ for Canadian and US forces, predicting during the five months from April 17 to mid-September,
twenty Canadians and twenty Americans should arrive here on Monday evenings … The programme would actually start the following morning with a reception by the Mayor and Mayoress at 10 o’clock. Afterwards there would be a talk on the history of Stratford by Mr. John Bird, and then the members of the Forces would have a free morning to visit the interesting buildings of the town. In the afternoon Mr Robert Atkins would give a talk on ‘The Shakespearean Stage,’ and afterwards tea would be taken with members of the Festival Company and staff of the Memorial Theatre. In the evening they would attend the performance. (Herald 14 Apr. 1944: 1)
The Festivals and the attendant educational programs took place alongside the kinds of wartime morale boasting and fund-raising activities that were common in Britain during the war. Stratford-upon-Avon held events such as War Weapons Weeks, which celebrated the manufacture of weaponry and sought financial donations from citizens. The Shakespeare Birthday Trust Archive holds a collection of items, left by local undertaker Frank Organ, that includes a photograph of his shop window dressed especially ‘for the War Effort’ as well as a photograph of an aeroplane on display in front of the Memorial Theatre during one of these campaigns.16 Anthony Eden returned to Stratford-up-Avon in February 1940 to make a long and widely reported speech on ‘The Progress of the War.’ This event took place at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre before an audience of local dignitaries, citizens, theatre staff, performers, and an international contingent of correspondents invited to the town especially for the occasion (Herald 9 Feb. 1940, 1).17 Eden’s speech was important in itself as an official declaration for an international audience of British attitudes towards the conflict, but the location was also highly significant, chosen in order to allow Eden to draw upon Shakespeare and his work as a kind of guarantee of the worth of the campaign and as a bulwark of national and international (or Imperial) identity. As Dominions Secretary he addressed the 500 people attending the event on the ‘unquiet mind’ of ‘Dr Goebbels’ goblins’ (the Nazi propaganda machine), the importance of war savings (in the form of Savings Certificates), and the ‘true character’ and idealism of the British Commonwealth. Central to his address, and this ideal, was an evocation of Shakespeare and Stratford: ‘Tonight we are met in Shakespeare’s theatre, in an atmosphere seeped with the traditions of our race. Here on this stage our history is enacted, our philosophy as a people is given expression, in plays which are the greatest gift of English genius to mankind. We stand at the very heart of England, and we can have little doubt what it is we must do battle to defend’ (Herald 9 Feb. 1940: 2).
The evening concluded with a short vote of thanks from Sir Archibald Flower. From an early twenty-first-century perspective such speeches as these, invoking the spirit of Shakespeare in aid of a just war, seem propagandist (if understandably so) in their nature, and can be compared with similar wartime imperatives elsewhere in Europe and beyond. They certainly had a counterpart in the Soviet Union where, as readers of the Herald discovered in April 1942, Shakespeare was to be lauded for his anti-fascist values: ‘Special meetings are to be held in Moscow to mark the 326th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death. “The Humanism of Shakespeare, the Enemy of Fascism,” “Shakespeare and the War,” and “English Humour in Shakespeare’s Works” are among the subjects to be discussed’ (‘Shakespeare: Enemy of Facism’ 1).
There was, then, much urgent and varied activity in and around Stratford-upon-Avon, with its commitment to government and military agencies, visiting soldiers and aircrew, training courses, speeches, and pomp. The town’s proximity to the deadly bombing of Britain’s industrial heartland made the long-established and continually reinforced symbolism of Stratford-upon-Avon as the birthplace of Shakespeare especially important in these troubled times. What then, of the nature of the performances that took place within the Memorial Theatre itself?
Although 1940 marked the real start of the wartime Festivals, an anticipation of conflict hung in the air during the summer of 1939, seemingly influencing the quality of the performances and certainly affecting audience numbers. Clearly, something of Sir Archibald’s triumphal account of the success of the 1940 Festival was due to a contrast that could be made with the dismal 1939 season, which had unfortunately also been the Memorial’s Diamond Jubilee. In fact, the quality of performances at Stratford-upon-Avon had been an issue for critics since at least 1937. What started with comments by W.A. Darlington of the Daily Telegraph became a sustained attack when he was joined by Charles Morgan of The Times, St John Ervine of the Observer, and Ivor Brown, writing in the Manchester Guardian. Although the criticism abated somewhat in 1939 (presumably even the critics had other things on their minds), everyone seemed aware that standards in Stratford had been in decline for some time. Records relating primarily to the organization of the 1940 Festival include sometimes heated correspondence among Flower, William Slavery (general manager of the Stratford-upon-Avon Festival Company), Henry Tossell (manager of the Memorial Theatre), and Ben Iden Payne (theatre director). The burden of the exchange is the particularly poor showing of the 1939 season of plays, and in the background, a proposed pro tempore amalgamation of the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre and London’s Old Vic, which at that time was under the directorship of Tyrone Guthrie.18 Although it came to nothing, this proposal (which many continued to find attractive for long after this period) was characteristic of the uneasy relationship over Shakespeare that existed at the time between London and Stratford-upon-Avon.19 It is impossible to summarize these discontents here, but it is clear that the Old Vic and other London companies thought that Stratford lacked a sense of interpretative adventure but believed (erroneously) that it enjoyed endless financial support. In contrast, the Memorial Theatre prided itself on its rural location, its claim on Shakespeare’s life, and a misplaced adherence to a sense of continuity, which the critics saw as conservatism.
During the war years, Stratford-upon-Avon saw almost sixty separate runs of works by Shakespeare, Sheridan, Goldsmith, and Jonson, although the repetition of plays that were either popular or easily revisited reduces the productions that may be considered truly original conceptions, conservative or not. (The list below does not include the ‘potted’ versions taken to garrisons, as these were sometimes reprised versions of productions from earlier seasons.) Within each season, the plays are listed in chronological order; the figures in brackets indicate the individual run against the total number of productions of that play during this period.
1939
The Taming of the Shrew [1/5]
As You Like It [1/4]
Richard III [1/1]
Othello [1/3]
Twelfth Night [1/4]
Comedy of Errors [1/1]
Much Ado about Nothing [1/3]
Coriolanus [1/1]
1940
Measure for Measure [1/1]
As You Like It [2/4]
The Merry Wives of Windsor [1/3]
The Merchant of Venice [1/4]
Hamlet [1/3]
She Stoops to Conquer [1/2]
King John [1/1]
The Taming of the Shrew [2/5]
1941
Much Ado about Nothing [2/3]
Twelfth Night [2/4]
Julius Caesar [1/1]
The Taming of the Shrew [3/5]
The Rivals [1/1]
Richard II [1/2]
The Tempest [1/2]
Romeo and Juliet [1/2]
The Merchant of Venice [2/4]
A Midsummer Night’s Dream [1/3]
The Merchant of Venice [3/4]
Hamlet [2/3]
As You Like It [3/4]
The School for Scandal [1/1]
Macbeth [1/2]
The Tempest [2/2]
The Winter’s Tale [1/2]
The Taming of the Shrew [4/5]
1943
Twelfth Night [3/4]
Othello [2/3]
A Midsummer Night’s Dream [2/3]
Henry V [1/1]
The Merry Wives of Windsor [2/3]
King Lear [1/1]
The Winter’s Tale [2/2]
The Critic [1/1]
1944
The Merchant of Venice [4/4]
The Taming of the Shrew [5/5]
Macbeth [2/2]
As You Like It [4/4]
Hamlet [3/3]
A Midsummer Night’s Dream [3/3]
Richard II [2/2]
Volpone [1/1]
1945
Much Ado about Nothing [3/3]
The Merry Wives of Windsor [3/3]
Othello [3/3]
Twelfth Night [4/4]
Antony and Cleopatra [1/1]
She Stoops to Conquer [2/2]
Henry VIII [1/1]
Romeo and Juliet [2/2]
Given the shortage of materials, the conscription of performers and theatre staff into the armed forces, the financial difficulties (underestimated in London), and the sheer hardships of war, it would be fair to say that this sequence of productions represents an admirable success in maintaining ‘business as usual.’ Undoubtedly audiences were entertained and diverted from the greyness of wartime Britain, and visitors from overseas certainly came to know something more of the work of Britain’s legendary dramatist. Yet by all accounts, despite a sequence of new directors and the engagement of some experienced and sophisticated actors, the overriding impression derived from reviews of these productions is of a universal blandness in their creative vision and delivery.20 Sally Beauman, whose 1982 book on the Royal Shakespeare Company remains the most authoritative account of the early history of the RSC and its precursors, has evaluated the period thus:
[The] function of theatre, to reinterpret and rediscover the classic plays by returning to the text and examining it without preconception or prejudice, was particularly vital at Stratford, where directors and companies were working almost exclusively on the plays of one dramatist. It was a function that Stratford generally failed to undertake. One of the most remarkable things about the Diamond Jubilee season and the Memorial’s productions generally after sixty years of existence was the predictability of its directorial vision, which hampered even the most talented of its actors. Iden Payne, like Bridges-Adams before him, worked from old prompt-books when redirecting the same play, so that again and again cuts, transpositions and business used the first time he directed a play remained the same in all succeeding productions. (159)
For Beauman, ‘business as usual’ meant the perpetuation of a Shakespeare who remained somehow isolated from a contemporary world that cried out for his comment. Reflecting on the last production of the 1939 season, which rather set the tone for what was to come over the next six years, she wrote:
This was Coriolanus, directed by Iden Payne, and it opened on 9 May, just three and a half months before Hitler ordered the invasion of Poland. By May conscription in Britain had already been introduced and war with Germany seemed inevitable. Of all the plays in the canon Coriolanus, with its complex and impassioned political arguments, its subtly balanced dialectic, its investigation of democracy and authoritarianism, was a play that had obvious and immediate relevance to the events which were at that very moment dividing Europe. Yet Iden Payne’s production appeared totally unrelated to and unaware of those events, and it was cocooned in theatrical traditions from the past. (160)21
Whatever one thinks of the highly politicized productions of Shakespeare staged elsewhere in Britain, and for that matter, elsewhere in the world during the 1930s and 1940s, those wartime productions testify to a contemporary relevance, not in the name of a ‘timeless Shakespeare’ but of the dynamics of interpretation. These dynamics do not rely on an obvious core of meaning. People forget, for example, that the much-discussed Olivier film of Henry V evolved along an uneven course from his early performances under Guthrie, who, according to Tony Howard, ‘initially chose Henry V to attack jingoism: Olivier recalled, “I fought against the heroism by flattening and getting underneath the lines, no banner waving for me.” They [Guthrie and Olivier] debunked the Church and the Salic Law and underlined Henry’s conscience’ (Howard 149).22
While the contingencies of war affected narrative value in cases such as Olivier’s, the Memorial Theatre chose to rely on a poetics of patriotism drawn from the mere context in which productions were staged. Outside the Memorial Theatre it was war; inside the theatre it was as if the lazing man in the Manchester Guardian had it right in asking a wartime Shakespeare, ‘My good man, don’t you know there’s a war on?’
A cartoon from the weekly Das Reich of 2 March 1941 seems to suggest that some in Germany also acknowledged a lack of recognition of Shakespeare’s wartime potential. In this cartoon the ghostly spirits of Goethe, Wagner, and Shakespeare, in celestial Olympian splendour, are discussing their comparative posthumous reputations. Goethe and Wagner ask Shakespeare: ‘Well, dear Master Shakespeare, you seem to be staged quite regularly in Germany. How are we faring in England?’ Shakespeare (who is drawn as a figure not unlike that which appeared half a decade later in the Manchester Guardian) replies wistfully: ‘Oh, we’ve long been treated equitably there: in England none of us is staged.’23
I am grateful for assistance with this essay to the staff of The Shakespeare Centre Library and Archive in Stratford-upon-Avon, and of the Martial Rose Library at the University of Winchester, as well as to Lorna Scott, the Archivist at the University of Gloucestershire
1 Stratford Birthplace Trust Archive, DR885/1/6.
2 See Stephen Marx, ‘Shakespeare’s Pacifism,’ Renaissance Quarterly 45 (1992): 49–95; Richard Courtney, Shakespeare’s World of War: The Early Histories (Toronto: Simon & Pierre, 1994); Nick De Somogyi, Shakespeare’s Theatre of War (Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate, 1998); Bruce R. Smith, Shakespeare and Masculinity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); Nina Taunton, 1590s Drama and Militarism: Portrayals of War in Marlowe, Chapman and Shakespeare’s Henry V (Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate, 2001); Alan Shephard, Marlowe’s Soldiers (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002); Patricia Cahill, Unto the Breach (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); Paola Pugliatti, Shakespeare and the Just War Tradition (Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate, 2010).
3 For a discussion of the further instances of the use of Coriolanus in the years leading up to the Second World War, see Simon Barker, ‘Coriolanus: Texts and Histories,’ Assays: Critical Approaches to Medieval and Renaissance Texts, ed. Peggy Knapp (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1986) 109–28.
4 Nathan the Wise (1779) is by Gotthold Lessing.
5 See Andrew G. Bonnell, Shylock in Germany: Antisemitism in the German Theatre from the Enlightenment to the Nazis (London: Taurus, 2008) 119–69.
6 I am thinking of other essays in this volume but also of those in Ros King and Paul Franssen, eds., Shakespeare and War (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).
7 See G.R. Wilson Knight, This Sceptred Isle: Shakespeare’s Message for England at War (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1940); ‘A Royal Propaganda, 1956. A Narrative Account of Work Devoted to the Cause of Great Britain During and After the Second World War,’ MS, 11768.f.13, British Library (1964); and Shakespearean Production (London: Faber and Faber, 1964). For a discussion of Shakespearean critics of the 1940s and their relation to the war, see Graham Holderness, Visual Shakespeare (Hatfield: Hertfordshire University Press, 2002) especially chapter 5. For his own account of his war service, see Knight, Atlantic Crossing: An Autobiographical Design (London: Dent, 1934).
8 Knight, The Imperial Theme (London: Oxford University Press, 1931) was published in the year he took up his post in Toronto.
9 For discussions about the bombing, see Paul Addison and Jeremy Crang, eds., Firestorm: The Bombing of Dresden, 1945 (London: Pimlico, 2006); and A.C. Grayling, Among the Dead Cities: Was the Allied Bombing of Civilians in World War II a Necessity or a Crime? (London: Bloomsbury, 2006).
10 Documents held in the Stratford Birthplace Trust Archive (DR755) detail a claim made by Mr D.W. Newport to the War Damage Commission in respect of ‘damage to … Wincott Close as a result of a bomb falling in the neighbouring fields on 13 September 1940.’ The extent of the paperwork perhaps gives a clue to the rarity of such events compared with similar episodes in nearby cities.
11 See the typescript recollection by Mrs Kate Higgins of the requisitioning of the Royal Shakespeare Hotel held in the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust Archive: DR730/6 and the typescript account from His Majesty’s Office of Works: DR595/150. Many details of the requisitions survive. For example, the RAF occupied the Red Horse Hotel in Bridge Street and the Arden Hotel in Waterside, the WRAC occupied White Gates in St Gregory’s Road, and the Welcombe Hotel was given to civil servants from the Treasury.
12 The Stratford Birthplace Trust Archive holds a copy (PR254/8) of ‘a secret memorandum outlining the plans for evacuating the House of Lords to Stratford-upon-Avon, utilizing the Conference Hall at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre, and the Shakespeare and Falcon Hotels.’ Members of the House of Lords (‘A grade’ personnel) were to be billeted in the hotels or private houses; B and C grade people were allocated to boarding houses. The new Parliamentary Office was to be housed in the Shakespeare Hotel. See House of Lords Record Office Papers No 313/23.
13 See Simon Barker, War and Nation in the Theatre of Shakespeare and his Contemporaries (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007) 4–5.
14 Stratford Birthplace Trust Archive, DR595/51.
15 John Laurie, a leading actor at Stratford-upon-Avon during the war, was one of those who joined the Home Guard. Ironically he later played the part of a Home Guard private in the BBC’s long-running comedy series Dad’s Army.
16 Stratford Birthplace Trust Archive, DR611/79.
17 Stratford Birthplace Trust Archive, ER25/3/34/4).
18 Guthrie and others had long envisaged a permanent alliance between Stratford-upon-Avon and the Old Vic (as a kind of National Theatre) but Guthrie contributed his ideas about a temporary arrangement in a letter of 31 October 1939, presumably in a spirit of wartime conciliation.
19 Stratford Birthplace Trust Archive, DR1108/1/7. Other notable correspondents on the issue of the 1939 season and the festival to come were Victoria Powell, Robert Atkins, and Dame Edith Lyttleton.
20 When Payne took up a lecturing post in the United States he was replaced by Milton Rosner, who was followed by Robert Atkins, who in turn resigned in 1945, making way for Sir Barry Jackson and a new era at the Memorial Theatre. Notable actors during the war included Baliol Holloway, James Dale, Alex Clunes, John Laurie, and Claire Luce; apparently Luce was responsible for a record attendance of 250,000 in the 1945 season.
21 Beauman gives an excellent account of the very different ethos that emerged in Stratford-upon-Avon in the postwar years.
22 See also Laurence Olivier, On Acting (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1986), 60.
23 This drawing is reproduced in Strobl 211.
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