IRENA R. MAKARYK
All theatrical cultures have recognized, in some form or another, this ghostly quality, this sense of something coming back in the theatre, and so the relationships between theatre and cultural memory are very deep and complex. Just as one might say that every play might be called [Ibsen’s] Ghosts, so, with equal justification, one might argue that every play is a memory play. Theatre, as a simulacrum of the cultural and historical process itself, seeking to depict the full range of human actions within their physical context, has always provided society with the most tangible records of its attempts to understand its own operations. It is the repository of cultural memory, but, like the memory of each individual, it is also subject to continual adjustment and modification as the memory is recalled in new circumstances and contexts.
(Roach 2)
Studies of ‘ghosting,’ repetition, memory, recycling, and ‘double-vision,’ are particularly appropriate theoretical models with which to approach theatre – and more specifically, Shakespeare – and the Second World War. Herbert Blau’s simple but potent remark, ‘Where memory is, theatre is’ (173),1 may be extended to include the theatre of war: ‘Where memory is, war is.’ By its very name, the Second World War draws attention to its presiding ‘ghost,’ the First World War.2 Most obviously linked through numerical sequence, the two wars are often inextricably connected in other ways, including the numerous memorials on which the fallen soldiers of the Second World War appear directly underneath those of the First, rather than on a separately dedicated monument.3
Similarly, Shakespeare’s ‘return’ in the Second World War was ‘haunted’ by the extensive uses of his plays in the First.4 As will be seen in the pages that follow, Shakespeare’s role in the Second World War was more complex and nuanced than it was in the Great War, where the Bard was found on stage, in the press, in sermons, in the new medium of silent film, and in propaganda.5 In the late 1930s and the 1940s, neither the actors nor the public easily took to such jingoistic uses of the Bard. As A.D. Harvey has astutely and wittily observed, ‘the second-time-round syndrome’ is ‘less obviously an advantage in art and literature’ (Harvey 273). The Second War, coming so soon after the First, was, for the most part, unable to call upon what Harvey terms ‘The Romance of War’ – the promise of glory, the opportunity to reveal ‘character’ through heroic or courageous acts in a war that would be quickly resolved. Such ‘Romance’ had withered ‘under the machine guns of the Somme’ (Harvey 63).6
Shakespeare presents a fascinating case study of the nexus of problems binding together concepts of collective remembrance, history, war, and national identity. His works – themselves frequently engaged with issues of memory – occupy a prismatic and complex position in world culture: they straddle both high and low, national and foreign, literature and theatre. If cultural memory is defined as comprising ‘that body of reusable texts, images, and rituals specific to each society in each epoch, whose “cultivation” serves to stabilize and convey that society’s self-image’ (Assmann 132), then Shakespeare poses a special challenge, since he forms part of the sanctioned, institutionalized heritage of many different cultures – not just one.
Most, if not all, of the belligerents of the Second World War have, at one time or another, laid claim to Shakespeare and have called upon his work to convey their society’s self-image. His works constituted a readily available, malleable, and instantly recognizable part of their cultural inventory of signs and symbols: a ‘ghost’ of their cultural past, and for some, a ghost whose use was also strongly embedded in the previous war. However, as the essays in this volume will amply prove, the meaning that accrued to that ‘ghost,’ that sign, was neither single nor simple. In calling up their cultural inventory during wartime, various groups were forced to confront the crisis of their own identity and cultural memory,7 a confrontation that often involved questioning the extent of their allegiance to that very English author. Shakespeare’s complex and ambiguous cultural position was further complicated – and sometimes aided – by intermediaries. Thus, for example, the fact that the Japanese had appropriated Shakespeare from German sources partly mitigated the Bard’s unwelcome and problematic English origins.8
Fought on every continent except Antarctica, the Second World War offers a unique and temporally limited but geographically inclusive period in which to analyse and probe the vexed interrelations among war, Shakespeare, nationalism, political exigency, collective memory, and collective identity. The social and political upheaval of the war, the sheer number of casualties, the reshaping of borders, the massive movement of refugees, and the central event of the Holocaust reshaped cultural values, paradigms, and mores. We are still living with the consequences today.9
Wartime conditions provide especially fertile grounds for testing a variety of theories concerning concepts of culture (in both an anthropological and an aesthetic sense). Classical reflection theories (the assumption of the existence of a collectively shared national identity and distinct features of a national culture), one may posit, are least problematically assimilated during wartime when desire, fear, or both, require collective, not individual, thought and shared, rather than divided, allegiances. Theatre, however, appears to work against such reflexes. As playwright David Edgar observes, ‘Theatre invites – indeed requires – the audience to empathize,’ to see the world from another, competing perspective, without the comforting guidance of a single narrator or historian (36). Theatre is, of necessity, an interrogative venture that requires audience collaboration, its ‘imaginarie Forces’ (to employ the Chorus’s phrase from Henry V), to work for its completion. Theatre’s ‘imaginary puissance’ also lies in the simple fact that it is literally an embodied genre in which actors repeat the action again and again, each time with a difference. Every performance is ‘haunted’ by the history – and histories – of previous performances. Both this interrogative nature of theatre and its ‘haunting’ complicate our understanding of the reception of especially difficult plays such as The Merchant of Venice (a recurring topic in this book).
The role of theatre and, in particular, Shakespeare, during the Second World War has not yet been examined or documented in any depth, despite the fact that theatrical representations contributed to the war effort from almost the first moments of hostilities.10 As of the point of writing, there were only about a dozen articles that examined the interplay between Shakespeare, theatre, and the Second World War, although both war studies and reception studies of Shakespeare have seen a remarkable growth during the past two decades.11 Shakespeare and the Second World War is thus the first sustained international, collaborative incursion into this terrain.
The core of Shakespeare and the Second World War is formed of invited essays and a small sampling of revised and expanded papers originally presented at the three-day international bilingual conference Wartime Shakespeare in a Global Context/Shakespeare au temps de la guerre, held at the University of Ottawa in 2009 and timed to coincide with the 70th anniversary of the declaration of the Second World War.
This volume does not present a history of Shakespeare during the Second World War nor is it intended to be complete and comprehensive in its geographical reach, although it does include a wide, international perspective on the topic. Rather, Shakespeare and the Second World War focuses on the way in which Shakespeare – ‘recycled,’ re-viewed, and reinterpreted – is illuminated by and simultaneously illuminates the war in various countries around the world. Among the subtexts of the essays that follow is the recurrent notion that Shakespeare, though seemingly infinitely malleable, is not easily snaffled by propaganda, censorship, or ideology. Slithering out of such constrictions, ‘local’ reinterpretations of Shakespeare’s plays often present unintended meanings and gesture at unexpected discourses.
Most of the essays that follow involve examining what Dennis Kennedy has called ‘foreign Shakespeare’ – that is, Shakespeare in a language other than English and often in an adapted or otherwise transformed mode. The editors and contributors share the view of Julie Sanders who, in her study of adaptation, observed that
it is usually at the point of infidelity that the most creative acts of adaptation and appropriation take place. The sheer possibility of testing fidelity in any tangible way is surely also in question when we are dealing with such labile texts as Shakespeare’s plays. Adaptation studies are, then, not about making polarized value judgements, but about analyzing process, ideology, and methodology. (20)
This last point – analysing process, ideology, and methodology – occupies a central part of the book’s discussions about Shakespeare in/and the Second World War. Moreover, as has been argued, above, Shakespeare is a kind of ‘sign’ or ‘symbol’ of cultural memory. His works serve functions similar to that of
myths, fairy tales, and folklore which by their very nature depend on a communality of understanding. These forms and genres have cross-cultural, often cross-historical, readerships; they are stories and tales which appear across the boundaries of cultural difference and which are handed on, albeit in transmuted and translated forms, through the generations. In this sense they participate in a very active way in a shared community of knowledge, and they have therefore proved particularly rich sources for adaptation and appropriation. (Sanders 45)
As will be seen, Shakespeare frequently served as a point of reference for communal memory and understanding, complicated and problematized by war. Usually instantly recognizable, infinitely referential, but frequently shifting in meaning, Shakespeare’s works offer a prismatic lens through which to view – and sometimes to replay on the cultural plane – the ideological and military clashes of the Second World War. If, as has been argued, performance is deeply ‘embedded into notions of nationalism, identity and power’ and, if ‘war is the continuation of politics by other means’ (pace von Clausewitz), then, ‘performance may well be a continuation of war and politics by other means’; so indeed suggest Thompson, Hughes, and Balfour (1–2). In the current climate of anxiety about the imposition of Western values (represented, as has been argued, by Shakespeare) on other cultures, and the daily presence of war around the world, Shakespeare and the Second World War also invites us to consider the ‘ghosting’ qualities of theatre: whether and how these issues may also obtain today.12
The following essays also suggest that to imagine a simple pro- and anti-war binary use of Shakespeare is not sustainable. As Thompson, Hughes and Balfour have perceptively noted, ‘Theatre in the moment of war creates a time and a conscious space apart from the conflict while paradoxically remaining part of the context. At times, it is part of a resistance against the ‘enemy’ within the narrative of the conflict. At other times, it seeks to resist war itself by trying to construct a reality beyond competing narratives’ (68). Despite the aims of their makers, wartime theatre is rarely consistent with their intentions.
This volume opens with Werner Habicht’s essay, ‘German Shakespeare, the Third Reich, and the War,’ a discussion of the Nazi regime’s ambivalent response to Shakespeare, one which became increasingly complex throughout the 1930s and, especially, during the war. Although Shakespeare had been deeply embedded in German literary and theatrical heritage for more than a century, he was also inconveniently English in a time of war with Britain. On the one hand, the Nazis attempted to impose ideological conformity on the theatres and turn them into instruments of political indoctrination and propaganda, including a shaping of national and racial consciousness; on the other, the Nazis perceived themselves as expert carriers of the best of world culture.13 As Habicht reminds us, the Germans established or subsidized theatres throughout the lands they occupied (including Czechoslovakia, Poland, Belarus, the Netherlands, and France). Indeed, the Nazi regime was perhaps one of the most theatrical of regimes, both in its creation, support, and attempt to control theatres, and in its insistent use of theatrical techniques in staging mass rallies.
Gerwin Strobl has suggested, and Habicht confirms in his essay, that ‘Shakespeare’s fluctuating fortunes in the Third Reich are more than just a historical curiosity. They go to the heart of the Nazi efforts of “cleansing” the German mind and the wider drive to create a Germany in the Party’s image’ (Stroble 16). While Habicht touches only lightly on foreign policy considerations (such as Nazi cultural ‘accommodation’ of Britain up to 1939 and into the early years of the war), he provides a nuanced picture of the way in which prominent theatre artists continued to stage a Shakespeare that did not always cohere with the demands of official ideology. Habicht also alludes to a major theme or undercurrent in many of the essays that follow: the ever inexplicable, paradoxical conjunction of culture and barbarism. Indeed, the longstanding centrality of Shakespeare in German culture often ensured Shakespeare’s use and survival in countries as different as Italy and Japan.
Zeno Ackermann’s ‘Shakespearean Negotiations in the Perpetrator Society: German Productions of The Merchant of Venice during the Second World War’ takes us deeper into this terrain by focusing on a vexed play that was changed forever by the Holocaust14 and that continues to spark heated debate with every new production. Ackermann tackles head on both the use that the Nazis made of The Merchant as a tool of racial propaganda and, as he puts it, the ‘ongoing anxieties that Shakespeare may have been a “Jew-hater.”’ This essay raises three important questions: (1) How was the reception of The Merchant related to Nazi anti-Semitism and the Holocaust? (2) Was there indeed a change in the reception of this play in 1933, when the National Socialist party first came to power in Germany? (3) How much ‘Angst’ did Shakespeare’s character of a thwarted Jewish avenger inspire in the proponents of anti-Semitism?
In the process of dealing with these difficult issues, Ackermann reveals the ambivalent and even contradictory relationship of Nazism to The Merchant, which appears to have been a ‘problem play’ for the theatres of National Socialist Germany. His essay reminds us how performance remembers, supports, but sometimes contradicts the past; it is ‘subtly “imbricated” in all aspects of warfare. Performance can help us carry out war and urge us to commit atrocities; it can also be deliberately employed by artists to create a productive tension with other kinds of culture-war relations and seek to prevent, resist and rebuild’ (Thompson, Hughes, Balfour 14).
Mark Bayer examines Shylock, one of the key figures of The Merchant of Venice, from an entirely different cultural and geographical perspective. His essay, ‘Shylock, Palestine, and the Second World War,’ discusses the way in which The Merchant of Venice variously functioned as a symbol of Zionist ambitions in the region, as a model of and justification for violence against non-Jews, and as a caricature of a number of political figures. In his study of the ‘local’ meanings of Shakespeare set against the backdrop of world power politics, Bayer examines two applications – one Zionist and the other Arab – of Shakespeare’s play to the growing Arab-Israeli conflict. Leopold Jessner’s production of The Merchant at the Habimah Theatre in Tel Aviv (1936), argues Bayer, is surprisingly employed as propaganda supporting the Zionist cause. In this controversial production, Shylock became an allegory of the long-suffering Jewish people who feel only contempt for the Christian aggressors.
By contrast, writing near the end of the war, Ali Ahmed Bakathir shifted the focus of The Merchant onto a local struggle between the indigenous Arab population and the Zionist Jews. As Bayer points out, the characters in Bakathir’s adaptation of Shakespeare’s play, The New Shylock (1945), are fully aware that they are reliving this drama in the present, and that the ‘old’ Shylock prophetically anticipates the ‘new Shylock’ who wants more than a pound of flesh. With Bakathir’s transformation of the centrepiece of the play, the trial scene, into an international tribunal aimed at determining the future of Palestine, ‘the pound of flesh’ becomes the issue of sovereignty over the entire country. The play’s representation of Arab and Jew is resonant with an ensemble of current stereotypes and longstanding archetypes, thus making it a useful vehicle for distilling some of the complex and volatile Middle Eastern issues of the Second World War that continue to haunt us today.
With Nancy Isenberg’s essay, ‘“Caesar’s word against the world”: Mussolini’s Caesarism and Discourses of Empire,’ we turn to Italian Fascist uses of Shakespeare and, in particular, to Mussolini’s use of a Caesarian model of politics and leadership to make of his rule a Modern Roman Empire, and of his persona a Modern Caesar. Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar was called up to aid and abet Fascist ideological programs, and in so doing to help rally popular consensus for Mussolini’s belligerent empire-building intentions. Shakespeare’s play also directly or indirectly spawned alternative stage Caesars better suited to a changing political climate after Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia. Among them was a new play, Cesare, written by Mussolini with the help of Fascist playwright Gioacchino Forzano. This adaptation, aimed at celebrating Caesar and regarding him as a hero called to save Rome from decadence, occludes all references to ambiguity and doubt found in Shakespeare’s play. Mussolini’s penchant for the grandiose and his theatrical use of display, along with his other invented symbols of ‘ancient’ Rome, were so visually potent that they ironically and falsely influenced the collective imagination worldwide. As one example, Isenberg points to Joseph Mankiewicz’s 1953 film that liberally (but unknowingly) used Fascist symbols and visual references, taking them for the ancient Roman.
In places occupied by Italian and German forces during the war, a strict censorship was imposed on all aspects of intellectual and cultural life, including the theatre; yet, as Tina Krontiris reveals in ‘Shakespeare and Censorship during the Second World War: Othello in Occupied Greece,’ there were many faultlines in the seemingly rigid totality of censorship and control. The Nazis, and Hitler in particular, held no particular racial prejudice against the Greeks. Although Shakespeare, as an Englishman, could not appear on the stage of the National Theatre of Greece (which had hitherto always awarded the Bard a prominent position), his plays could be found in the private theatres. One of these was a production of Othello, purportedly directed by Spyros Melas (but, in fact, by Dimitris Myrat) at the Cotopouli Theatre in 1942. While the reason for Myrat’s choice of this specific play is not entirely clear, what is certain is that he aimed through this production to introduce a new, psychologically oriented, and ideologically progressive approach to Shakespearean drama. His Othello was a self-controlled, noble, self-reflexive, dark (but not black) protagonist who sported a kippah-like cap and spoke with a slightly Hebraic accent. Such an Othello, argues Krontiris, was only possible through the mediation of Melas, the Nazi collaborator whose name was identified on the advertisements and the program as the production’s director. Aiding in this advancement of an anti-racist interpretation of Othello was Shakespeare’s special relationship with German culture (remarked upon above) and the collaborations and the gaps created by the interdependence of Greek nationals, collaborators, and Nazi occupiers.
The situation in Poland was radically different. Krystyna Kujawińska Courtney’s essay, ‘“In This Hour of History: Amidst These Tragic Events” – Polish Shakespeare during the Second World War,’ is the first work to examine Shakespeare’s presence in Poland, a country that found itself trapped between Nazi and Soviet aggression. Theatres were closed; many actors and writers were killed or sent to concentration camps while others fled abroad. Literary and scholarly publications were prohibited. There were no Polish productions of Shakespeare under Nazi occupation, which aimed to eradicate completely the cultural life (including the education) of all Slavs. Working through hitherto unexplored documents, Kujawińska Courtney has discovered that, under the auspices of the Secret Theatre Council, Shakespeare moved underground. In Warsaw and Cracow, his works were secretly read and performed by Polish national artists and intellectuals. Ironically, censorship was eased in the Jewish ghettos, perhaps to distract the inhabitants from their ultimate fate, and thus permission was granted to stage an adaptation of Hamlet. Shakespeare was also found in internment camps, particularly in Murnau, which was close enough to the Swiss border to serve as a ‘Potemkin’ camp at which amateur theatricals (including Shakespeare) organized by Polish officers were permitted. Polish soldiers who served with the Allied forces found Macbeth a particularly congenial play. Many highly regarded Shakespeare, some even perceiving him as a guarantor of European and world cultures. Less grandly, the Scottish play was adapted as a farcical comedy reflecting on the quotidian life of Polish soldiers in Britain, serving both to lift up morale and to unify soldiers in exile.
As Kujawińska Courtney’s essay suggests, the human losses on the Eastern front were staggering. Historians estimate that 32 million military and civilian lives were lost, but even these numbers may not yet represent a final tally.15 Aleksei Semenenko’s ‘Pasternak’s Shakespeare in Wartime Russia’ turns to Hamlet in this context of total war and strict censorship. In such circumstances, translation often becomes an aesopic activity, masking yet revealing personal and social-political realities. Translation also served Pasternak as a sole outlet for a creativity that would otherwise be shackled by censorship. Boris Pasternak’s Hamlet, the most influential of all of his translations of Shakespeare, served not only stage but also screen (as the script for Grigorii Kozintsev’s famous film), but provoked much controversy. It still plays a significant role in many aspects of Russian cultural life and may be – as Semenenko claims – the most important Russian work of translation of the twentieth century.
On the Far Eastern front, as elsewhere, Shakespeare elicited complex and ambivalent responses. Ryuta Minami’s ‘Shakespeare as an Icon of the Enemy Culture in Wartime Japan, 1937–1945’ considers the shifting positions of Shakespeare on page and stage in wartime Japan. ‘Possessing’ Shakespeare had been regarded as one proof of Japan’s status as a modern, advanced nation since his first introduction to that country in 1875, but by 1940 the Japanese government had begun an extensive series of prohibitions that included banning not only the use of English words but also performances of American and British music and plays. Yet, as with Germany and Italy, Japan’s attitude to Shakespeare was not simply that of antagonism toward an icon of the enemy culture. Some Japanese scholars and theatre artists tried to ‘appropriate’ Shakespeare while separating him from his birthplace, Britain. One of the reasons that Shakespeare survived the war in Japan was his strong association with German culture. Simultaneously admired and hated, Shakespeare nonetheless retained his status as a symbol of cultural sophistication; his plays, while not staged, were recommended reading, along with Tolstoy’s works and Greek myths, for teenage girls.
From Japan, we turn to China. Alexander C.Y. Huang’s ‘“Warlike Noises”: Jingoistic Hamlet during the Sino-Japanese Wars’ shows how, during the 1940s when China was under threat of Japanese invasion, Shakespeare emerged as a weapon of political propaganda. Huang uncovers the competing, yet sometimes collaborative, tension between admiration for Western theatre and the pull of Chinese nationalist sentiment. During a time when the theatre was suspect, the Shakespearean canon was an obvious choice for those who wished to avoid censorship by the Nationalist government. The function of this body of work as a site for social education and its potential for propaganda were seen as compelling reasons to stage public performances. Examining Jiao Juyin’s 1942 Hamlet set in a Confucian temple in rural China, Huang argues that a special prestige accrued to this production. The unusual location emphasizes how site-specificity may bring unexpected and new cultural, religious, political, or other discourses into an interpretation of the play, thus confirming the value of what has been called ‘topoanalysis.’16
In addition to the esteem associated with Shakespeare’s stature, the sheer ability to stage and attend plays during a time of war was itself perceived as a victorious gesture by the Chinese, as it was by other nationalities, including the British. With Simon Barker’s ‘Shakespeare, Stratford, and the Second World War,’ we turn to the English Midlands, the Shakespearean heartland. Barker’s essay describes the wartime context for short seasons of plays staged at the Memorial Theatre in Stratford in order to show how the war years irreversibly transformed the relationship between Stratford and Shakespeare. With its Shakespearean associations, its location in the symbolic centre of England (and its proximity to major targets of enemy bombing), Stratford represented a geographically and ideologically unique place from which to observe the potential destruction of the values it had come to represent.
Peter Billingham’s ‘Rosalinds, Violas, and Other Sentimental Friendships: The Osiris Players and Shakespeare, 1939–1945’ admiringly examines the little-known work of an all-female touring company that brought productions of Shakespeare to non-standard venues and disparate communities. While the composition of the Osiris Players was, at that time, unique, their commitment to taking theatre to wartime citizens of Britain mirrored that of other touring companies including the Adelphi Players, the Pilgrim Players, and the Compass Players. It has been argued that these – and other better known companies (such as the Old Vic) that toured the various nooks and crannies of Britain – in fact constituted the real ‘national’ theatre (Wolfit). Such groups (both professional and amateur, English and refugee troupes) bringing pared-down productions with none of the conventional trappings to Welsh mining towns, gun sites, factory canteens, and other such locations, created new audiences for theatre; in turn, the players, brought closer to their public, thrived on this synergy. The wartime perambulations of theatre companies revived British theatre and, it has been argued, contributed to the postwar ‘unprecedented growth in the size and vigour of alternative and experimental theatre’ (Davies 64). In bringing to light information about this all-female company, Billingham’s essay offers a neat complement to the recent work of Michael Dobson, who has studied all-male companies in prisoner-of-war camps.17 Both Dobson and Billingham have begun the necessary process of the restoration of the numerous ‘other,’ especially amateur, wartime ‘voices.’
Anne Russell’s essay, ‘Maurice Evans’s G.I. Hamlet: Analogy, Authority, and Adaptation,’ examines an unjustly ignored but, in its day, popular production of Hamlet (1944) for an audience of American soldiers stationed in Hawaii, close to the geographical reminder of the reason that the United States entered the war: the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Russell explores the cuts and changes that Evans made to Shakespeare’s play about revenge, and demonstrates that Evans’s hyper-masculine – rather than hesitating – Hamlet was created to help the GIs more readily identify with the Danish Prince. Adapting the play for practical, as well as aesthetic and ethical reasons, Evans justified his cuts with reference to eighteenth-century theatrical practice. Most notably, in removing the graveyard scene, he hoped to avoid too much direct attention to a physicality and omnipresence of death that would counteract his desire to raise the troops’ morale. Despite Evans’s intentions to stage a less problematic play, his adapted Hamlet nonetheless revealed that the genre of tragedy is difficult to digest in wartime and is particularly resistant to explicit ideological uses.
The last three essays in this book turn more specifically to a consideration of Shakespeare and (rather than during) the Second World War. Today, the war is still experienced very much as a physical presence. In Europe, buildings still retain pock-marks from shelling; entirely new postwar city centres have sprouted up on the ground of destroyed buildings; grim historical plaques in places like the Paris Metro remind us how even innocuous places were scenes of execution; and still-dangerous unexploded shells lurk underneath otherwise pastoral-looking fields. In North America, however, the consequences of the war are decidedly more human than architectural, historical, or geographical. With the huge influx of postwar immigrants and refugees (especially from Eastern Europe), who ultimately reshaped the values and the culture of this country, Canadian demographics changed dramatically. These groups, along with returning soldiers and war brides, also brought with them stories of unimaginable horrors that only began to seep into North American consciousness after the war, especially with the onset and the aftermath of the Nuremberg Trials (1945–9).
Because Canada was never occupied, nor did its citizens experience such devastating attacks (as did the Americans, who felt the full force of the war at Pearl Harbor), the nature of Canadian responses to the Second World War was necessarily of a different order. As Marissa McHugh’s ‘The War at “Home”: Representations of Canada and of the Second World War in Star Crossed’ shows, the Canadian response has been focused more on the domestic and personal, than on the overtly political or horrific aspects of war. But even this ‘local’ view of war does not fail to raise the troubling spectre of collaboration with the enemy, at home, on the domestic front.
McHugh focuses on a little known but intriguing Canadian adaptation of Romeo and Juliet set in German-occupied Holland. She examines the way in which the playwright (perhaps Patrick Bentley) uses Romeo and Juliet to expose the way in which war infects domestic spaces that appear to be far removed from its horror. By transposing the setting from Italy to Holland, a location and a distinct moment when Canada was said to have proved its independence as a nation, the playwright is able to critique the effects of war on a nation’s social-domestic relations without undermining the importance of the Second World War in the development of Canadian national identity. This provocative interrogation of a highly celebrated moment of Canadian war history, the liberation of Holland, is set within the context of a universal critique of intolerance and hatred that also necessarily afflicted Canada. Since, among others, the loyalties of Canadian-German families were suspect, the author may have found it necessary to conceal his own domestic German connections. In moving the action of Verona to Holland, but all the while perhaps thinking of tensions in Canada, the author employs the Shakespearean intertext to critique war and ‘tribal’ affiliations. Less optimistic than Shakespeare, ‘Bentley’ finds no communal unity or restoration created by the lovers’ deaths.
Yet a more personal and visceral response to Shakespeare and the war may be found in Tibor Egervari’s contribution to this volume, ‘Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice in Auschwitz.’ Egervari, himself a playwright, theatre director, scholar, and survivor of both the Holocaust and Stalinist Hungary, first discovered The Merchant of Venice in 1970 on the stage of Canada’s Stratford Festival. As elsewhere, the Stratford Festival production of this play raised controversy and dismay, particularly around the question of what it may have contributed to anti-Semitism. (As noted above, these issues are explored in greater detail by Zeno Ackermann and Mark Bayer in this volume.) Egervari’s theatrical experience of The Merchant centred on its dramatic greatness and particularly on the hugely powerful figure of Shylock. Grappling with what Shylock has come to mean and what Egervari believed that the character both was before the war and should be now, Egervari began a struggle with Shakespeare’s work that ultimately resulted in an urge to recreate the play. His essay describes his process of writing Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice in Auschwitz: a way of thinking through Shakespeare and the war. Egervari’s elation and frustration with Shakespeare’s ‘ghost,’ the ‘ghosts’ of history, and his own inability to achieve his goals, are markedly part of his personal account of his attempt to deal with the politics and the ethics of representation.
The delicate balance between a critique of war and an admiration for heroism and courage is explored in detail in the concluding essay of this volume: Katarzyna Kwapisz Williams’s ‘Appropriating Shakespeare in Defeat: Hamlet and the Contemporary Polish Vision of War.’ Gathering up a number of the themes raised in the other essays, Kwapisz Williams examines what it means to recycle both painful history and Shakespeare in the context of a culture that has traditionally (and for the most part unconditionally) admired heroism and sacrifice for one’s country. What she calls the Polish ‘national martyrology’ is brought to bear upon the interpretation of a specific event, the Warsaw Uprising of 1944, as it appears in a trenchant analysis by Paweł Passini in his production of Hamlet’44. This 2008 adaptation of Shakespeare’s play is rich in thematic intensity, setting official versions of the past against the memories of ordinary people; national history against family history; collective memory against historical memory; acts of remembrance against memory aids; the need to forget against the need to remember.
Hamlet’44 is remarkable in its forthright attempt to stage questions about the ethics of representation, narrative testimony, and individual and national identity within the context of a war that shattered Eastern Europe. Passini’s production may usefully be regarded as what Roger Simon has called a ‘difficult return’ – that is, ‘a form of memorialization where history is allowed to remain problematic and unresolved in the present’ (qtd in Thompson, Hughes, Balfour 211) – or what Andreas Huyssen describes as ‘productive remembering’ (qtd in Thompson, Hughes, Balfour 214), that is, a practice that opens up public debate about strategies of remembering, and appears to encourage new possibilities for engaging with the past. Passini’s invoked ‘ghosts’ – of war, of Shakespeare, of memory – demand the critical interrogation of received ideas, myth, and stereotypes; rather than safely bracketing off the past from the present, they invite its audience to stare history in the face. Adapting Hamlet, Shakespeare’s best known play, for this purpose, Passini suggests the way in which acts of remembrance may not simply prevent forgetting but may also ‘fix’ the identity of a community and prevent its recovery.18
Kwapisz Williams thus brings us up to the present day, to a world that is englobed by wars and their ghosts. Her essay – like that of McHugh – seems to confirm Sidney Aster’s claim that ‘the nature of the national experience itself … is the lasting fruit, or poison, of 1945.’ Not so much physical destruction, but rather psychological and sociological upheavals are among the most potent reasons for our continuing fascination with the Second World War. Thirty years ago, Aster observed, ‘[A]ll wars begin as propaganda and end as myth … It is only by looking again at the 1939–1945 War … that the balance between myth, illusion and reality can be restored.’ Kwapisz Williams similarly suggests that there is no better way to comprehend the terrifying events of war – any war, and the myths created about those events – than by exposure, repetition, and recycling; she also compellingly argues that the best way to understand Shakespeare’s texts is by appropriating them to local contexts where, ironically, they become fully revealed.
1 Other thought-provoking studies on this topic are Marvin Carlson, The Haunted Stage: The Theatre as Memory Machine (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001); and Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996).
2 On the literature of the First World War, see Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); and A.D. Harvey, A Muse of Fire: Literature, Art and War.
3 This is certainly true of Canadian war memorials.
4 On Shakespeare, commemoration, and the First (Great) War see the work of Clara Calvo and Ton Hoenselaars. I am grateful to both for sharing their essay-overview of the First World War, ‘Shakespeare and World War I,’ soon to be published by Greenwood Press. Also see Werner Habicht, ‘Shakespeare Celebrations in Times of War,’ Shakespeare Quarterly; and, in the same volume of that journal, Coppélia Kahn, ‘Remembering Shakespeare Imperially: The 1916 Tercentenary,’ Shakespeare Quarterly 52 (2001): 456–78.
5 See Balz Engler, ‘Shakespeare in the Trenches,’ Shakespeare Survey 45 (1993): 105–11 for a discussion of German uses and celebrations of Shakespeare during the First World War, including the German Chancellor’s citations from Henry V when the troops stood before Calais. On German Shakespeare also see Wilhelm Hortmann, Shakespeare on the German Stage: The Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998) and Rodney Symington, The Nazi Appropriation of Shakespeare: Cultural Politics in the Third Reich (Lewiston, NY: Mellen, 2005).
6 Among the exceptions is Canada, as Jeffrey A. Keshen notes: ‘Jingoism and even naïvete were very much evident among volunteers’ (22). Keshen suggests that both their age and the fact that some of them were veterans of the Great War contributed to the idea of war as a site of valour and ‘manly’ comradeship.
7 The last two decades have seen an explosion of research on the topic of cultural memory and cultural remembrance. Still, an excellent survey of the major trends may be found in Jeffrey K. Olick and Joyce Robbins, ‘Social Memory Studies: From “Collective Memory” to the Historical Sociology of Mnemonic Practices,’ American Review of Sociology 24 (1998): 105–40.
8 On this point, see Ryuta Minami’s essay in this volume.
9 An indication of the continuing fascination with the Second Word War can be seen, for example, in the creation of the World War Two Society, established in 2009 ‘to foster interest in the period of the Second World War and to remember the sacrifice and achievements of the British and Commonwealth Forces between 1939 and 1945.’ See the Society’s webpage at http://battlefieldsww2.50megs.com/ww2_society.htm. The World War Two Studies Association (an older organization, established in 1967) continues to promote ‘historical research in the period of World War II in all its aspects,’ and is affiliated with the International Committee for the History of the Second World War. See http://www.h-net.org/~war/wwtsa/.
10 See, for example, Steve Nicholson, The Censorship of British Drama, 1900-1968, vol. 2 (Exter: Exter University Press, 2003): ‘the role of theatre and the stage during the Second World War has never been documented or subjected to a general analysis’ (167). Since then, Rodney Symington and John London have begun to address this lacuna.
11 This list includes Jonathan Baldo, Alan Clarke, Gerd Gemuenden, Werner Habicht, John London, Zoltán Márkus, Irena Makaryk, and Rodney Symington. While little has been written about Shakespeare and the Second World War, there has been a resurgence of interest in studying theatre, war, violence, and conflict, doubtless spurred on by the war in the Middle East and in Afghanistan. The European Shakespeare Research Association (ESRA) dedicated their 2009 conference (held in Pisa) to the theme of Shakespeare and Conflict: A European Perspective. There has also been a renewed interest in the representation of war in Shakespeare’s plays. For an overview of the literature, see ‘War in Shakespeare’s Plays,’ Shakespearean Criticism, vol. 88, ed. Michelle Lee (Detroit: Thomson Gale, 2005) 239–380. More recent studies include Shakespeare and War, eds. Ros King and Paul J.C.M. Franssen (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).
12 The world press coverage of director Corinne Jaber’s 2005 production of Love’s Labour’s Lost in Kabul, Afghanistan, sparked such a continuing debate about the relationship between Western culture and its ‘imposition’ on new audiences. For a detailed reconstruction and analysis of this production, see Irena R. Makaryk, ‘“Brief candle”?: Shakespeare in Afghanistan,’ Multicultural Shakespeare: Translation, Appropriation, and Performance 6 (21)/7 (22) (2010): 81–113.
13 Jonathan Petropoulos, Art as Politics in the Third Reich (Chapel Hill, North Carolina: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), examines the aesthetic theories of the Nazis and their habits of art collection. While focusing on visual art, Petropoulos offers a fascinating picture of the way in which the Nazis perceived themselves as arbiters of great art. Many of the same claims can be made about their views of theatre.
14 John London concludes “Non-German Drama in The Third Reich” by asking whether Shakespeare did indeed survive the Nazis ‘unscathed’ or whether ‘a certain approach to Shakespearian drama (and other non-German plays) extended beyond 1945’ (252).
15 This figure is approximately equivalent to the current population of Canada. It may be that the finally tally will never be known, since, as Catherine Merridale has observed, under the Soviet regime, ‘among the many secrets of this war was its true cost’ (127). R.A.C. Parker observes that the 1959 Soviet census showed a deficit of 50 million, extrapolating from the 1939 census what the approximate figures, in stable circumstances, should have been (281). Robert Service calculates that 26 million Soviet citizens perished, and that 1,710 cities and 70,000 villages were destroyed (225).
16 See, for example, Leslie Hill and Helen Paris, eds., Performance and Place, Performance Intervention Series (Houndsmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), especially Hill’s Preface and Introduction, for a penetrating analysis of notions of place, space, and ‘non-spaces.’ The term ‘topoanalysis’ is originally that of Gaston Bachelard and his experience of architecture; see The Poetics of Space (1958) (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1994). Also useful, M.A. Carlson, Places of Performance: The Semiotics of Theatre Architecture (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989); and G. McAuley, Space in Performance: Making Meaning in the Theatre (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999).
17 I am grateful to Michael Dobson for sharing with me the manuscript of his chapter on ‘Prisoners’ from his book Shakespeare and Amateur Performance: A Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge Univeristy Press, 2011).
18 On the notion of fixing identity and on issues of remembering, see Thompson, Hughes, Balfour.
Assmann, Jan. ‘Collective Memory and Cultural Identity.’ New German Critique 65 (Spring/Summer 1995): 125–33.
Aster, Sidney. ‘The Second World War as a National Experience.’ n.d. 27 Sept. 2010. http://www.ibiblio.org/hyperwar/UN/Canada/Natl_Ex[/NatlExp-Intro.html.
Baldo, Jonathan. ‘Wars of Memory in Henry V.’ Shakespeare Quarterly 47.2 (Summer 1996): 132–59.
Blau, Herbert. The Eye of Prey. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987.
Calvo, Clara. ‘Shakespeare as War Memorial: Remembrance and Commemoration in the Great War.’ Shakespeare Survey 63 (2010): 198–211.
– Calvo, Clara, and Ton Hoenselaars, eds. Shakespeare and the Cultures of Commemoration. Special theme issue of Critical Survey 22:2 (2010).
Clarke, Alan. ‘German Refugee Theatre in British Internment.’ Theatre and War 1933–1945: Performance in Extremis. Ed. Michael Balfour. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2001. 86–116.
Davies, Andrew. ‘The War Years.’ Theatre and War 1933–1945: Performance in Extremis. Ed. Michael Balfour. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2001. 54–64.
Dobson, Michael. Shakespeare and Amateur Performance: A Cultural History. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011.
Edgar, David. ‘Making Drama Out of Conflict.’ Conflict Zones. Ed Carla Dente and Sara Soncini. Pisa: Edizioni ETS, 2004. 31–48.
Gemuenden, Gerd. ‘Space out of Joint: Ernst Lubitsch’s To be or not to Be.’ New German Critique 89, Film and Exile (Spring–Summer 2003): 59–80.
Habicht, Werner. ‘Shakespeare and Theatre Politics in the Third Reich.’ The Play out of Context: Transferring Plays from Culture to Culture. Ed. Hanna Scolnicov and Peter Holland. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989. 110–20.
– ‘Shakespeare Celebrations in Times of War.’ Shakespeare Quarterly 52 (2001): 441–55.
Harvey, A.D. A Muse of Fire: Literature, Art and War. London and Rio Grande: The Hambledon Press, 1998.
Hoenselaars, Ton, and Clara Calvo. ‘Shakespeare and World War I.’ The Shakespeare Encyclopedia: Life, Works, World and Legacy. Ed. Patricia Parker et al. Phoenix, AR: Greenwood Publishing (forthcoming).
Kennedy, Dennis. Foreign Shakespeare. Contemporary Performance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.
Keshen, Jeffrey A. Saints, Sinners, and Soldiers: Canada’s Second World War. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2004.
London, John. ‘Non-German Drama in the Third Reich.’ Theatre under the Nazis. Ed. John London. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000.
Makaryk, Irena R. ‘Wartime Shakespeare.’ Shakespeare in the Worlds of Communism and Socialism. Ed. Irena R. Makaryk and Joseph G. Price. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006. 119–35.
– ‘World War II.’ The Shakespeare Encyclopedia: Life, Works, World and Legacy. Ed. Patricia Parker et al. Phoenix, AR: Greenwood Publishing (forthcoming).
Márkus, Zoltán. ‘Shakespeare at War: Cultural Appropriations of Shakespeare in London, Berlin, and Budapest during World War II.’ PhD Diss. New York University, 2002.
Merridale, Catherine. Ivan’s War: The Red Army 1939–1945. London: Faber and Faber, 2005.
Parker, R.A.C. The Second World War: A Short History. 1989. Oxford: Oxford University Press, rev. ed. 2001.
Roach, Joseph. Cities of the Dead. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996.
Sanders, Julie. Adaptation and Appropriation. New Critical Idiom. London: Routledge, 2006.
Service, Robert. Comrades. Communism: A World History. London: Macmillan, 2007; Pan Books, 2008.
Strobl, Gerwin. ‘Shakespeare and the Nazis.’ History Today (May 1997): 16–21.
Symington, Rodney. The Nazi Appropriation of Shakespeare. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen, 2005.
Thompson, James, Jenny Hughes, and Michael Balfour. Performance in Place of War. London, New York, and Calcutta: Seagull Books, 2009.
Wolfit, Donald. ‘Shakespeare in Wartime.’ First Interval: The Autobiography of Donald Wolfit. London: Odhams Press, 1954. 192–234.