From Common Reader to Canon: Memorialising the Shakespeare-Reading British Soldier During the First World War

In 1916, at the same time as Shakespearean tercentenary addresses were claiming that Shakespeare epitomised British national ideals, numerous press dispatches ‘from the field’ appeared in British newspapers seeming to prove the existence of a large audience of Shakespearean readers among those fighting for those ‘ideals’ in active zones. This chapter examines some of these claims. It asks how the image of the Shakespeare-reading soldier was deployed within book-trade and charity publicity and capitalised upon by educators and other members of Britain’s cultural and intellectual elites. It assesses the ways in which press anecdotes about soldiers reading the classics contributed to larger discourses of national identity and cultural and aesthetic mobilisation. Finally, it asks how these accounts may have contributed to the conflict’s transmutation into a ‘literary war’ in post-war collective memory, one in which literature came to assume an outsized role in how the conflict was subsequently memorialised.

Culture and Colonialism: The 1916 Shakespeare Tercentenary in Egypt

The 300th anniversary of William Shakespeare’s death in 1916 coincided with an unprecedented political crisis across the globe. The outbreak of the First World War in 1914 brought to the fore the ambitions of the established and would-be colonial powers, conflicts between and within existing nation states, and disenfranchised groups’ aspirations for self-determination. Recent scholarship has demonstrated how the 1916 Shakespearean commemorations in countries such as Britain, Germany, Ireland, and the USA registered these political upheavals. However, research into the Shakespeare Tercentenary has so far neglected Egypt’s complex response to the occasion. Amidst developing political tensions, which were to culminate in the Revolution of 1919, Egyptian intellectuals nevertheless chose to commemorate Shakespeare’s Tercentenary. These commemorations, however, were marked by ambivalence: while expressing admiration for Shakespeare, Egyptian commentators questioned the appropriateness of celebrating an English writer instead of promoting Egypt’s, and the Arabs’, own national literature. This chapter examines the manifestations of these conflicting feelings, ranging from the heated press debates surrounding the occasion, through Cairo University’s celebrations, to tributes published by individual intellectuals, such as Ahmad Lutfi al-Sayyid and Mohammed Hafiz Ibrahim. In doing so, the chapter explores the ambiguities created by celebrating a cultural anniversary at a historical moment fraught with acute colonial tensions.

Introduction: Memorialising Shakespeare, Memorialising Ourselves

This introductory chapter starts by situating Shakespeare commemoration in the context of recent theory on cultural and collective memory. It then examines the relationship between literary memorialisation and the nation state before problematising commemoration events outside Europe in the context of postcolonial and decolonial theory. Commemoration events have become fraught, it suggests, because of a growing tendency to focus on the politics of the present. This presentist position, which typically represents the values and interests of the past and present as radically opposed to one another, presents challenges for traditional modes of memorialisation, which in the past have sought to demonstrate positive links and continuities between the literatures and cultures of past and present. The introduction concludes with a set of detailed summaries of the chapters in the volume.