Antipodal Shakespeare: Remembering and Forgetting in Britain, Australia and New Zealand, 1916–2016 9781474271431, 9781474271462, 9781474271455

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Antipodal Shakespeare

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Antipodal Shakespeare Remembering and Forgetting in Britain, Australia and New Zealand, 1916–2016 Gordon McMullan and Philip Mead with Ailsa Grant Ferguson, Kate Flaherty and Mark Houlahan Afterword by Catherine Moriarty

THE ARDEN SHAKESPEARE Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, THE ARDEN SHAKESPEARE and the Arden Shakespeare logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2018 Paperback edition first published 2019 Copyright © Gordon McMullan, Philip Mead, Ailsa Grant Ferguson, Kate Flaherty and Mark Houlahan, 2018 Gordon McMullan, Philip Mead, Ailsa Grant Ferguson, Kate Flaherty and Mark Houlahan have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as author of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. xi constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design: Dani Leigh Cover image: New Zealand soldiers, sightseeing trip from the Shakespeare Hut. © Auckland War Memorial Museum All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-474-27143-1 PB: 978-1-3501-2654-1 ePDF: 978-1-474-27145-5 eBook: 978-1-474-27144-8 Typeset by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

CONTENTS

List of figures  vii List of contributors  viii Acknowledgements  xi

Introduction: ANZAC and the Tercentenary in London, April 1916  1 Gordon McMullan and Philip Mead 1 Forgetting Israel Gollancz: The Shakespeare Tercentenary, the National Theatre and the effects of commemoration  29 Gordon McMullan 2 Shakespeare, memory and the city: The Tercentenary in Sydney and its afterlife  63 Philip Mead 3 The Shakespeare Hut for Anzacs: Building commemoration, performing memory, 1916–19  89 Ailsa Grant Ferguson 4 From the Shakespeare Hut to the Pop-­up Globe: Shakespeare, memory and New Zealand, 1916–2016  117 Mark Houlahan

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CONTENTS

5 Lest we remember: Henry V and the play of commemorative rhetoric on the Australian stage  145 Kate Flaherty Afterword: The antipodal dynamics of commemoration  173 Catherine Moriarty Notes  189 References  207 Index  221

FIGURES

2.1 Sydney Shakespeare Monument (courtesy Peter F. Williams, Monument Australia). 2.2 Max Dupain, Botanic Gardens, Macquarie Street Entrance, c. early 1950s (courtesy Rex Dupain). 2.3 Jeffrey Smart, Cahill Expressway, 1962 (Estate of Jeffrey Smart. National Gallery of Victoria). 3.1 The Shakespeare Hut, as seen from Gower Street, c. 1917 (courtesy YMCA Archive). 3.2 The Shakespeare Hut Lounge (courtesy YMCA Archive). 4.1 Frontispiece, Sir Walter Raleigh, History of the World (1614). 4.2 Flyer for the Shakespeare Hut (Waikato Museum of Art and History 1993-11-163. Photo Dan Morrow). 4.3 Pop-­up Globe, Auckland, February 2016 (Photo Mark Houlahan). 4.4 Pop-­up Globe deconstructing, May 2016 (Photo Mark Houlahan). A.1 Fred Taylor, ‘I pray you let us satisfie our eyes . . .’, 1938 (Poster published by London Transport. Width: 635mm, height: 1016mm. London Transport Museum).

75 76 82 90 103 120 124 143 144

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CONTRIBUTORS

Gordon McMullan is Professor of English and Director of the London Shakespeare Centre at King’s College London. He created Shakespeare400, a London-­focused consortium of cultural organizations marking the Shakespeare Quatercentenary in 2016. He is a general textual editor of the Norton Shakespeare 3E (2015), a general editor of Arden Early Modern Drama, author of Shakespeare and the Idea of Late Writing: Authorship in the Proximity of Death (2007) and The Politics of Unease in the Plays of John Fletcher (1994), and editor of the Arden Shakespeare edition of Henry VIII (2000) and the Norton Critical Editions of 1 Henry IV (2004) and Romeo and Juliet (2016), as well as several collections of essays, including, most recently, Late Style and Its Discontents: Essays in Art, Literature and Music (2016, with Sam Smiles). Philip Mead is inaugural Chair of Australian Literature and Director of the Westerly Centre at the University of Western Australia. Between 2010 and 2013 he was Principal Investigator for the Australian Research Council-­funded project ‘Monumental Shakespeares: an investigation of transcultural commemoration in twentieth-­century Australia and England’ (with co-­investigator Gordon McMullan). His publications include Teaching Australian Literature: From Classroom Conversations to National Imaginings (2011, with Brenton Doecke and Larissa McLean Davies), the prize-winning Networked Language: Culture and History in Australian Poetry (2008), and Shakespeare’s Books: Contemporary Cultural Politics and the Persistence of Empire (with Marion Campbell, 1993). Ailsa Grant Ferguson is senior lecturer in English at the University of Brighton. Between 2010 and 2013 she was a Postdoctoral

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Research Associate at King’s College London for the Australian Research Council-­funded project ‘Monumental Shakespeares: an investigation of transcultural commemoration in twentieth-­century Australia and England’. Her publications include Shakespeare, Cinema, Counterculture: Postmodern Appropriations of Shakespeare (2015) and several essays on the Tercentenary and the Shakespeare Hut. Kate Flaherty is senior lecturer in English and drama at the Australian National University. Between 2008 and 2012 she held a postdoctoral research fellowship at the University of Sydney working on the Australian Research Council-­funded project ‘Shakespeare Reloaded’: an investigation of uses of Shakespeare within school and university English curricula from the nineteenth century to the present. Her monograph Ours As We Play It: Australia Plays Shakespeare (2011) examined three plays in performance in contemporary Australia. More recent work investigates Shakespeare on the colonial stage and the public interplay of the dramas with education, imperial politics and sectarian friction. Her work has been published in Shakespeare Survey, Contemporary Theatre Review and Australian Studies as well as in a range of edited collections. Mark Houlahan is associate professor in the English programme in the School of Arts at the University of Waikato and President of ANZSA (the Australian and New Zealand Shakespeare Association). He works on the place of Shakespeare in New Zealand and the use of adaptations and appropriations in Shakespeare performance. His publications include the Broadview/Internet Shakespeare Editions Twelfth Night (2014, edited with David Carnegie) and Shakespeare and Emotions: Inheritances, Enactments, Legacies (2015, co-­edited with R. S. White and Katrina O’Loughlin), as well as numerous essays on Shakespeare in/and New Zealand. Catherine Moriarty is Curatorial Director of the University of Brighton Design Archives and Professor of Art and Design

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CONTRIBUTORS

History in the Faculty of Arts. She has directed a variety of digitization projects and has written on the history of the Design Council’s photographic holdings, and on the relationship between sculpture and design. Between 1989 and 1996 she led a major Leverhulme-­funded research project, the National Inventory of War Memorials, at the Imperial War Museum. In 2005 she was a visiting fellow at the University of Melbourne’s Australian Centre, and in 2008 she was awarded the prestigious University of Melbourne Macgeorge Fellowship. Her publications include three monographs: Abram Games, with N. Games and J. Rose (2003), The Sculpture of Gilbert Ledward (2003) and Making Melbourne’s Monuments: The Sculpture of Paul Montford (2013).

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The lead authors would like to thank the Australian Research Council for the generous award of a Discovery Project Grant, ‘Monumental Shakespeares: a transcultural investigation of commemoration in twentieth-­century England and Australia’ (2010–12), which enabled us to begin the research that is expressed here. Gordon and Philip would particularly like to thank Ailsa Grant Ferguson for her contribution as Research Associate and Early Career Researcher on the ARC project. We would also like to thank Gavin Clarke, former Archivist at the National Theatre Archive, for his immense generosity with time and space and for his ongoing support of our research: his guidance through the SMNT and other related materials was simply invaluable. We would like too to thank Sally Barnden, Anna Kamaralli, Claire Jones, Olivia Murphy and Miranda Fay Thomas for their research assistance. Gordon would like to thank a number of individuals at King’s College London for their support of, and engagement with, Shakespeare400, the London-­based Quatercentenary season that we created and coordinated in 2016. These include the former Principal of King’s, Sir Richard Trainor; Russell Goulbourne, Dean of Arts and Humanities; Paul Readman, Vice-Dean for Research; Nicola Rankin, Faculty Business Manager; members of the Culture team, notably Leanne Hammacott, Ulrika Högberg, Sophie Cornell and Oliver Stannard; Fran Hegyi for her wonderfully supportive report; and successive heads of the Department of English, Josephine McDonagh and, especially, Richard Kirkland. Above all, he would like to thank his fellow members of the London Shakespeare Centre, without whose enthusiasm and collegiality the project would have been impossible: Hannah Crawforth,

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

John Lavagnino, Sarah Lewis, Lucy Munro, Emily Oliver, Lizzie Scott-Baumann, Ann Thompson, Emma Whipday, Clare Whitehead – and especially Sonia Massai, whose knowledge of global Shakespeare is in a different league. Without the unparalleled organizational skills (not to mention the patience and sense of humour) of Laura Douglas, the Shakespeare400 project manager, there would have been no hope. And he would like to thank Nicola Rankin for belief, patience and cava (but never, ever prosecco). He dedicates his share of this book about commemoration to the memory of his mother, Muriel McMullan, who died while it was being written. Philip would like to thank the librarians of the Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, particularly Maggie Paton and Samantha Hagan for their assistance with the one-­ day symposium in April 2013, ‘Shakespeare 1916 and Antipodal Memory’, where earlier versions of some of the research in this volume were presented. He would also like to thank Tobias Döring and Sabine Schülting for their invitation to speak about the history of the Sydney Shakespeare Monument at the Deutsche Shakespeare-Gesellschaft conference in April 2014, and David McInnes of Melbourne University for sharing his comprehensive knowledge of Quatercentenary events in Australia. Thanks to Jenna, too, for all her support. And we would like to thank Margaret Bartley, Arden publisher, for her belief in this not entirely typical book, Ian Howe for his wonderfully precise copyediting and Merv Honeywood for his patience in the final stages. Perth, Cambridge, MA, and London

Introduction: ANZAC and the Tercentenary in London, April 1916 Gordon McMullan and Philip Mead

I never could stand London during the war. It seemed to have lost its bearings and broken out into all manner of badges and uniforms which did not fit in with my notion of it. One felt the war more in its streets than in the field, or rather one felt the confusion of war without feeling the purpose. JOHN BUCHAN (1992 [1916]: 110)

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Waterloo Station, 25 April 1916 On the early evening of Tuesday 25 April 1916, the crowds flowing into London’s Waterloo Station included two very different groups of people, each of which had that afternoon attended commemorative events of national and cultural significance, one responding to the death of a playwright three hundred years earlier, the other to a military debacle that had taken place only twelve months previously. At a century’s distance we can see historical resonances in this unremarked confluence that would presumably not have been apparent to the crowds at the railway station. Only with hindsight can we see that their experiences that afternoon in two theatres a mile or so apart in central London were interrelated in complex and fascinating ways. From one direction came Londoners who had been in the audience at the Old Vic – a venerable theatre, located a few hundred yards south of Waterloo Station, that was two years into an ambitious cycle of productions of the complete works of William Shakespeare which would continue until 1923 (the three-­hundredth anniversary of the publication of Shakespeare’s First Folio) – for a ‘Special Matinee’ as part of its festival marking the Tercentenary of Shakespeare’s death. Meanwhile, from another direction, marching past the Houses of Parliament and across Westminster Bridge, came Australian troops of the ANZAC corps, fresh from attending another matinée, one of a very different nature but similar duration, as part of the commemoration of the disastrous landings at Gallipoli a year earlier and the subsequent loss of life of thousands of Australian and New Zealand troops under British command in a futile attempt to open the Dardanelles and ultimately capture the Ottoman capital, Constantinople – marking, that is, the first Anzac Day. In a curious way, these parallel events express in a single locale processes that had been under way in very distant but imperially connected locations – Great Britain on the one hand, Australia and New Zealand on the other – in the build-­ up to the Shakespeare Tercentenary, promoted in both

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hemispheres by committees whose personnel could not have foreseen either the advent of the First World War and its inevitable impact on their plans or the events of the war itself that would require commemoration and thus add to the memorializing palimpsest at this intense moment in history. In Sydney, in the larger New Zealand cities and elsewhere in Australasia, as in London and elsewhere in Great Britain, plans had in fact been in train for a decade or more to establish the best ways to mark the Tercentenary, and parallel debates took place in each location about modes of Shakespearean commemoration – whether it would be better to remember Shakespeare by way of a theatre, a statue, a library or a set of scholarships – with results that were partly shared and partly divergent, in each case tellingly. In the event, the commemorative processes designed originally to mark the three-­hundredth anniversary of the death of the English national poet became entwined, in both hemispheres, with historical events and memorial processes with a quite different focus and with quite different trajectories – those thrown up by a global war – and the result, expressed both in conjunction and in parallel, is the subject of this book. The Old Vic matinee was one of the very few Tercentenary events to take place in London on or around the actual anniversary of Shakespeare’s death. Awkwardly for those planning the celebrations, Easter was early in 1916 and Easter Sunday fell on 23 April, the traditional anniversary date of Shakespeare’s death. In order to avoid the uncomfortable association of Christ and Shakespeare as foci of veneration that would result from simultaneous rituals, the authorities argued opportunistically (and with no trace of humour) that, as a result of the shift from Julian to Gregorian calendars in the eighteenth century, the three-­hundredth anniversary of Shakespeare’s death would in fact fall on 3 May 1916, and it was for that date that the principal commemorative events in London were scheduled. The Old Vic’s Tercentenary festival, however – which was not part of the official marking of the anniversary – ran from 22 April to 5 May, thereby encompassing

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both actual and virtual tercentenaries. As a result, the matinee on 25 April – a theatrical event that featured several of the best-­known Shakespearean actors of the day – took place on the same day as the first anniversary of the Gallipoli landings, and it coincided exactly with the Anzac Day performance at His Majesty’s Theatre on Haymarket – a coincidence that is, as we will explain, in a quiet way the expression of a triple commemorative displacement. ANZAC, for readers not from Australia or New Zealand, may need glossing. The acronym stands for the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps, a joint force formed in 1915 from the Australian Imperial and New Zealand Expeditionary Forces, both of which were sent to the northern hemisphere early in the First World War, ostensibly to Europe but in the event to Egypt. The corps, entirely made up of volunteers, lay under the command of the English general William Birdwood, and their first action was the catastrophically mismanaged landings at Gallipoli, which began on 25 April 1915 and ended, ignominiously, with withdrawals that began in November of that year. ‘Anzac’, for Australians and New Zealanders now, has become more than an acronym for an historical fighting force. It expresses a myth of nationhood, the emergence of post-­imperial Australia and New Zealand from British colonial rule and, very particularly, the heavily debated renegotiation of Australia’s relationship, a new nation from 1 January 1901, with its former colonizer. This ongoing struggle was most immediately played out in recent times through two political rows, one over a 2010 work of academic history, What’s Wrong with Anzac? The Militarisation of Australian History, which, in an attempt to counter the myth-­making about Anzac, argued that the glorifying of Anzac Day has distorted and militarized Australian national history, the other over the award of an Australian knighthood to Prince Philip in 2015 by the then Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott, a controversy that contributed to Abbott’s downfall at the hands of his own party (Lake et al. 2010). On that Tuesday in 1916, such debates were for the future. ANZAC was a hastily improvised army corps fresh from a

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disastrous baptism of fire and central London was visibly filled with more than two thousand of its soldiers, the Australians travelling from barracks in Aldershot, taking overground trains into Waterloo, and any New Zealanders who may have joined the commemoration making their way to the theatre by train and Underground from Colchester. These troops, many of whom had survived the fighting at Gallipoli that had ended with evacuation earlier in the year, were shortly to join British and French troops on the Western Front. Their commemorative day, which had been declared a public holiday in London, had begun with a service at Westminster Abbey, attended by King George V and Queen Mary, a solemn occasion observing the loss of Anzac soldiers in the Dardanelles in the cause of England’s war with Germany and the Ottomans. From the Abbey, the soldiers marched up Whitehall and east along the Strand to the Hotel Cecil (which was close to the Savoy) for lunch; then they marched to His Majesty’s Theatre – ‘[l]ent by courtesy of Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree’ – for a matinee ‘given to the Australian Imperial Forces in Great Britain on Anzac Day under the auspices of the High Commissioner for Australia and the Agents-General of the States of the Commonwealth of Australia’ and supported by the Australian-­born theatre entrepreneur Oswald Stoll (Mead 2015: 225–44).1 The show began with the presentation of medals by High Commissioner and former Prime Minister Andrew Fisher to soldiers for ‘Distinguished Conduct at Anzac’ and ended less earnestly with ‘Mlle Anna Martens’ and the ‘Pick-­a-Dilly Girls’ from the Opéra Comique, Paris, singing ‘Pick-­a-dilly’. That the venue for the event had been donated by Beerbohm Tree underlines an element of overlap between the two very different performances. Tree, the impresario of His Majesty’s, had, at the instigation of the London Shakespeare League, produced an annual Shakespeare Festival at the theatre for the preceding decade but was noticeable by his absence from London at this moment.2 He was in fact in the USA, where he had taken up Hollywood’s offer to film his production of Macbeth, and where he made the most of the opportunity this

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gave him to encourage American participation in the war as Britain’s ally. According to his biographer Hesketh Pearson, Tree ‘made more than a hundred speeches in favour of the Allies before America joined in the war’ (Pearson 1956: 230). Over the Tercentenary weekend he was in New York, and involved in multiple commemorative occasions there, reading at an Easter memorial service at St John the Divine Cathedral on the Upper West Side in the company of another of London’s leading Shakespeareans, Johnston Forbes-Robertson (whose wife, Gertrude Elliott, would a little later run the performance schedule at the Shakespeare Hut) (see Mead 2015). He declared that ‘[t]oday our two countries are united as one to honour the memory of the greatest man who ever spoke our common language’, adding that ‘[o]n this Easter day two books stand side by side – the Bible and Shakespeare’ – thus underlining the fact that, unlike in London, the organizers of the New York celebrations did not seek to separate Easter from the Shakespeare Tercentenary nor the commemoration of a Shakespeare anniversary from the commemoration of the deaths of Allied troops. He went to performances of Henry VIII and The Merchant of Venice during the Shakespeare festival week, attended a screening of his film version of Macbeth, went to actors’ fund benefits, appeared in a Red Cross fundraising matinee at the New Amsterdam Theatre as Macbeth, Falstaff, Richard the Second and Malvolio, gave an after-­dinner speech to the Shakespeare Club, joined a wreath-­ laying at the Shakespeare statue in Central Park (a memorial dating from the 1864 Tercentenary of Shakespeare’s birth), delivered a lecture on ‘Shakespeare and the Actors’, saw the African American Lafayette Theatre’s performance of Othello (and addressed the audience at the end of the play), and on 25 April attended an evening commemoration for the Tercentenary at Carnegie Hall. Tree claimed that the war was the reason he was performing in New York rather than in his usual annual Shakespeare festival at His Majesty’s: ‘Owing to the conditions prevailing at home, I have decided to celebrate this year’s festival in New York’, he noted, adding that the English at this

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time ‘have enough that is serious to think about without going to the theatre for it’ (Mead 2016). As Philip Mead has noted, however, Tree’s rhetoric did not quite match reality, and his implication that wartime conditions were sufficiently grim as to mean no theatre was perhaps part of his propaganda drive. After all, a successful season of Shakespeare’s plays was produced by John Martin-Harvey, a former protégé of Tree, at His Majesty’s for five weeks in May and June 1916, and the hugely successful musical comedy Chu Chin Chow opened there in August, running for five further years (MartinHarvey 1930: 460). Theatre, including Shakespearean production, despite calls from some quarters for its complete cessation in wartime, remained alive and well during the war, and the Anzac matinee effectively constituted a brief interruption in a full programme at His Majesty’s, Tree’s absence notwithstanding.3 On that same April afternoon and at precisely the same time as the Anzac matinee, there was, as we have noted, another, rather different performance taking place across the river at the Old Vic, one created in part by Tree’s wife, Helen Holt, and their elder daughter, Viola Tree. This was a notably more highbrow affair, given by the Friends of the Old Vic, and it included some of the finest Shakespearean actors of the day – Ellen Terry (playing Katherine in Henry VIII), Edy Craig, Ben Greet, Viola Tree, Sybil Thorndike – performing scenes from seven Shakespeare plays – Henry IV, Part 1, Henry VIII, Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth, Hamlet, Othello and A Midsummer Night’s Dream – as well as a range of musical items, including Edward German’s setting of ‘Orpheus with his Lute’ from Henry VIII. A tangibly patriotic affair, the matinee ended with ‘The King’s Prayer’ from the early Elizabethan play Ralph Roister Doister and, finally, the national anthem. This matinee audience would have been emerging from the performance at the Old Vic, down the road from Waterloo, just as the Anzac troops were arriving at the station in order to return to their barracks. On the other side of the world in Sydney, meanwhile, the Town Hall had been booked for the

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Tercentenary but was solemnly released to an Anzac Day committee for the staging of a commemorative event that included the performance of excerpts from Shakespeare (Mead 2015: 67–84). Thus in both locations Tercentenary plans, created to commemorate an event that had taken place three hundred years earlier, ceded ground to Anzac, marking something much more recent, something that had taken place only a year earlier. The Shakespeare Tercentenary and the first Anzac Day thus coincided, asymmetrically, across the hemispheres. That they did so was partly, as we have seen, a result of the perceived need to avoid celebrating the Tercentenary on Easter Day, and to recognize the sacrifice of Allied troops, an element of the history of the Tercentenary that has been wholly overlooked. Investigating it is part of our decision to perform what we are calling an ‘antipodal’ reading of the 1916 Tercentenary – one that assesses in parallel events in London in April and May 1916 and those that took place in Sydney and elsewhere in Australia and New Zealand at the same time, events that require us to reflect on certain local manifestations of what we are calling the ‘antipodal’ that emerged, as a result of the war, within London, the late-­ imperial centre, itself. Our aim is to sketch a possible alternative way of reading the becoming-­global of the phenomenon ‘Shakespeare’, situating that process in relation to time, geography and ideology by presenting a specific case study, one that connects Shakespeare, war, commemoration, monumentalization, myth-­ making and nationhood at a precise historical moment, and that follows some of the outworkings of that moment across the past century. The Shakespeare Tercentenary lies at the cusp, historically speaking, of the imperial and the post-­imperial, and its afterlife tracks the accretions and losses attendant on processes of memorialization in certain antipodally connected parts of the world: in the northern hemisphere, Great Britain (specifically London); in the southern, Australia (specifically Sydney) and New Zealand (specifically Auckland, but also Dunedin). The memorializing relationship we trace turns

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out to be premised at least as much on forgetting and misremembering as on remembering, and we note that the shape it takes emerges from accident, from delay, from unforeseen event and resultant improvisation, as often as it does from carefully laid plans. This history of memorializing also emerges from events that require a spontaneous or hurried response and that thus open up certain cultural perspectives in the particular way that improvisation can do, being, as it is, a local response relatively untrammelled by reflection or revision.

Antipodal reading This is a relatively brief and focused book, deliberately so – an intervention or a set of extended essays rather than a tome – but it cannot avoid, given its subject matter, a broad reach, addressing as it does issues of memory, contingency and commemoration, of the cultures of the First World War, of Australian history, of New Zealand history, of British history, of the history of the establishment of Shakespeare as the key literary and cultural icon of the English-­speaking world and of the local and global, not least in respect of the phenomenon known as ‘global Shakespeare’. The idea of ‘global Shakespeare’ is decidedly overdetermined at this point in critical history, and we seek to engage with it in this book not directly but obliquely. None of us is, per se, a ‘global Shakespeare’ specialist, and we do not seek to make overblown claims within a field that others have shaped as the primary focus of their research. Rather, we address Shakespeare, the Shakespeare phenomenon, the global Shakespeare effect, from our particular localities and by way of local case studies that became of particular interest to us in the build-­up to the Shakespeare Quatercentenary of 2016. That our interest in the global is locally inflected is of course not unusual: the local/global dyad has been a commonplace of ‘global Shakespeare’ studies for at least two decades, and globalization studies tend properly to note that this dyad can mislead, can be read as a simple antonym, and to

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emphasize instead the interpenetration of the local and the global, the claim that, in Anthony Giddens’s words, ‘locales are thoroughly penetrated by and shaped in terms of social influences quite distant from them’ – which must be particularly true of locales with colonial and postcolonial history (Giddens 1990: 18–19). For us, Arjun Appadurai’s insight about the disjunctures and unevenness of the temporal and spatial processes of globalization had particular resonance in relation to the phenomena we have come to associate with the Shakespeare Tercentenary, an event you might expect to have been primarily local to Britain (Appadurai 2001: 4–5). This resonance has nagged at us as we have reflected on our own particular interest in the history of Shakespearean memorialization and as we have considered the geographical, cultural and historical relationships expressed by events that include the two London performances that took place in parallel on 25 April 1916. Our sense is that the locales we address in this study (London, Sydney, Melbourne, Auckland, Dunedin) are by no means simply and only ‘local’, fixed to one place or culture at one time or part of an abstract whole, nor are they quite recognizably ‘global’ in the sense of the term as it has become a key component of postmodernity. Rather, they are what we have chosen to call ‘antipodal’ – that is, they have a sustained socio-­historical relationship across the hemispheres which entails that they function antipodally, north and south, in a complex but directly connected way arguably reminiscent of Donne’s pair of compasses in his poem ‘A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning’: If they be two, they are two so   As stiff twin compasses are two; Thy soul, the fixed foot, makes no show   To move, but doth, if the other do. That is to say, because of their interpenetrated history, these ostensibly polar locales do not operate wholly independently;

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they are always in some way interdependent and by no means equally so (just as the imbalanced gendering of the poem partially undermines the apparent value of ‘the fixed foot’). There can be no balance, simply, in an antipodal relationship of the kind we outline because of the inequality of north and south that is the result of the determining history of empire and its accompanying complexities and contradictions. In this sense, the antipodal is marked by oscillation and telaesthesia, not by simple oppositions of otherness or assumptions about centre and margin, and so its operations are always about misrecognitions and contingencies. Thus, London’s relationship to Sydney or Auckland is distorted – shaped (warped) by history, by colonialism, by the resistant-­yetinterdependent nature of postcolonial experience; necessarily also, then, the modes of representation and commemoration of Shakespeare across antipodal locales share in this resistance-­ yet-interdependence. This, we think, is an expression of Ulf Hannerz’s observation that the ‘local’ is ‘more protean than primordial’, which must especially be true in respect of colonial history, in which any sense of the fixity of the local has always already been fractured (Hannerz 1996: 27). We therefore offer the term ‘antipodal Shakespeare’ as an alternative to, or a refinement of, ‘local’ and/or ‘global’ Shakespeare. Not that we think that in so doing we either avoid or resolve the tensions or the imbalances apparent in the local/global binary; rather, we reflect on the particular effects of the north–south, colonial–postcolonial binaries evoked by the idea of antipodality, and we wonder what difference there may be when the global locales in question are directly – antipodally – connected by close historical and social interrelationships, despite geographical distance, across a sustained period. By ‘antipodal reading’, then, we mean an analysis of certain activities, events or performances taking place at the same moment in ostensibly equal and opposite locations across the globe, locations that are in fact – due to the effects of history, in particular imperial history – not equal at all, culturally and politically. The antipodal is not precisely

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geometric or simply polar; it is anamorphic and reflexive, characterized by misrecognition. It depends upon the demonstration of a binary relationship between two locations that are diametrically conjoined – that is, geographically remote but intimately connected by time and history. We understand the ‘antipodal’ as more specific, in a certain way, than the ‘local’ due not only to its dependence upon a direct connection between two geographically distant locations but also to its relationship to time: the antipodal is expressed in certain key – if often arbitrary – conjunctions at precise moments that are in themselves notable but that also subsequently generate afterlives at least as arbitrary or unpredictable as the originary moments themselves. In other words, for our particular case study we are treating the ‘antipodal’ as synchronic, at least in its originary moment, but as Kate Flaherty’s chapter in this volume in particular makes clear, the ramifications of such moments also have a marked diachronic dimension. ‘Antipodal’, we should note straight away, is not synonymous with ‘Antipodean’. ‘Antipodean Shakespeare’ would be a term – an inherently patronizing one – for cultural activity relating to Shakespeare taking place in Australasia. By ‘antipodal Shakespeare’ we mean a mode of reading, a means of analysing cultural activities taking place in parallel, with a shared impetus and with a range of connections, direct and indirect, almost certainly colonial in origin, across significant geographical distance, most likely across the hemispheres. The word is chosen consciously to function in contradistinction to the usual binary local/global. The primary Oxford English Dictionary (OED) definition of the ‘Antipodean’ is ‘Of or pertaining to the opposite side of the world; esp. Australasian’, but the word inevitably retains associations of the deformed and outlandish, whereas for ‘antipodal’ it is ‘Of or pertaining to the antipodes; situated on the opposite side of the globe’. It is the second half of the latter usage that interests us most, especially in the context of the OED’s first supporting quotation, which is from Thomas Browne in his Pseudodoxia

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Epidemica of 1646 (306): ‘The Americans are Antipodall unto the Indians.’ This rather slyly offers the sense we seek of an apparently equal-­and-opposite quality that is not as straightforward as it would seem (never mind, in Browne’s case, just plain wrong, geographically speaking), not least given that in Browne’s day ‘Americans’ were understood to be ‘Indians’. It is this sense of the antipodal as a geographical opposition, a kind of single-­word antonym, that is at first sight balanced, even equal, yet that begins to seem less balanced, less equal, the closer you examine it – at times collapsing in on itself – that we wish to invoke. What is fixed (in a given epoch) is the geographical opposition, the sense of a shared if imbalanced history and culture and, almost inevitably, of colonial imbalance; and the likelihood is that an antipodal relationship will be a North/South one – alternative pairings might include Amsterdam/Johannesburg, Madrid/Buenos Aires, Lisbon/Rio de Janeiro – though a certain kind of antipodality would surely function as a frame too for geographical binaries such as London/Mumbai or Paris/Phnom Penh that disregard the Equator. In this book, we offer what we hope will serve as an exemplary case study, one that is a logical choice for us, given our personal affiliations and professional experience, and that we hope others may in due course expand (or critique) it as a model by way of case studies focused on some of these other antipodal geographies. In our chosen case study, then, we address a particular antipodal relationship at a very particular commemorative moment, one displaced and yet in part generated by the advent of the First World War. The study has two aspects, one of which would presumably have been the case without the advent of war – an analysis of events taking place in parallel in London and in Sydney (and to a lesser extent in New Zealand locations) to mark the Shakespeare Tercentenary – and the other of which is a direct consequence of the war and of Australia and New Zealand’s involvement in support of Britain in that war – which is the presence of what might be termed ‘antipodal activity’ within a single location, London, as a result

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Antipodal Shakespeare

of the presence of Anzac troops there. The particular value, for our reading, of the historical intervention of Anzac – and in particular of the origins at this time of the Anzac myth by way of the first anniversary of the Gallipoli landings – is that we demonstrate the limitations of previous understandings of the 1916 Tercentenary as celebrating Shakespeare ‘imperially’ – which has become the controlling critical understanding of, for instance, Israel Gollancz’s Book of Homage to Shakespeare (1916a). While certain aspects of the 1916 celebrations (and of the Book of Homage) unarguably express imperial values and aspirations, the larger context requires a more complex, overlapping understanding of the historical moment and of its expressions in print and in performance. Rather, we propose, the Tercentenary takes place at, and (in certain ways quite spectacularly) expresses, the cusp of the imperial and the post-­ imperial, thereby valuably complicating critical understandings of Shakespearean commemoration and of the place of Shakespeare in British and world culture at the historical moment in question. What an antipodal reading makes possible, we wish to suggest, is two recognitions: one of the process through which global Shakespeare came to displace imperial Shakespeare, the other of the ongoing relationship between former colonies and former colonial power that memorializing processes express.

1916 and its afterlife Thus to the complex set of events coinciding on one weekend in 1916 – Easter, the Shakespeare Tercentenary, St George’s Day, the Dublin rising – we add another, the London Anzac matinee, that is not mentioned in modern critical accounts either of the Tercentenary or of Anzac, yet one that would have been very apparent to Londoners, and its elision from any overview of the events of this period is an instance of forgetting. Normally, those writing about the Tercentenary simply (and understandably enough) overlook or ignore the intrusion of

Introduction

15

Anzac activities into the ‘Shakespeare period’ in Spring 1916 even though, arguably, for Londoners the Anzac troops would have been rather more highly visible on the day in question than any Shakespeare-­related event. In turn, as we have suggested, the parallel timing of the Anzac and Old Vic matinees seems to us to open up a new way of thinking about the moment of the Shakespeare Tercentenary and its value as a lens through which to view the condition of the ‘Shakespeare effect’, and thus the state of what we have come to know as ‘global Shakespeare’ in 1916. If this has at least the salutary effect of underlining the point that ‘global Shakespeare’ began a good bit earlier than is usually assumed, then that will, we hope, enhance the debate. The authors of this volume began a conversation about the 1916 Tercentenary a fair while ago, and it seems logical to note and outline here the relevant publications that precede the present book, since to a certain extent what we have written here extends from and develops arguments begun elsewhere that readers of this book may not be aware of. First of all, though, it is necessary to acknowledge those who have worked in this field before and alongside us, since there is a significant existing corpus of critical writing on the Shakespeare Tercentenary and on Shakespearean commemoration more widely, including the work of Clara Calvo, Balz Engler, Richard Foulkes, Werner Habicht, Ton Hoenselaars, Christa Jansohn, Coppélia Kahn, Luke McKernan, Dieter Mehl, Andrew Murphy, Monika Smialkowska and others.4 Kahn’s essay especially broke key new ground for a cultural-­material understanding of the moment of the Tercentenary, and we wish to pay tribute in particular to her pioneering thinking about the Book of Homage. More recently, Philip Mead’s essay ‘Tableau Effects’, his, Gordon McMullan’s and Ailsa Grant Fergsuon’s chapters in the Calvo and Kahn collection, Celebrating Shakespeare: Commemoration and Cultural Memory (2015), Grant Ferguson’s previous essays on the Shakespeare Hut and McMullan’s introduction to the 2016 reissue of Gollancz’s Book of Homage all serve as preliminaries

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Antipodal Shakespeare

to the material in this collection and offer additional information and perspectives on the Tercentenary.5 In this book, we return to the concerns first broached in these essays. We tell the story of 1916 and its aftermath mostly separately – chapters examine Tercentenary activities in London, in Sydney, in Auckland and Dunedin, and reflect on the afterlife of the Tercentenary in these various locations – but our primary, if often implicit, interest remains the comparative story the book as a whole tells. The antipodal reading that emerges from these chapters has a geographical reach that is hemispherical and a long duration in time, which, taken together, show how unexpectedly interrelated were the manifestations of Shakespeare commemoration in 1916 (and beyond) across the planet. Gordon McMullan’s chapter anatomizes Israel Gollancz’s leading role in the Tercentenary and in the origins of a global Shakespeare, but also demonstrates how the politics of commemoration meant that his cultural entrepreneurship – which led not only to the creation of the National Theatre in London but was also instrumental in certain ways in the origins of both the Royal Shakespeare Company and Shakespeare’s Globe – was largely and rapidly forgotten. Philip Mead’s chapter focuses on the threads of commemorative desire at work in the Sydney Tercentenary and on the way in which the broader public expression of this desire was largely annulled by the commemorative impulses of a single man’s surviving family and a sculptor of imperial monuments. Ailsa Grant Ferguson’s chapter shows how Shakespeare performance in time of war and in the memorial space of the Shakespeare Hut – doggedly established and run for commemorative purposes – was no guarantee of remembrance. Mark Houlahan’s chapter shows how, from the New Zealand perspective, a new depth in cultural understanding of the First World War is linked to the ways in which Shakespeare’s memory has been antipodally inflected. Kate Flaherty’s chapter traces the longue durée of the disruption by war of Tercentenary commemoration in Australia through the discourse of Shakespeare performance up to the 1950s. And, in

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her Afterword, Catherine Moriarty brings an art-­historical and curatorial understanding to the idea of antipodal Shakespeare, reading 1916 in the context of the commemorative creativity, notably the erecting of statues, in and around the period in question. The cultural resonance of Tercentenary commemorations in our chosen locales thus outweighs the local manifestations, none of which was in the end commensurate with the outcomes imagined by their instigators yet each of which has a significant story yet to tell.

2016 Thus the Tercentenary and its long reach. But what of now? What, in particular, of 2016, the four-­hundredth anniversary of Shakespeare’s death? How did Quatercentenary remembrance compare with the events of a century ago? It is, in many ways, too soon to say: we finished this book in February 2017, too close to the events of 2016 for any adequate perspective, and we ourselves were involved in a range of ways in the marking of the Quatercentenary, thus potentially contaminating the evidence. At the same time, it would be odd in the context of this volume not to reflect for a moment, at least, on the events (and non-­events) of 2016. One of our chapters, after all – Mark Houlahan’s account of 1916 and 2016 in New Zealand – already touches on this subject, recording the largely unheralded creation of a highly successful ‘pop-­up’ Globe Theatre in Auckland, a phenomenon with no direct connection to, but overtly sharing heritage with, the permanent reconstructed Globe in London. So here we will briefly reflect on the ways in which the Quatercentenary played out in Britain, Australia and New Zealand in the course of 2016 and on what this might tell us about contemporary manifestations of Shakespearean commemoration in the locations that have concerned us in this book, and how antipodal reading might be evolving. In Britain, the marking of the Quatercentenary, though extensive and creative, was visibly balkanized, the result both

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Antipodal Shakespeare

of the UK’s current state of national/regional fragmentation and also of the very recent and – in relation to strict commemorative timings – distracting national focus on Shakespeare in the shape of the World Shakespeare Festival, the primary element in the Cultural Olympiad that accompanied the London Olympics of 2012. National Lottery funded and coordinated by the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC), the Festival (‘the biggest celebration of Shakespeare ever staged’, according to its website) featured a number of successes due to its showcasing of global Shakespeare, a logical enough move, obviously, for an Olympic celebration – though persistent protests against the Festival’s partial sponsorship by the global petroleum company BP cast an uncomfortable shadow over the proceedings. The Festival’s most visible component came, as it happens, not from the RSC but from that company’s rivals at Shakespeare’s Globe in the form of the ‘Globe-­toGlobe’ season – ‘37 Plays in 37 Languages’ performed, highly successfully in nearly all instances, by companies from around the world on the open-­air Globe stage – thus establishing a further phase in the ongoing competition between Stratford and London for ‘ownership’ of the Shakespeare industry in Britain. The 450th anniversary of Shakespeare’s birth just two years later in 2014 passed largely unnoticed – it was clearly far too soon for cultural organizations to focus again on Shakespeare – and government showed little or no desire to lead the Shakespeare Quatercentenary commemorations two years later. Commemorative activity in 2016 was fragmented, again with two predictable enough foci – Stratford and London – and to a degree was expressed not as a fresh process but as an ongoing legacy of the 2012 World Shakespeare Festival, most obviously in the form of the production of Hamlet that the Globe took to very nearly every country in the world, finally reaching home on the Bankside on 23 April. London and Stratford shared an academic conference, the World Shakespeare Congress, in August – it opened in Stratford, where it was hosted by the RSC, Shakespeare Birthplace Trust

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and Birmingham University’s Shakespeare Institute, and then moved to London, hosted in turn by Shakespeare’s Globe and King’s College London – but with this minor and strictly academic exception the rival locations marked the Quatercentenary separately, competitively and without central coordination. The differences a century makes were apparent enough. There were no aristocratic galas, no messages from the Queen – though the repeated deployment of Shakespeare in the debates surrounding the UK’s referendum in June 2016 on continued membership, or otherwise, of the European Union made it clear that his name and works retain a tangible place in British political discourse. Holding an empire together is no longer Britain’s problem; holding the United Kingdom itself together, on the other hand, is, and the result was an inward-­ looking, fragmented season of celebrations. The UK is a unitary, not a federal, state, but the Scottish Parliament and Welsh and Northern Irish Assemblies hold devolved powers, and certain English regions, primarily in the north of the country, continue to express interest in acquiring varying degrees of autonomy from London. The Scottish referendum of 2014 rejected independence by 55 to 45 per cent on a very high voter turnout of 84 per cent – not a margin of victory to be unduly celebrated by unionists and one that seems unlikely to remain stable in the wake of Brexit, given that Scottish voters, unlike their English and Welsh peers, overwhelmingly supported the ‘remain’ side in the referendum. In this context, the emphasis on ‘Shakespeare’s England’ (see, for example, the website for the ‘official destination management organization for Stratford-­upon-Avon, Warwick, Kenilworth, Royal Leamington Spa and the surrounding areas’) means that national overemphasis on Shakespeare runs visibly counter to government attempts to minimize England’s, and London’s, continued cultural and political dominance within the United Kingdom.6 The RSC’s 2016 season consciously marked not only Shakespeare’s Quatercentenary but also that of Cervantes and

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Antipodal Shakespeare

of the Ben Jonson First Folio and was overtly designed to respond to the tensions between London and the regions (and also to the RSC’s continued lack of a fixed London base since their departure from the Barbican in 2001). It centred on a ‘Shakespeare Day’ in Stratford on 23 April – unlike in 1916, Easter fell at the end of March in 2016, and no negotiation of the sacred was required – and on a foregrounding of the company’s regionality. It included new productions of Hamlet, King Lear and Cymbeline (for which the production description tellingly began ‘Cymbeline rules a divided Britain’) alongside Jonson’s Alchemist and a dramatization of Don Quixote. The company’s most highly publicized Quatercentenary event was a national touring production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, directed by Erica Whyman, subtitled ‘A Play for the Nation’, which, simultaneously, according to the press release, marked ‘Shakespeare’s 400th anniversary and celebrate[d] his love letter to amateur theatre’ and which toured ‘to all nations and regions of the UK with the same professional company’. The production was regionally differentiated: in each location, Bottom and the mechanicals were played by a local amateur group, cast and trained by the RSC, in a substantial collaboration with thirteen partner theatres, and Titania’s fairy train was played by local schoolchildren. In addition to this production, on 23 and 24 April there was a major live weekend-­ long televised event, a collaboration with the BBC fronted by actor David Tennant, at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre. Thus the most visible activities of the RSC in 2016 were twofold: a single-­day celebration on 23 April, shared with the BBC and focused almost wholly on Stratford-­upon-Avon, and a combined – and distinctly nostalgic – focus on regionality and performance by amateur actors, including schoolchildren. The decision a decade or so ago by the BBC – which acts as Britain’s ‘national voice’ for cultural activity – to regionalize their productions led to a decision to tie the corporation’s Shakespeare coverage to the West Midlands and thus to limit the showcasing of London-­based Shakespeare-­related activities in a national context, adding a further dimension to the long

Introduction

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struggle for control of Shakespearean anniversaries between Stratford and London. This was a policy aggressively pursued in 2016. As the BBC’s press release noted, its aims for 2016 included [a]n online festival, a digital project tracking Shakespeare’s inspirations around the country, and interactive lessons for school children . . . among . . . plans which will see Birmingham – a home of digital innovation at the BBC – play a leading role in the BBC’s celebrations marking 400 years since the death of Shakespeare in 2016. The content included a series of programmes, produced by BBC English Regions, entitled The Best Bottoms In The Land, overseen by BBC Birmingham, following the Royal Shakespeare Company’s journey with their Midsummer Night’s Dream, thus underlining the continued closeness of the collaboration between the BBC and the RSC for the Quatercentenary – wholly understandable for the Stratford-­based RSC, if less so for the still largely London-­based BBC – and resituating Shakespeare as regional, a ‘Warwickshire man’, and thus, by extension, representative of the non-­metropolitan regions of Britain.7 The focus of attention in London, meanwhile, was Shakespeare400, a season of performances and other events created by a consortium of twenty-­seven mainly London-­based cultural organizations coordinated not by government or the RSC but by King’s College London – by way of marking the legacy of Israel Gollancz – and it deliberately spread the generic net more widely than did the World Shakespeare Festival, with its near-­exclusive focus on theatre.8 Shakespeare400 included three exhibitions – the British Library’s ‘Shakespeare in Ten Acts’ was an object-­led history of Shakespeare in performance; ‘By Me William Shakespeare: A Life in Writing’, jointly curated by The National Archives and King’s College London, featured Shakespeare’s will and other early documents of the life; and ‘Shakespeare in the Royal Library’, a display of Shakespeare-­

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related materials from the Royal Collections – along with theatre from Shakespeare’s Globe, international productions at the Barbican that included the Australian King Lear adaptation The Shadow King, opera from Glyndebourne, animations from Film London, music from the London Philharmonic Orchestra and the London Symphony Orchestra and a range of other events and performances. The consortium was a loose arrangement that did not impose conditions on partners: in the event, some of the organizations did more, some less, than they had initially planned, and it was often those not directly involved in normal years with Shakespeare (notably the orchestras) that showed the most enthusiasm in marking the Quatercentenary. Certainly, for some, the Cultural Olympiad continued to cast a shadow, creating a degree of wariness that audiences might not be ready so soon for another intensive year of Shakespeare-­related festivity. Yet the reach of many of the components of the season – not least the Globe’s ‘Complete Walk’ display of short films of each of the plays displayed on a series of screens spread along the South Bank of the Thames from City Hall to the Royal Festival Hall and the highly successful performance-­centred exhibition at the British Library – was considerable, and some elements, including Film London’s ‘Still Shakespeare’, a set of short animated films, and On Shakespeare’s Sonnets, a collaboration by the Royal Society of Literature, Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare and King’s College London to create a series of new poems by contemporary poets based on Shakespeare sonnets, acquired a degree of global visibility (see Crawforth and Scott-Baumann 2016). And what of central government? Unlike the structure of the World Shakespeare Festival, which had substantive funding and coordination across the UK through one lead organization, the RSC, there was no official single lead for the Quatercentenary celebrations and no central funding stream. The result was a commemoration fragmented across the country and across the media, representing both something of a reversion to the near two centuries of struggle between London and Stratford for control of Shakespeare and expressive of the current acentric

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state of the United Kingdom. Rather than cohering the celebrations in Stratford and London through an overarching body, Downing Street directed its attentions outwards as both diplomacy and trade. The ‘Great’ Britain campaign, the government’s Cabinet Office-­led £100m-­plus global advertising campaign to promote UK business and tourism overseas, collaborated with the British Council and a selection of private-­ sector partners to project Shakespeare globally as a sales brand for British business. A ‘cross-Government initiative designed to deliver trade and tourism benefits to the UK by harnessing the best that Britain has to offer under a single brand’, the ‘Great’ campaign was announced in September 2011 by then Prime Minister David Cameron in the build-­up to the London Olympics and sought ‘to make the most of the Olympic opportunity to get the world thinking and feeling differently about Britain, positioning [the UK] as a vibrant, inspiring and innovative nation to visit and invest in’ (Bird 2015). Given its emergence alongside the World Shakespeare Festival of 2012, the ‘Great’ campaign’s engagement with Shakespeare in the lead-­in to 2016 seemed a little belated, its ‘Shakespeare Lives’ strand the product of a collaboration with the British Council mostly constructed in the latter stages of 2015 (though the British Council had been working on its own programme since 2011). Its reach in 2016 was extensive, underlining the ‘soft power’ still expressed by the activities of the British Council, yet also marking the increasing neediness of a nation that, in separating itself structurally from its European neighbours, seeks trade partners in the wider world, including both Australia and New Zealand on the one hand and, on the other, Asian nations with which Australia in particular already has close connections and which it may arguably (not to mention ironically) not wish to share. Yet, as a glance at Susan Bennett and Sonia Massai’s website Performance Shakespeare 2016 (http://performanceshakespeare2016.org) makes abundantly clear, the world’s engagement with Shakespeare across the year – not least the Folger Shakespeare Library’s ‘First Folio Tour’, which took a First Folio to every US state – was by no means

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limited to events sponsored by the British Council or other forms of UK patronage. For its part, Australia hosted numerous Quatercentenary events, each of which is recorded on Anna Kamaralli and John Galea’s website Shakespeare TwentyScore (http:// shakespearetwentyscore.org). But in a globalized and networked world, the ability of anyone interested in Shakespeare commemoration in 2016 to join the virtual jet stream of globally commemorative Shakespearean activity in the press, via documentary TV and social media, and in various modes of digital access to events and exhibitions across the globe – but with metropolitan concentrations on either side of the Atlantic – has of course transformed the world’s engagement with cultural events of this kind. The publicly accessible online exhibition, ‘Shakespeare Documented’ (www.shakespearedocumented.org/ exhibition), for example, coordinated by the Folger Shakespeare Library, is the largest collection of primary source materials documenting the life of Shakespeare, and one of the high-­profile television programmes at the time of the Quatercentenary was Director of the Folger Shakespeare Library Michael Witmore’s C-SPAN documentary ‘400th Anniversary of William Shakespeare’s Death.’ Arguably – and perhaps curiously – this has tended to reiterate a certain turning back to the imperial centre that is at the same time an underlining of the vast reduction in the valency of that centre in the present time, of the global dispersal and availability of the Shakespeare archive and of the proliferation of localized Shakespearean-­themed events (see, for example, the ‘First Folio Tour’9 in the United States). One signal indication of the changing significance of the Shakespeare Quatercentenary in Australia, compared with what we report in this volume about the Tercentenary, was the choice of director-­manager John Bell to retire at the end of 2015 from the helm of Bell Shakespeare, the company he formed in 1990 as an explicitly national theatre company. This meant that there was uncertainty, on the very eve of the Quatercentenary, about the future direction of the country’s leading

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Shakespearean company and thus about the project of an Australian ‘national Shakespeare’, although the Bell company’s new artistic director, Peter Evans, who had collaborated with Bell before taking over as artistic director in his own right, and who is not interested, like Bell, in historical reconstructions of Shakespeare’s plays, did produce and direct Romeo and Juliet and Othello with Ray Chong Nee in the lead role, in 2016. As Adrian Kiernander argues in his study John Bell, Shakespeare and the Quest for a New Australian Theatre (2015), the tension between the classical, imperial, English Shakespeare and the desire, expressed through Shakespeare nevertheless, for a distinctive Australian national theatre has been present both from the start and throughout the company’s history. It was Bell’s individual vision and commitment that held these tensions in productive balance. As Kiernander points out, ‘During the course of his career, Bell has explored both how Australian theatre can intervene in ongoing debates about the nature of the nation, and reciprocally how the influence of ever-­changing Australian life and culture can reinvigorate the practice of theatre’ (2015: 184). Melbourne Malthouse Theatre’s 2013 production of Tom Lewis and Michael Kantor’s The Shadow King was produced at the Barbican, London, in October 2016. Although it had nothing to do with Bell’s company, this Indigenized version of King Lear was nevertheless a kind of radical extension of Bell’s theatre practice and teaching. The production transposed Lear to ‘the story-­rich and resource-­laden terrain of northern Australia’, reimagining the play as ‘a blood-­soaked tale of two Indigenous families divided by land, identity and legitimacy. Told through modern English, Kriol languages and with a score performed live by an onstage band, the production fuses new text, video and Aboriginal ‘dreamtime’ songs to create provocative theatre’.10 As the pre-­publicity for this production indicated, the ‘English’ Shakespeare at the core of Tercentenary commemoration is no longer available, not even in terms of language, and antipodality in Shakespeare commemoration is now part of a global system within which new discrepancies and cross-­recognitions prevail,

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Antipodal Shakespeare

particularly at the old imperial, now devolving, British end. In the same zone of Australasian Indigenized Shakespeare, inaugurated in 2012 with Perth’s Yirra Yaakin theatre company’s translation of the sonnets into the West Australian Indigenous language Noongar for the London Globe’s Cultural Olympiad, was the performance at the 2016 Australian and New Zealand Shakespeare Association at the University of Waikato (convened by Mark Houlahan) of Regan Taylor’s SolOthello, a one-­man Commedia-­inspired, Maori adaptation of Othello. One creative work of 2016 had a direct line of connection back to debates in Sydney, pre–1916, about the role of Shakespeare commemoration in the growth and encouragement of Australian literature. The high-­profile singer-­songwriter, Paul Kelly, released an album, Seven Sonnets and a Song, on which he sings his own settings of six of Shakespeare’s sonnets and a song from Twelfth Night. There were numerous performances and exhibitions around the country, themed as Quatercentenary, and academic events focusing on scholarly debates, for example, about Christopher Marlowe’s collaborative role in Shakespeare’s Henry VI, occasioned by the new Oxford Complete Works of Shakespeare, which had an Antipodean launch at the Beyond 400: New Shakespeares symposium at the University of Melbourne. In 2016 the University of Melbourne also established a Shakespeare 400 Trust to support the teaching of Shakespeare studies. Official recognition of the Anzac Day anniversary in England on 25 April 2016, though, was a reprise of events of 1916: after a dawn service at Wellington Arch, Queen Elizabeth and the Duke of Edinburgh, accompanied by the Duke of Cambridge, laid a wreath at the Cenotaph in Whitehall. This ceremony was a specific commemoration of the centenary of the Gallipoli Campaign and Anzac Day – of a residual imperial connection, in other words. After this ceremony Queen Elizabeth and the other members of the royal party attended a Service of Commemoration and Thanksgiving at Westminster Abbey in imitation of their royal ancestors’ roles on 25 April

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1916. The absence of Australian and New Zealand troops in London meant, of course, that there was no parade through the streets of the city, nor was there any theatrical component to the commemoration. What had been the antipodality of Shakespeare and First World War memorialization in 1916, emblematized by the afternoon crowd at Waterloo Station, was indiscernible in 2016. It seems clear that in the twenty-­first century the celebration of a Shakespearean anniversary – in Britain as much as in Australia and New Zealand – is by no means any longer a given. This is for a series of obvious historical and political reasons, in view of the history of the association of Shakespeare with the British Empire and with London as the heart of that empire. Yet, as the contributors to this book make clear, the history of the intertwining of Shakespeare and the Anzac story, beginning in 1916, means that Shakespeare became a key cultural vehicle for the transition from imperial to national history in both Australia and New Zealand. Meanwhile, within the UK, regional and national sensitivities mean that London can no longer arrogate to itself even the assumption of centrality to Shakespearean anniversaries. Certainly, Gollancz’s wresting of the focus of Shakespearean engagement from the green spaces of the English Midlands to cosmopolitan London seems to have been short-­lived, and the struggle quietly continues. The Shakespeare of 2016 was of course very different from his 1916 counterpart yet, as we will suggest, the two years are connected across time and across the hemispheres by a series of threads that suggest the complexity of the intertwining of the phenomenon of Shakespeare with the discourses of nation and empire in Britain and in two of her former colonies, now nation states, in the twentieth and very early twenty-­first centuries. In reflecting on the forms of remembering (and of forgetting) of Shakespeare in 1916, in 2016 and across the decades in between, we trace a story that is global, certainly, but is, more to the point, we will argue, antipodal – that is, it expresses the particular tensions of ongoing postcolonial

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Antipodal Shakespeare

relations – foundational yet historically imbalanced relations – between nations in the north and in the south, and it makes apparent in complex and at times baffling ways the ongoing, evolving ramifications of cultural dependence and exchange that emerge from the history of empire and of nation.

1 Forgetting Israel Gollancz: The Shakespeare Tercentenary, the National Theatre and the effects of commemoration Gordon McMullan

The 1916 Tercentenary and the origins of the National Theatre At the rear of the foyer of the National Theatre on London’s South Bank is the building’s foundation stone, which begins with the words ‘In Memory of William Shakespeare’. This might strike casual theatregoers, if they notice it at all, as curious. Surely this expression of commemoration would be more logically located half a mile east at Shakespeare’s Globe

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Antipodal Shakespeare

or a hundred miles north-­west in the Royal Shakespeare Theatre at Stratford-­upon-Avon, since these are the two UK theatres that can each be guaranteed to offer at least one production of a Shakespeare play at any given moment, whereas the National Theatre’s repertoire is, as befits a consciously ‘national’ theatre, far broader in scope. In 2016, the apparent incongruity of the foundation stone’s commemorative function has been all the more apparent, since the National Theatre opened no Shakespeare productions during the Quatercentenary year (As You Like It was still in repertory early in the year, but it opened in autumn 2015). Yet the history of the National Theatre was closely tied to the commemoration of Shakespeare from the outset, and there has been a production of at least one Shakespeare play at the National almost every year since its very first – Hamlet, starring Peter O’Toole, at the Old Vic in 1963 – with only seven exceptions, and in all bar one of the non-Shakespeare years a Jacobean play was produced as, in effect, a substitute: The White Devil (1969 and 1991), The Alchemist (1996 and 2006), The Duchess of Malfi (1985) and The Revenger’s Tragedy (2008). Furthermore, and this is a key instance of the forgetting that seems always to be a crucial component of remembering, its origins and those of both the Royal Shakespeare Company and Shakespeare’s Globe are bound up – in one way or another, and certainly more than each organization tends to acknowledge – with the prolonged and often tortuous process of commemoration that began with the build-­up to the Shakespeare Tercentenary of 1916.1 There are obvious enough reasons why none of these theatres should wish to emphasize its origins in the Tercentenary – not least the RSC and the Globe, neither of which especially wants to be seen as in some way a product of the history of a competitor theatre. Nevertheless, it is a story that can valuably be told, not only as a case study in the selective rememberings and the forgettings that constitute the processes of memorialization and to establish the scope of the activities that marked the Tercentenary year in London but also to underline the antipodal element in these ‘home’ celebrations.

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As a point of comparison with the National Theatre’s ostensibly puzzling foundation stone, I want to glance at another commemorative marker, a bronze memorial plaque that has been located on a wall in the Department of English at King’s College London for several decades, both in its former Strand location and, more recently, in the building on Kingsway where the department is currently housed. Its wording is simple: in memory of israel gollancz k t . l ittd . for twenty-­seven years professor of english language and literature this tablet has been placed in the skeat and furnivall library itself an example of his devotion to the college Sir Israel Gollancz – medievalist, Shakespearean, cultural entrepreneur – was Professor of English at King’s from 1903 to his death in 1930.2 He had studied under the philologist and medievalist Walter William Skeat (1835–1912) at Christ’s College, Cambridge, and he later persuaded Skeat’s widow to donate her husband’s library to King’s; he was instrumental also in the acquisition for King’s of the library of F. J. Furnivall, founder of the Early English Text Society (whose role as director Gollancz took over at his death) as well as the controversial New Shakspere [sic] Society. But the detail that is of primary interest for this chapter is not the referencing of the means by which the Skeat and Furnivall libraries came to King’s but rather the date the plaque gives for Gollancz’s birth: 1864. This is not in fact correct – Gollancz was born in 1863 – but the mistake is telling because it serves, consciously or otherwise, to align Gollancz with Shakespeare, the Tercentenary of whose birth fell in 1864 – a resonant year in the afterlife of

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Shakespeare, the year of the founding of the first national Shakespeare association in the world, the Deutsche Shakespeare Gesellschaft, with which Gollancz had close connections both before and after the First World War, and, most significantly, the year which fully initiated the ongoing, unresolved struggle between Stratford-­upon-Avon and London for ownership of the Shakespeare industry. On that occasion, Stratford won resoundingly, hosting a two-­week Shakespeare festival and setting in train the process that led to the building of the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre (which would later become the Royal Shakespeare Theatre). In 1916, Gollancz sought, in effect, to reverse that victory and to use London as a springboard for a vision of Shakespeare that would, he hoped, transcend both the local and the national, instead acquiring a global identity. That Gollancz should be memorially, if tacitly, linked with Shakespeare by way of the King’s plaque is not so surprising, both because, as this chapter will show, Gollancz was a consistent presence in the planning and execution of the 1916 Tercentenary commemorations and because it appears to be the fate of Shakespeare’s commemorators to blur themselves, or to be blurred, willingly or not, with the writer in whose memory they are ostensibly operating, as Philip Mead’s account of Henry Gullett and the Sydney Shakespeare statue in the next chapter will underline. Counterfactuals are by nature undemonstrable, but it is arguable that without the assiduous work of Gollancz on behalf of the various memorial committees of which he was ‘Hon. Sec.’ in the build-­up to the 1916 Tercentenary, the histories of the National Theatre, the Royal Shakespeare Company and even Shakespeare’s Globe would have been very different. In and of itself this is not necessarily a valuable claim, of course, at least if it is seen to belong to the ‘one-­man-who-­changed-the-­world’ school of historiography (and I admit I have a local interest, as a professor of English at King’s, in reclaiming the history of Gollancz’s under-­recognized achievements), but the logic of this chapter is to offer a short history of his involvement in the 1916 Tercentenary for two

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reasons: one, as a way to outline and reflect on the complex processes of remembering and forgetting that constitute the memorialization of Shakespeare and, by extension, of other figures deemed by a given culture to have significant literary or cultural significance; two, to begin to address Gollancz’s involvement in what we are calling ‘antipodal’ activity by way of the curious phenomenon known as the Shakespeare Hut, his most intriguing wartime commemorative improvisation, a process which Ailsa Grant Ferguson will continue to develop in Chapter 3. Gollancz’s leading role in the Tercentenary – as opposed, for instance, to his role in the establishment of the British Academy, which has been acknowledged quite consistently – seems quite rapidly to have been forgotten in the period between the wars. F. G. Kenyon’s account of Gollancz for the Academy, for instance, is quite terse on the subject of the Tercentenary: In 1916, when the First World War prevented any full celebration of the Tercentenary of Shakespeare’s death, he organized the publication of A Book of Homage, to which scholars and Shakespeare-­lovers from the allied and neutral countries contributed, though few were able to give of their best. From 1908 onwards he was Honorary Secretary of the Shakespeare Memorial National Theatre. He also took an active part in organizing the celebration of a Shakespearian Day in schools, and founded a Shakespeare Association, which met to hear papers and at the outset interested itself in publishing reports of the growth of appreciation of Shakespeare, both in the theatre and in the study, in various countries. KENYON 1931: 166–7 This is an accurate enough account as far as it goes – certainly Gollancz’s editing of the Book of Homage was a highly significant moment, and Kenyon’s primary focus is the Academy, understandably enough – but it nonetheless substantially underplays both the events of the Tercentenary

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and Gollancz’s centrality to those events – omitting, for instance, his instrumental role in Shakespeare Day 1916 and in the creation of the Shakespeare Hut. Kenyon’s account is not atypical, however, and I wish to reflect on the reasons for his amnesia. The forgetting of Israel Gollancz and of his contribution to the Shakespeare Tercentenary is, I will argue, synecdochic of the larger forgetting of the impact of the Tercentenary on the creation of certain contemporary UK cultural institutions, and in recovering the history in question I hope also to extend the argument I have begun elsewhere (McMullan 2015) in recognizing Gollancz’s role in the emergence of what we now call ‘global Shakespeare’ from the unwelcome legacy of ‘imperial Shakespeare’ as well as contributing an initial element in the ‘antipodal’ reading of the interdependent commemorative cultures of 1916 that this book offers.

The build-­up to 1916 To view the physical materials that make up the story of the National Theatre’s foundational entwinement with Shakespearean commemoration, the theatregoer would need to walk south from the theatre to the National Theatre Archive, which is housed in a 1970s building next door to the Theatre’s former home at the Old Vic, and there investigate the contents of a series of box files containing the documents that constitute the history of the Shakespeare Memorial National Theatre (SMNT) Committee. The ‘SMNT’ papers include a plan for a proposed Shakespeare monument (which was never built), a set of plans for the Shakespeare Hut (which was) and a great deal of information about the debates that erupted in the build-­up to the Tercentenary, the impact of the First World War on the plans those debates eventually produced and the aftermath of the commemorative process as it manifested itself in wartime. To piece together this history, it is necessary to go back to the time immediately before Gollancz was appointed

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to a chair at King’s College London. In his preface to the Book of Homage, the sumptuous commemorative volume he edited in 1916, he noted the length of history of planning that had gone into the Tercentenary. ‘For years past’, he wrote, – as far back as 1904 – many of us had been looking forward to the Shakespeare Tercentenary as the occasion for some fitting memorial to symbolize the intellectual fraternity of mankind in the universal homage accorded to the genius of the greatest Englishman. GOLLANCZ 1916a: vii Those plans had, however, been curtailed by the war – in Gollancz’s words, ‘the dream of the world’s brotherhood to be demonstrated by its common and united commemoration of Shakespeare, with many another fond illusion, was rudely shattered’ (ibid.) – and they had, in any case, already been subject to a good deal of struggle and underachievement before war broke out. Planning for the Tercentenary began, in effect, with a letter to The Times on 28 May 1903 from a wealthy Yorkshire brewer, Richard Badger, offering funds towards the creation of a statue of Shakespeare since, he felt, the great writer’s ‘countrymen have, as yet, failed to properly memorialize his marvellous talent’ (Badger 1903). A few months later, this initial proposal became an offer of £500 towards initial expenses and £2,000 towards the cost of a statue, if the London County Council would provide a site. The Council agreed, and the London Shakespeare League – which had been formed a year earlier primarily to promote William Poel’s aim of creating a space for ‘the truer playing of Shakespeare’ in a theatre ‘surrounded on three sides by the audience’ – sent Gollancz to Scarborough to respond to Badger’s request that a committee be formed to raise funds for the statue (Littlewood 1928: 4, 5). At a public meeting in February 1905, the Shakespeare Memorial Committee was formed, with Gollancz as its Honorary Secretary. Some time went by, and then in March

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1908, at the Mansion House, Gollancz announced on behalf of the committee that there would be an international competition for the design of the proposed statue, which was to be erected at Portland Place (a move facilitated by an additional donation of £1,000 offered by Badger to provide prizes). Gollancz characteristically noted the global potential of the scheme: The movement will, it is hoped, be not merely national, not yet confined within the broader limits of the Empire and the great English-­speaking republic . . . but will be truly International; for there is good reason to believe that the various municipalities will readily join in what should ultimately prove to be a world-­wide commemoration.3 Proposals for the memorial include the design now in the National Theatre Archive, best imagined as a cross between the Albert Memorial in Kensington Gardens and Edinburgh’s Walter Scott Monument with Shakespeare at its heart. The statue scheme, however, in the words of Samuel Littlewood, ‘was received with an immediate storm of disapproval’ (Littlewood 1928: 14). The most forthright dissent came from supporters of the long-­term plan for a state-­subsidized National Theatre, initiated in 1848 in the form of a pamphlet by a publisher, Effingham Wilson, and subsequently supported by other figures of significance, notably Matthew Arnold, which had received a substantial boost in 1904 when theatre practitioner Harley Granville-Barker and journalist William Archer privately circulated their detailed plans for a theatre appropriate to ‘national’ status, entitled Scheme & Estimates for a National Theatre, which was then published in 1907. They argued that the only appropriate way to commemorate the greatest of playwrights would be a ‘living monument’, a theatre that would ‘break away, completely and unequivocally, from the ideals and traditions of the profit-­seeking stage . . . [and which] must be visibly and unmistakably a popular institution, making

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a large appeal to the whole community’, and they vehemently rejected what Archer would call the ‘dumb carven stones’ of a memorial statue.4 Struggle was followed by negotiation, and in 1908, just a few months after the announcement of the competition for a statue and in the wake of Badger’s death, the SMNT committee was formed from a merger of two separate groups – members of the Shakespeare Memorial Committee and representatives of the movement for a National Theatre, with Gollancz again as Honorary Secretary – with a view to creating not a statue but a national theatre in Shakespeare’s name. Within a year, The Sphere, at the SMNT committee’s behest, published a broadsheet page with images of all the national theatres of Europe, decrying the absence of such a building in London, and arguing for the creation of the proposed theatre – a contemporary building, not a reconstructed early modern theatre of the kind that Poel and the London Shakespeare League had argued for – by the time of the 1916 Tercentenary. The process was under way, then, but funds were lacking. The situation improved in 1909, when Edith Lyttelton – activist, spiritualist and energetic supporter of the National Theatre project – persuaded the wealthy businessman Carl Meyer to donate £70,000 to the cause. But there was still a significant shortfall, and two major fundraising events took place in 1910 and 1912, both successful enough occasions in their own right but neither productive, in the end, of actual funds for the project. The first of these was the Shakespeare Memorial Ball of 1911, held on 20 June ‘in support of the Shakespeare Memorial Fund’. This was an overtly establishment-­centred event, led by Mrs George CornwallisWest (the American-­born former Lady Randolph Churchill, mother of Winston). It took place at the Royal Albert Hall and consisted of a themed dinner and a series of vignettes of royal and aristocratic parties, grouped and costumed as the casts of Shakespeare’s plays, dancing sets of waltzes and quadrilles. A lavish publication, the Souvenir of the Shakespeare Memorial National Theatre Ball, emerged in 1912, illustrated with

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images of the social elite in Shakespearean costume and listing scores of royal attendees (Cornwallis-West 1912). The cost of the Ball and its Souvenir, however, significantly outweighed the funds received, and the event was a public relations catastrophe too, confirming in the eyes of the public the status attributed to the project by its opponents as privileged and self-­indulgent. The second ostensible fundraising event, in 1912, was the ‘Shakespeare’s England’ exhibition at Earls Court. This was a large-­scale, privately sponsored show lasting six months; it was designed by Edwin Lutyens and its leading light was again Mrs George Cornwallis-West. Lutyens designed an entire ‘Tudor village’, based on actual locations around Britain, as a ‘historic grouping of old typical buildings’.5 The exhibition was designed as an immersive experience to give Londoners the chance to ‘walk straight into the sixteenth century and visualise the environment and atmosphere’ of the period, providing them with ‘a reproduction of the choicest bits of Elizabethan England, as exact as the research and historical knowledge of Mr. Edwin L. Lutyens, the well-­known architect, knew how to make them’.6 Buildings included replicas of Shakespeare’s birthplace in Stratford and an Oxford college; the two most visually striking reconstructions were Francis Drake’s ship the Revenge, floating in its own artificial harbour, and a working replica of the Globe Theatre – the latter reportedly the most popular attraction of the entire exhibition, offering a cycle of half-­hour excerpts from plays by Shakespeare, Marlowe and Fletcher. The theatre was based on a design that had been drawn up by William Poel back in 1897, but Poel was highly critical of the Earls Court Globe, calling it a ‘travesty’ of his proposals. For Poel and his supporters, what mattered above all was not the creation of a ‘strict replica of the Globe’ but the recreation of three elements of early modern staging: ‘The use of Shakespeare’s own text and scene-­ sequence’, ‘The professional performances of Shakespeare’s plays on an auditorium-­stage’ [that is, ‘a stage surrounded on three sides by the audience’] and ‘The establishment of an “auditorium-­stage” in London’ (Littlewood 1928: 5–7). They

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did not see the Earls Court Globe as advancing their cause. Nor did it offer much of value to the SMNT project. As with the Ball, ‘Shakespeare’s England’ failed to raise significant funds for the Memorial Theatre. In each case the hopes and interests of the SMNT were largely brushed aside and the events used as vehicles for quite different purposes, above all by Cornwallis-West, for whom they served to cement her connections with royalty and the aristocracy. Marion O’Connor cites a letter from Lutyens to his wife regretting his involvement in Cornwallis-West’s scheme: ‘I feel rotten sorry that I had anything to do with it, as under the banner of good intentions and names of bona fide Endeavours she means to whip up the public & her society smarts – to her own benefit!’7 Thus even before the outbreak of war, the protracted difficulties of fundraising had doomed the project to build a Shakespeare Memorial Theatre in time for the 1916 Tercentenary, a fact that Gollancz acknowledged at the opening of his preface to the Book of Homage: We had hoped that, on a site that has already been acquired, a stately building, to be associated with that august name, equipped and adequately endowed for the furtherance of Shakespearian drama and dramatic art generally, would have made the year 1916 memorable in the annals of the English stage. GOLLANCZ 1916a: vii The failure of this hope must have been deeply frustrating for Gollancz and his fellow members of the SMNT committee – though some doubted that Gollancz’s heart was really in the memorial theatre project, a criticism he rejected. Asked by a Daily Graphic reporter in 1913 if there was ‘any truth whatsoever in the report that you personally do not care for the National Theatre idea’, he replied, On the contrary . . . [T]he project of a National Theatre . . . was not put forward by the Special Committee appointed to

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deal with the various proposals [for a statue, but e]ven then, through my life-­long enthusiasm on the drama, I secured a statement . . . that a small theatre for the furtherance of dramatic art and literature, and for the performance of Elizabethan and other plays, might well be erected on a site adjoining the proposed architectural monument. But when there was a danger of the name of Shakespeare becoming the battle-­ground of opposing parties I was alone responsible for bringing about the amalgamation of the two forces. I have honestly endeavoured, as is my high duty, to be the true custodian of the confidence reposed in me.8 Slow-­moving the SMNT committee may have been, but Gollancz and his colleagues managed nonetheless to sustain their commitment to the building of the memorial theatre. In 1914 they spent £50,000 (of the total of £85,000 they had in their coffers by this point) on acquiring an acre or so of land in Bloomsbury as a site for the theatre, and right up to the outbreak of war they continued to harbour hopes that they might host its opening production by the Tercentenary of April 1916.

Gollancz and the Tercentenary I: the Book of Homage Or, rather, May. As we noted in our introduction, it had been agreed long before war broke out that the commemorations for England’s National Poet would be postponed until the May Day weekend, with the solemn explanation that the change of calendar from Julian to Gregorian, adopted in Britain in 1752, meant that 1 May 1916 was in fact four hundred years to the day from 23 April 1616, thereby avoiding any unintended conflation of Shakespeare with Christ, a decision that underlines, even as it seeks to elide, the quasi-­ religious reverence in which Shakespeare and his writings were held at this time.9 There was no memorial theatre – the

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outbreak of war not only required suspension of the project but also provided the SMNT with a practical explanation for the continued lack of progress with the building – and it had already been made clear by the government that the creation of a large-­scale Shakespeare festival in wartime would be viewed as being in poor taste. As Basil Yeaxlee, ‘editorial secretary’ of the YMCA and pioneer of lifelong learning, noted in a letter to Gollancz discussing the proposed creation of the Shakespeare Hut on the theatre site, ‘the Prime Minister and others in high places have deprecated the adoption of any festive kind of celebration’ (Yeaxlee 1916). Yet even as he reinforces this point, Yeaxlee’s language retains a certain mild theological cast: ‘Your proposal is that the site [of the proposed theatre] should be used for a practical and National service in the spirit of Shakespeare, who would certainly desire that those who are maintaining the traditions of his England should be sustained and inspired’.10 And the Tercentenary Committee – in the person, again, of Gollancz – was also responsible for a quasi-­theological gesture in the form of the brief publication, Shakespeare Tercentenary Observance in the Schools and other Institutions, issued for ‘Shakespeare Day’, 3 May 1916, which set out, in effect, a liturgy for the occasion – a Bible reading (‘Let us now praise famous men’ from Ecclesiasticus, one of the books of Apocrypha), three Shakespearean songs (a choice of eight is provided in an appendix), a ‘Discourse on Shakespeare’, some ‘Scenes or passages from Shakespeare’ and, finally, the National Anthem – in addition to the brief essay, ‘Notes on Shakespeare the Patriot’, that is most frequently cited in disparagements of Gollancz as an unthinking imperialist (Gollancz 1916b). The Tercentenary Observance was a derivative of the London Shakespeare League’s project for an international ‘Shakespeare Day’, which was the focus of the last of the four official days marking the Tercentenary and is a good instance of the means by which the SMNT quietly retained its place in the centre of commemorative activity – at times solely through the initiative of Gollancz and his quiet but persistent

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involvement in a range of events related to the Tercentenary. Somewhat ironically, however, the SMNT committee seems not to have been involved at all in the third day, Tuesday 1 May, with its theatrical focus. A performance of Julius Caesar at Drury Lane before the King and Queen was followed by a pageant of characters from Shakespeare’s plays enacted by a roll-­call of contemporary Shakespearean actors and culminated in the knighting of Frank Benson, still in costume as Julius Caesar, the King wielding a prop sword for the ceremony. This event seems to have been organizationally detached both from the Old Vic festival performances in April and from John Martin-Harvey’s five-­week season of Shakespearean productions at His Majesty’s beginning on 8 May (which he intended as a boost for the National Theatre project), and its focus on Benson perhaps helps to explain the absence from the British scene at this time of Beerbohm Tree and Johnston Forbes-Robertson.11 The following day, 2 May, was devoted to a political commemoration at the Mansion House which began, according to The Times, with the reading out of messages from the King and Queen and from US President Woodrow Wilson and featured dignitaries ranging from the Archbishop of Canterbury to the US and Spanish ambassadors (the neutrality of the United States and of Spain being, as Richard Foulkes has noted, ‘an obvious subtext to the occasion’), the High Commissioners of Australia and South Africa, representatives of the governments of China, Belgium, Switzerland and Greece, and a lengthy list of theatre practitioners, writers and other cultural and creative celebrities and academics, including Gollancz (Foulkes 2002: 199). The Lord Mayor opened proceedings; after him came tributes from the US ambassador (who reported that ‘the people of that great English-­speaking world beyond the sea were expressing their gratitude for their great inheritance – that they were born into the language of Shakespeare and into the development of that civilization and into that racial trick of thought of which he gave the very highest expression’) and the High Commissioners of Australia and South Africa. As

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one journalist noted, ‘[t]he Mansion House th[at] afternoon presented a scene of tranquillity and intellectual refreshment, the very antithesis of the war and the Dublin rebellion’.12 The occasion thus served to define Shakespeare’s works as a source of tranquillity, notwithstanding the predominance of war and rebellion in so many of his plays, and to detach them from contemporary global events that might, in another light, have suggested that the historical stability celebrated by so many Tercentenary contributors was illusory. The message from the King and Queen with which the Mansion House event opened acknowledged receipt of their copy of one of Israel Gollancz’s principal contributions to the commemorative process, A Book of Homage to Shakespeare: ‘Their Majesties have graciously commanded that their thanks be sent to you for this illustrious record of reverence for him to whose memory the whole civilized world is now doing honour.’13 Alongside the report of the Mansion House event in The Times is a column describing the publication of this ‘sumptuous volume’ which ‘may be said to record, in a peculiarly catholic way, what after 300 years the best literary representatives of British and allied culture are saying about Shakespeare’.14 Certainly the Book of Homage – a large, elegantly produced book with a consciously global reach – underlines the hegemonic status of Shakespeare in the early twentieth century as an icon of Englishness and Empire. Yet, as the journalist’s slightly reserved phrase ‘in a peculiarly catholic way’ suggests, it also serves as a precursor of the future role of Shakespeare as a figure of a global culture not restricted to Empire. The Book of Homage has an astonishingly ambitious sweep, with 166 contributions in verse and prose in languages from Setswana to Icelandic, celebrating a wide range of versions of, and meanings for, ‘Shakespeare’ – though with the omission, for obvious enough reasons, of representation from Germany, Austria–Hungary and Turkey. Contributors range from novelists John Galsworthy and Edmund Gosse to poets Wilfred Campbell and René de Clercq, from Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagore to the Nobel-Prize-­winning human biologist Sir Ronald Ross –

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whose sonnet has particular poignancy, given that his son had been killed at Le Cateau in 1914:   in the darkness men die where they stood, And dying slay, or scatter’d limb from limb, Cease in a flash where mad-­eyed cherubim Of Death destroy them in the night and mud: . . . We dying, lifting bloodied eyes and dumb, Behold the silver star serene on high, That is thy spirit there, O Master Mind sublime.15 Each offers a perspective appropriate to their context – ‘Dante e Shakespeare’ by Italian senator Isidoro del Lungo, say, or ‘An Eddic Homage to William Shakespeare’ by Icelandic scholar Jón Stefánsson – and most either praise Shakespeare’s genius or choose a particular element in Shakespeare’s oeuvre on which to focus their brief contribution. The Australian contribution, M. W. MacCallum’s ‘The Cawdor Problem’, belongs to the last of these categories: it is a short account of an apparent illogicality in the text of Macbeth, and it is situated among the British academic contributions as part of the ‘home team’. The contribution from New Zealand, by contrast, opens the section of the Book populated by representatives of the Commonwealth and, as Mark Houlahan argues in Chapter 4, is forthrightly engaged with the ongoing project of associating Shakespeare with the ideology of empire. It is a poem by William Pember Reeves, who in 1916 was Director of the London School of Economics (located just across the road from Gollancz’s office at King’s), had held various ministries in New Zealand colonial governments of the late nineteenth century and had been New Zealand’s first High Commissioner to the United Kingdom, and had written not only a number of well-­received poems but also the best-­known short history of New Zealand, The Long White Cloud: Ao Tea Roa. Reeves’s political profile seems odd to modern eyes: he was a reforming politician, a supporter of trades unions with the outlook of a

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Fabian who was married to a feminist and was friends with Sidney and Beatrice Webb and George Bernard Shaw, yet he was at the same time (like the Webbs) a serious enthusiast for empire, and it is this that is most apparent in his poem for Gollancz’s volume, ‘The Dream Imperial’ (Gollancz 1916a: 312–3).16 ‘As our warring, trading, reading race / Moved surely outward to imperial space’, the poem tells us, ‘Beyond the tropics to the ice-­blink’s hem / The mind of Shakespeare voyaged forth with them’ (ll. 9–12), explaining that it is through Shakespeare’s works that imperial subjects, ‘Children of England’s children, breed new-­prized’ (l. 19), form their image of the mother country: Sons of her sons who, unreturning, yet Looked o’er the sundering wave with long regret, Grandsons on clear and golden coasts, how seems The grey, ancestral isle beheld in dreams? ‘We have a vision of our fathers’ land’, ‘The realm of England drawn by Shakespeare’s hand’. (ll. 21–6) It is Shakespeare’s England specifically that the British Empire’s subjects retain in their mind’s eye, ensuring that, though they are ‘unreturning’, they nonetheless sustain the colonial centre’s primacy at the periphery. Thus the Australian and New Zealand contributions to A Book of Homage straddle the divide between ‘home’ and ‘away’, neither of them rocking the boat and one overtly underlining Shakespeare’s ongoing status at this time as poet of empire. Yet there are also contributions to the Book of Homage that – as Coppélia Kahn, Andrew Murphy and others have argued – complicate our understanding of the work the volume was doing (Kahn 2001; Murphy 2010). One of the most notable of these, as David Schalkwyk and others have pointed out, is ‘A South African’s Homage’, the only anonymous item in the volume, written in Setswana by Solomon Plaatje, an

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early African National Congress (ANC) activist whom Gollancz met when he was part of a pre-­war political delegation to London (Schalkwyk and Lapula 2000; Seddon 2004; Distiller 2005). Plaatje’s playful English translations, in telling the story of an ‘educated native’ finding his self-­construction through Shakespeare, quietly perform an act of what can be seen in hindsight as a very conscious form of proto-­postcolonial self-­fashioning. Another contribution that does not fit with a simplistic reading of Gollancz’s role as editor, and that involves some telling issues of translation, is that of future president of the Irish Republic Douglas Hyde, a poem entitled ‘An Rud Thárla do Ghaedheal ag Stratford ar an Abhainn’ (‘How it Fared with a Gael at Stratford-­on-Avon’). Hyde – who had once given a speech on ‘The Necessity of De-Anglicising Ireland’ – was, as Andrew Murphy has noted, ‘rather an odd person for Gollancz to have approached in connection with the book’ (Murphy 2010: 52), and the poem he contributed required some diplomacy on Gollancz’s part. Its persona is that of an Irishman who notes early on that ‘England was not liked of me’ – that he had ‘sorely suffered, he and his folk; hatred was in his heart’ – but whose distaste for England is calmed by a visit to Stratford (Gollancz 1916a: 276, 275). As Murphy has shown in an entertaining essay, there are certain discrepancies between the Gaelic and the English translation, notably at stanza 25, where the translation is noticeably briefer than any other. The Gaelic reads as follows: A Albion do sgrios mo shinnsir,   A Albion na bhfocal sleamhain, Má bhuaileann námhaid ar do dhorus   Tóg é chum Stratford ar an abhainn. The English alongside it is very clearly reduced: O Albion, If an enemy knock at thy door,   Take him to Stratford on the Avon!

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This seems a curious curtailing, but to Gaelic speakers it would have been decidedly amusing, since a full translation reads: O Albion, deceitful sinful guileful Hypocritical destructive lying slippery, If an enemy knock at thy door,   Take him to Stratford on the Avon. There was, not surprisingly, a certain amount of correspondence between Gollancz and Hyde on this matter. Gollancz inquired politely if it would be acceptable to Hyde if the translation could be toned down in a few places, and he graciously replied: ‘You have been so kind and have taken such an awful lot of trouble over the Homage book that of course no one could find it in their heart to hold out against anything you desire’ – though he could not resist a little further mischief, adding: ‘Would this do you. “O Albion who destroyedst my ancestors, O Albion of the smooth words” – and goodness knows that’s letting “la perfide” down easily!’ In the end, Gollancz’s censored translation appeared in the printed volume, but there is no question that a great deal remained, even in the English version, that had potential to upset readers of the Book of Homage at the moment of Easter 1916. And the Gaelic original remained as it was submitted, with no cuts, enabling readers of the language to appreciate the presence of a thoroughly subversive poem at the heart of the volume. There is a tendency for critics to view Gollancz as a weak-­willed patriot, censoring in a mealy-­mouthed sort of way, but it is necessary, as I have argued elsewhere, to offset this by asking why he requested contributions from figures such as Hyde and Plaatje in the first place, knowing that the product was unlikely to sit comfortably alongside overtly conservative contributions such as Reeves’s unashamed poem of empire. The Book of Homage is thus unexpectedly inclusive, far-­ reaching and subtle. It performs a cultural moment with both brio and care, enabling the reader to find within its pages the Shakespeare with which he or she is most familiar and

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comfortable. Enthusiasts for nation and empire could read it untroubled, by and large – though they might admittedly have baulked a little at C. H. Herford’s unexpectedly generous and, in context, brave essay, ‘The German Contribution to Shakespeare Criticism’ – yet the incipient globalist could also find within its pages expressions of hope in a changing world. Its apparent arbitrariness turns out often to be precise grouping and even, at times, humorous juxtaposition. As an expression of the condition of Shakespeare studies in its moment the Book of Homage is unparalleled, but it is far more than that. It makes very apparent how pivotal was the year 1916 in the negotiation between the fading Shakespeare of empire and the emerging global Shakespeare, and it invites the reader to absorb a range of perspectives, by no means all compatible, upon the National Poet. It is, in other words, a performative memorial, and it underlines both the complexity and the globalism of Gollancz’s outlook and, by extension, that of the SMNT project.

Gollancz and the Tercentenary II: the Shakespeare Hut The second of Gollancz’s two main contributions to the Tercentenary – clearly the stranger and more unexpected of the two – is the Shakespeare Hut. Ailsa Grant Ferguson’s chapter will expand more fully on this subject, but I address it briefly here because of its significance for the antipodal story this book seeks to tell. In 1914, as we have seen, the SMNT committee, having accepted that the site in Kensington that had to this point been the preferred initial location for the theatre was unsuitable and that the subsequent proposed site at Spring Gardens near Trafalgar Square would be unavailable for the foreseeable future, yet recognizing the need for action if impetus was not irreparably to be lost, turned their attention to Bloomsbury and acquired, at substantial cost, a plot of land

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at the corner of Keppel and Gower Streets, where the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine now stands. Almost immediately, however, hostilities commenced, and the committee had to decide what should be done with the empty site in wartime. Attempts to raise money for the building of a theatre would be considered inappropriate – unpatriotic, even – and it was Gollancz who proposed a solution. He brokered an arrangement with the YMCA for the creation of temporary accommodation for overseas troops on the site of the theatre, a series of interconnected buildings to be known as the ‘Shakespeare Hut’. The word ‘hut’, the standard term at the time for the YMCA’s temporary buildings both on the war and home fronts – which could, in the words of Arthur K. Yapp, vary from ‘Huts that are not huts’ and ‘Huts that are mere stables or farm outbuildings’ to ‘Huts that are palatial establishments catering for the needs of thousands of men’ – does not adequately evoke a clear sense of the building that was erected on the theatre site (Yapp 1916: 7). Temporary it may have been, but the Shakespeare Hut included substantial accommodation (scores of thousands of beds were let to Anzac troops between 1916 and the war’s end), dining facilities, a shop and a concert hall in which Shakespearean performances took place – strictly for the resident soldiers – featuring some of the finest actors of the day, not least Ellen Terry and Johnston Forbes-Robertson, whose wife Gertrude Elliott combined women’s suffrage activism with management of the Hut’s theatrical programme (Grant Ferguson 2013). It was hardly the stage the SMNT committee had expected to create, but its existence means that Shakespearean performances of a certain kind took place between 1916 and 1919 in a commemorative space on the chosen memorial site – a fact that until recently has simply been forgotten (Grant Ferguson 2014). The Hut, as Ailsa Grant Ferguson has shown, is a curious, multifaceted space, with resonances and forgotten impacts that both outweigh and are, in a certain sense, the direct result of its status as a temporary building. Huts, as recent work on,

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for instance, Heidegger’s hut at Todtnauberg has suggested, are frequently seen as embodying a building practice that functions in the shadow of Romantic essentialism, as expressions of a belief that a return to a certain kind of primordiality might be possible, as it were, architecturally, and, in Heideggerian terms, offering ground for a distinction between the authentic and the inauthentic in relation to lived experience (Benjamin 2006). The Shakespeare Hut occupies a place quite oblique to this. For one thing, it was urban, a space created in large part with the premise of keeping young soldiers away from the temptations – sex and alcohol, principally – of the wartime cityscape. For another, its non-­urban counterpart was the YMCA huts at the front, whose existence was as temporary as could be: one of the first tales recounted in the YMCA’s hut ‘gift book’ is that of the Ploegsteert Hut, as told by Winston Churchill, which disappeared almost without trace in a bombardment: ‘With the morning light not a vestige of the Hut was to be seen’ (Yapp 1916: 9). For yet another, the Shakespeare Hut was designed, in effect, to be forgotten, an improvisation solely for wartime, a way to deploy the SMNT’s site for a memorial theatre for a strictly finite period so as to contribute to the war effort and in the process offset the public relations disaster of the Shakespeare Ball or the distraction of the ‘Shakespeare’s England’ exhibition. That the Hut housed Anzac soldiers and is thus a significant element of direct overlap in the antipodal story we are telling in this book was, in the SMNT’s terms, certainly contingent and perhaps incidental. There is no evidence that Gollancz had a particular nationality of resident in mind when he initiated the idea of the temporary occupation of the theatre site by a YMCA hut, though his repurposing of funds offered by the Australian theatre impresario Oswald Stoll for a Shakespeare memorial may have prompted the antipodal nature of the Hut as it became established.17 What seems to have mattered much more to Gollancz than the identity or nationality of the soldiers occupying the Hut, however, was the intention that the space should house Shakespearean performance and

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related educational activities, as Yeaxlee makes clear in his letter to Gollancz when he observes that the Hut will enable ‘the purpose of the Shakespeare memorial [to be] fulfilled as far as possible during war time by the arrangement of lectures and rendering of plays’. Yeaxlee also notes that the nature of the Hut meant that it could be assembled section by section and thus ‘the Concert and Lecture Hall could be put up first’, thereby implying his recognition that for his interlocutor the educational and theatrical possibilities of the Hut were paramount – that if the theatre itself were not yet to be built, then the temporary construction on the site would perform at least some of its proposed functions and that those functions could be prioritized in relation to the order of building. It is the nature of the Hut as a temporary space for soldiers that facilitated the performance on its tiny, setless stage of scenes from Shakespeare by some of the most prominent actors of the day, who would in no other circumstances, it is safe to assume, have chosen to act in such constricted conditions. This is the implicit value to Gollancz of the Hut stage – that it enables the performance of a virtual Memorial Theatre, one that (as Grant Ferguson notes in Chapter  3) provokes a layering of memorial functions as the originary logic of the memorial site – a theatre in memory of Shakespeare – meshes with the accumulating logic of commemoration produced by its primary function as military accommodation for wartime and thus the deaths, inevitably, of a proportion of those who passed through its doors (the image of Anzac soldiers in front of the Shakespeare Hut that we chose as the jacket image for this book is, to say the least, poignant, given the likely fate of the bulk of the soldiers in the photograph). Grant Ferguson notes that the original funding for the Hut’s lounge had come from the mother of a fallen soldier, Lieutenant Leslie Tweedie, who had been killed in 1915, making immediate the multiple commemorative function of the building from the outset and even leading in due course to a counternarrative of the Hut’s creation, as the dead soldier’s mother claimed a decade later to have created the entire Hut in memory of her son.18 Such

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reallocation of memorial function serves as a version of forgetting – or at least of misremembering the impersonal logic of the Hut’s memorial status in the natural death of a playwright three hundred years earlier and replacing it with a personal and more immediate commemoration of wartime death by violence.

Forgetting 1916: National Theatre/ RSC/Globe Theatre history – particularly the internal mythology of a given theatre or company – is constituted by such patchworks of remembering, misremembering and forgetting, as the presentation of institutional history is adapted to suit subsequent formations and missions are adjusted to map more effectively onto changing funding regimes. The tension present in the National Theatre project from the beginning – its function, as outlined by Barker and Archer, both to sustain Shakespearean performance and to champion new playwriting – necessarily finds its counterpart in histories of the organization. Daniel Rosenthal’s recent monumental history of the National Theatre differs markedly from earlier accounts in this regard, understandably foregrounding Barker and Archer’s status as ‘founding fathers’ but offering generous recognition of the place of the SMNT in the National Theatre’s origins (Rosenthal 2013). This has not always been the case, however, as Geoffrey Whitworth’s mildly patronizing attitude to Gollancz in his earlier history of the National suggests: [B]ehind [the] kaleidoscopic maze of committees, flitting to and fro, one glimpses the mercurial figure of Israel Gollancz . . . benign, discreet, master of innocent intrigue . . . with every thread in his hands, and alone capable of unravelling the tangled skein when the right moment came. Whitworth 1951: 44

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Perhaps this gentle caricaturing of Gollancz is simply a function of time passing. As founder, immediately after the war, of the British Drama League, which sought to reinvigorate the National Theatre project in the face of what it saw as the SMNT’s sluggishness, Whitworth arguably had an interest in downplaying what Gollancz and the SMNT had achieved, though his final description of Gollancz in The Making of a National Theatre is affectionate, noting his importance to the Shakespeare National Theatre idea, ‘with which he had been associated from the very beginning, loyal to it through every chance of fortune, and though criticized by some, the axle round which the whole wheel turned’ (Whitworth 1952: 179). Others have subsequently adopted a dismissive attitude to the SMNT committee and to Gollancz in particular (see, for instance, Bate 1993). Sally Beauman, in her history of the RSC, describes Gollancz as ‘haughty’ and misreads the materials in the National Theatre Archive to the extraordinary extent of suggesting that the plan and elevation of the Shakespeare Hut is of the proposed theatre itself, which she describes sarcastically as ‘a long, low structure, resembling a conglomeration of Stratford tea-­shops’ – as if everyone involved in Shakespearean theatre would eventually defer to Stratford for their design aesthetic – and adding that during the war the SMNT did ‘nothing . . . except to lease the Bloomsbury site to the YMCA, who built on it a small wooden hut in which to entertain British troops’ – an assessment which, as I hope I have made clear, is confused and inaccurate on multiple counts.19 I have speculated elsewhere about one of the possible reasons for the resistance to Gollancz, which dates right back to the build-­up to 1916 and is by no means edifying – in a word, anti-Semitism (see McMullan 2015: 192ff.). Another may be a subsequent misreading of his relatively complex internationalism as straightforward imperialism, a comprehensible enough error, given the frequent gap between Gollancz’s public statements and his much more overtly globalist private expressions of opinion – though, as I have suggested, a sustained analysis of A Book of Homage ought to

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make this understanding difficult to sustain (McMullan 2015: 188–90). It may equally be the result of the perennial reluctance of theatre practitioners to acknowledge the relevance of academic intervention in their professional zone – particularly, perhaps, when the academic in question has adopted the role of cultural entrepreneur, as Gollancz did. Whatever the reason, one effect of the downplaying of the achievements of Gollancz and, along with him, the SMNT is to suppress the significance of the impact of elements of Tercentenary activity on the shape of British Shakespearean theatre today. It is of course entirely right and proper that the contemporary National Theatre sees Barker and Archer as founding fathers in a way Gollancz is not, and there is no question that the establishment of the theatre was the result above all of the belief in the project and the sheer doggedness shown by theatre practitioners. Yet without the work of the SMNT, and without Gollancz’s persistence in the form particularly of the Shakespeare Hut, which rescued the reputation of the SMNT at a critical point, helped sustain its existence throughout the war and, most importantly, enabled the first performances of Shakespeare on what might be called a memorial stage, it is arguable that the National Theatre project might well have faded away. It is clear, then, that key elements of the origins of the National Theatre lie in the 1916 Tercentenary. What is less well known – though it may account in part for the dismissiveness of the company historian Beauman – is that the Royal Shakespeare Company too owes an element of its history to the Tercentenary and specifically to Gollancz’s entrepreneurship, though the timeline on the RSC’s website simply skips the period from 1913 to 1925. In the course of 1918, the young director William Bridges-Adams had a series of conversations with William Archer in which he argued that the best way to proceed with the aim of creating a National Theatre was to found a company first and build a theatre later – an argument that would haunt the National Theatre for decades. At this point, the prehistories of the National and the RSC briefly overlap. In 1919, Bridges-Adams took over from

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Frank Benson as director of the Stratford-­upon-Avon Festival, and Archibald Flower, chairman of the Festival, encouraged the SMNT to support the launching of a new company that would – by contrast with Benson, who had done a great deal of cutting and abbreviating – perform Shakespeare’s plays largely uncut (Bridges-Adams acquired the nickname ‘Un-­aBridges-Adams’) and would, though based for part of the year in Stratford, have a commitment to playing in London and to touring. The SMNT chose to support this project, and a joint committee was created between the governors of the Stratford Memorial Theatre and members of the SMNT, including Archer, Lyttelton and Gollancz – a rare instance of Shakespearean collaboration between London and Stratford. The New Shakespeare Company did not directly become the Royal Shakespeare Company – certainly it was viewed by influential members of the SMNT, not least George Bernard Shaw, as potentially the basis for a National Theatre company – but it embodied what was to become the company blueprint: a Shakespeare-­centred repertory company with a base in Stratford, a London programme and a commitment to national touring. And it was funded by SMNT money – or, more precisely, by the income the SMNT was currently receiving from the Shakespeare Hut. Between 1919 and its demolition in 1923, the Hut became the temporary home of the Indian YMCA (for more on this controversial phase in the existence of the Hut, see Chapter  3), an arrangement which provided £3,000 a year in rent. It was this exact sum that the SMNT committee used to fund the ‘New Shakespeare Company’ between 1919 and 1922. Beauman notes that ‘[t]he SMNT Committee might be prepared to back Bridges-Adams’s scheme to a degree, but it had no intention of touching its capital’ (Beauman 1982: 71) – yet it did nonetheless put significant funds into the company which would otherwise have increased that capital. The SMNT continued to fund the New Shakespeare Company until 1923, though it reduced the amount once the Indian YMCA rent was no longer available (that is, for the 1923 season), even-­handedly (in its view,

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though not in that of Bridges-Adams and his supporters in Stratford) providing £1,000 to each of the New Shakespeare Company and the Old Vic. Thus, briefly, the Shakespeare Hut, the product of Gollancz’s entrepreneurship, underpinned an early phase of the history of the RSC, sustaining Shakespeare performance at Stratford during a period of financial difficulty. It can further be argued that, in a certain way, the third and most recent of Britain’s primary Shakespeare-­producing theatre companies, Shakespeare’s Globe, had its seeds in the 1916 Tercentenary. The official history of the reconstructed Globe of course offers a rather different story of origins, one that lies firmly in the extraordinary inspiration and persistence of Sam Wanamaker – and rightly so, for many reasons. Without Wanamaker’s indefatigable energy and extraordinary persuasive powers, the project would never have got off the ground and would certainly never have achieved fulfilment. As Paul Prescott notes in an engaging essay on Wanamaker, ‘few theatrical spaces in the world owe so much to the vision, vitality and perseverance of one person’ (Prescott 2013: 151). Nonetheless, in celebrating Wanamaker’s remarkable achievement, the Globe – not especially surprisingly – tends to downplay Wanamaker’s predecessors in the long-­ standing project to create a reconstructed Elizabethan theatre in London, above all, as we have seen, William Poel, conscious outsider, mystic and lifelong evangelist for the recreation of early modern conditions of performance, whose 1897 plans for a small-­scale replica of the Globe were, to his distaste, the basis for the ‘Elizabethan theatre’ that had formed the centrepiece of the ‘Shakespeare’s England’ exhibition of 1912.20 Poel’s vision – one that, as it happens, overlapped to some extent with that of Gollancz, though by and large they clashed more than they agreed – was not solely theatrical: it was to create a Shakespeare Memorial that would combine an ‘Elizabethan theatre’ with ‘a Shakespearian Library and Museum’ – in other words, an establishment that would be in roughly equal measure theatrical and educational.21

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The extent to which Wanamaker’s project has a direct link with that of Poel depends on which myth of origin you choose. Prescott reports that in a file Wanamaker sent to the Gotlieb Archive at Boston University towards the end of his life he included a programme from the Cleveland Great Lakes Festival of 1936 to which he ‘attached a Post-­it note with the handwritten exclamation “The Beginning!” ’, and he notes that Wanamaker had spent the summer of that year playing bit parts on a replica Elizabethan stage at the Festival (Prescott 2013: 151). ‘But’, Prescott adds, ‘ “The Beginning” was a movable moment and would depend on which version of the genesis story Wanamaker happened to be telling’, one of which was that ‘the idea of rebuilding the Globe first occur[red] to the fifteen-­year-old working-­class Chicago boy [when he was] taken by his father to . . . [the] World’s Fair in 1934, where . . . he was struck by the beauty of a reconstructed Globe, one of a dozen or so ersatz landmarks comprising the English Village’ (ibid.: 152). If this sounds very much like the 1912 ‘Shakespeare’s England’ exhibition and its replica Globe, that is because the design of the 1934 theatre was based on that of 1912, thus creating a direct causal link between Wanamaker’s project, one of the SMNT’s fundraising events and Poel’s original Globe design of 1897. The point, of course, is that it does not especially matter which of these stories, if any, is the correct one: each underlines the fact that Wanamaker’s Globe is the fulfilment of the project that Poel and others had championed since the end of the nineteenth century to build a theatre that would allow Shakespeare performance ‘upon a stage surrounded on three sides by the audience, [which is] the only kind of stage where the actor moves and speaks in the Shakespearian focus [and] only under its conditions [can] the correct interpretation [be] given to his work on the stage’ (Littlewood 1928: 5). Prescott is right to note that ‘there is a world – or perhaps an ocean – of difference between Poel’s antiquarianism and Wanamaker’s . . . idea . . . that Shakespeare might serve as the locus and alibi for a joyous civic and communal experience’ (Prescott 2013: 161),

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but he is right too when he acknowledges the ‘ancestral link between’ Poel and Wanamaker, ‘between the neo-Elizabethan movement of the late nineteenth century and the logical, if delayed, fruition of that movement a century later: the opening of the third Globe Theatre’ (ibid.: 160). Shakespeare’s Globe has, in the two decades of its existence, become the de facto ‘Memorial Theatre’ in London, frequently mistaken by tourists for an actual site of Shakespearean memory – Shakespeare’s ‘own’, ‘original’ Globe refurbished – an error which has at times been implicitly encouraged by the Globe’s own publicity materials, as Cary Mazer has shown in respect of a 1999 poster advertising the ‘400th anniversary season’ at the Globe. As Mazer explains, a little wryly, ‘the 1999 season, celebrating the 400th anniversary of the first recorded performance in the original Globe, was, by the most generous standards of calculation, not the theatre’s 400th season but its 46th season in three buildings, interrupted by a 354-year hiatus’ (Mazer 2013: 3). The challenges over the claims to ‘authenticity’ that have been made on behalf of the Globe (though rarely, it should be noted, by the Globe’s own employees) are well documented and need not be repeated here, but the point is to acknowledge that the SMNT story suggests a certain disingenuousness in the myth of autochthony that prevails at the Globe.22 In a certain way, this is an instance of the return of the repressed: after all, the new Globe, with its extraordinarily active and engaged education programme, most fully expresses – far more than the educational programmes of its rivals – the dual vision of theatre and education that Poel had consistently championed and that Gollancz sought to develop in the unlikeliest of ways by way of the Shakespeare Hut.23 The reconstructed Globe is not a direct product of the Tercentenary, then, less so even than the RSC. Yet the origins of its story intersect intriguingly with the story of Gollancz and the SMNT, and its current status as London’s primary producer of Shakespeare means that it, more than its immediate rivals the RSC and the National Theatre, occupies the role of London’s Shakespeare memorial theatre. This has come about

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for contingent reasons: in hindsight, the RSC’s departure from its long-­standing base at the Barbican in 2001 ceded key territory just as the Globe was beginning to establish a bridgehead on the Bankside, and the artistic directorship of the National Theatre does not at present appear to view Shakespearean preservation or innovation as a priority. The state of play would presumably wryly please William Poel if he could witness it, but it would baffle the majority of the SMNT committee. That said, I suspect Gollancz would cast a benign eye on the current situation: experience surely taught him that it is the vision, far more than the detail, that matters in the end, and the single most obvious conclusion from the history of the SMNT is that stasis is never achieved. You build a statue, you build a memorial theatre, you think that by definition commemoration will continue on those sites indefinitely, but it doesn’t: it disappears and then reappears elsewhere in unpredicted locales. The forgetting or misremembering – perhaps ‘suppression’ is not too strong a word – of the achievements of Israel Gollancz is synecdochic of the deletion of the memory of the Tercentenary as a key impetus in the creation of London’s major theatres for the production of Shakespeare – by which I mean both theatrical and cultural production. Commemoration is a looking back, a remembering, but it also, as we have seen, involves a good deal of negotiation, misremembering and forgetting; cultural organizations tend to look back only selectively as incumbents seek to avoid being tied to earlier visions of the institution’s mission. New myths of origin are established almost from the beginning, as interest groups compete for foundational recognition. In the case of Shakespeare, the memorial and the national are closely bound, and Gollancz’s insistent belief in the interor supra-­national significance of Shakespeare does not fit comfortably with the overarching narrative of a national Shakespeare theatre to which the Tercentenary became subsumed. The awkward negotiation between Shakespeare the English national poet and what we now call ‘global Shakespeare’

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arguably began, as I have argued elsewhere, with Gollancz’s contribution to the Tercentenary, but it has led to a sustained distortion of his role in the establishment of the primary players in the Shakespeare industry in Britain today and it has cost him his place in public memory. The outline of the events of the 1916 Shakespeare Tercentenary in London and of Gollancz’s leading role in them that we have offered so far is, on one level, designed to set the scene against which the ways in which the Tercentenary was marked in Australia and New Zealand can be assessed – that is, to compare and contrast the arguments that ran in parallel across the hemispheres in respect of statues and theatres, of contemporary performance spaces versus reconstructed Elizabethan theatres, of national versus imperial celebrations. But the outline has also already provided an initial demonstration of the perhaps surprisingly antipodal nature of the commemorative moment. It has done so, I suggest, in three ways: through the coincidence of the Anzac matinee of 25 April and the Old Vic Shakespeare celebration of the same day and time, through certain contributions to Gollancz’s Book of Homage, and through the remarkable emergence of the Shakespeare Hut on the ground acquired for the Shakespeare Memorial National Theatre. The theatre project may have been a national one, yet it was always already, we suggest, antipodal – that is, by 1916 Shakespeare had long been the poet not only of nation but also of empire and any form of English (or British) nationalism at this time necessarily drew to a greater or lesser extent on colonial identities and energies both as contrast and as buttress. In London at Easter 1916 one of the most visible forms of British national identity was antipodal in nature – the ‘Britishness’ expressed by the presence of thousands of Anzac troops dressed in khaki and to all intents and purposes looking like ‘home’ troops on furlough except for their badges and distinctive headgear. The New Zealanders in our jacket illustration sporting their ‘lemon-­squeezer’ hats beneath the two curiously ill-­matched words ‘Shakespeare’ and ‘Hut’ – the one offering reassuring

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historical depth and cultural permanence, the other suggesting temporariness and precariousness – are survivors most probably of the Gallipoli debacle and are presumably soon to face the horrors of the Somme, and they offer a profoundly moving image of the complex and unexpected antipodal processes whose course we seek to trace in this book.

2 Shakespeare, memory and the city: The Tercentenary in Sydney and its afterlife Philip Mead In Australia, plans to commemorate the three-­hundredth anniversary of Shakespeare’s death began in the early years of the twentieth century. The New South Wales Shakespeare Society was established in 1900. The Melbourne society had been going since 1884, but curiously, was much less active in early twentieth-­century Shakespeare commemoration than the NSW society. On 22 April 1909, at the ‘conversaziones’ held in commemoration of Shakespeare’s birthday by the Sydney society, the (third) President Henry Gullett’s lecture, as reported in the Sydney Morning Herald, included the observation that in recent years there had been a somewhat sluggish, self-­reproachful impulse on the part of a portion of the English people towards national

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commemoration in some permanent form of the work of England’s greatest poet. It cannot be said that much, so far has come of it, though we had the cabled announcement the other day that, some anonymous donor had given the sum of £70,000 to found a national theatre as a memorial to the poet. But since this movement, if it can be called so, first showed itself, anniversary after anniversary of the poet’s birth has been celebrated, and the matter remains much the same as when the question why Shakespeare had not a monument was asked a few years after his death, when it was answered by Milton in his famous sonnet, practically to the effect that Shakespeare’s work and its impression on the minds of his readers were his best monument. How far this is an adequate answer to the question may be left for each to determine for himself. ‘Shakespeare’s Place in Poetry’ 19091 As this report suggests, Gullet was aware of the debates and cross-­currents around Shakespeare Tercentenary com­ memoration going on at the time in both London and Sydney. But he was also preparing the ground for what would be his own posthumous intervention in Shakespeare commemoration in Australia seventeen years later. The way he refers to the Carl Meyer donation to the London Shakespeare Memorial National Theatre (SMNT) fund, for example, subtly skews his account of London plans for commemoration in relation to what is evidently already his own preference for a com­ memoration in ‘some permanent form’ or ‘monument’ – a word he uses more than once. A statue is what he has in mind, rather than a memorial theatre for which Meyer’s London donation was, in fact, intended (see Gordon McMullan’s chapter in this volume). Gullett’s waspish tone about Milton is further confirmation that he has made up his mind about a material monument, as opposed to the abstract or virtual one that Milton imagined. Gullett would also have been aware that it was about this time, 1908–9, that the London contest about what should comprise the Tercentenary commemorative and

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memorial project – statue versus theatre, or ‘dumb carven stones’ (in William Archer’s words) versus live performance – had been won resoundingly by the advocates of a national theatre.2 There was a sense in which this victory of the living national theatre advocates, led eventually by Israel Gollancz, including Granville-Barker and evoking Matthew Arnold, represented a victory for a narrower ‘national’ commemoration over a broader or imperial one, although there was also some suggestion of high-­level involvement in the National Theatre management by Australian, Canadian and US diplomatic representatives. Earlier, when it was still a live proposition, for example, Gollancz was able to provide a rhetoric of ‘the great English-­speaking republic’ for the discourse around Richard Badger’s proposed Portland Place statue (see McMullan in this volume). How Gullett’s determination, driven by the idea of a worldwide Shakespeare Gollancz had voiced in relation to a proposed statue, and with all its antipodal complexity, eventually produced a statue as the defining gesture of Sydney Tercentenary commemoration is the story of this chapter. By January 1912 the Sydney Morning Herald was reporting on the Earls Court ‘Shakespeare’s England’ exhibition and on English plans for a Tercentenary memorial theatre (‘Australians Abroad’ 1912); in May of that year the Sydney Shakespeare Society even contributed to the London SMNT fund. Whatever his feelings about a statue in Sydney, rather than a theatre or other performance space, Gullett himself, though no longer president of the NSW society, was happy to supplement ‘substantially’ the amount voted by the society towards the theatre in London (‘The Shakespeare Memorial: Contributions by New South Wales Society’ 1912). As in London, there were public meetings, press commentary and interested citizens’ and executive committees and subcommittees contributing to the conversation about what form the Sydney commemoration should take. The Lord Mayor, George T. Clarke, who was unsympathetic to the whole idea of a Shakespeare statue and who thought Shakespeare a ‘ponderous’ writer, nevertheless convened, in August 1912,

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a committee of interested citizens for ‘Celebrating the Tercentenary.’3 Debates over commemoration also took their lead from London, and the work of the London SMNT committee, chaired by Israel Gollancz, was regularly reported on in the Australian papers, including its purchase in 1914 of the Bloomsbury Memorial Theatre, later Shakespeare Hut, site (‘The Shakespeare Memorial’ 1914).4 Should the Sydney memorial take the form of a statue, a bas-­relief, a memorial hall, a library or library wing, a museum, a picture gallery (by analogy with the Stratford Memorial theatre), a festival, a theatre, funds or prizes for the study of Shakespeare in schools, or a university lectureship and scholarships? The one proposal that would not make sense, at the Sydney end, was a national Shakespeare memorial theatre, and with London’s decision on that particular form of commemoration, Sydney had to think how to commemorate Shakespeare in its own, distinctive way. On 11 November 1912 the Executive Committee of the Sydney Tercentenary Memorial Fund (STMF) met at the Town Hall and the idea of a Shakespeare statue as an appropriate form of commemoration still had some forceful local advocates. One member of the committee, the Catholic priest H. S. Bowden, thought a statue ‘would suit the wishes of most people’, and ‘he could see nothing, either from an aesthetic or scholarly point of view, to discredit the idea of a statue’. Gullett seconded Bowden’s motion for a statue ‘as the universal form of commemoration adopted in all parts of the world’. It was also, he argued, rather astonishingly, the ‘most human. It brought the man himself, so to speak, face to face with the public continually. It was also the most durable form.’ These arguments were derailed, at the November meeting, by Judge Alfred Paxton Backhouse. Backhouse had everyone laughing, according to the Sydney Morning Herald report, about how statues, whether in action or repose, were essentially ridiculous and ignored by the public. William Farmer Whyte, Australian-­born journalist, and at the time Honorary Secretary of the Shakespeare Society of New South Wales, thought the committee should ‘take advantage of the opportunity to do something to encourage Australian

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literature and dramatic art’. While Whyte ‘hoped there would be erected a statue that would make New South Wales famous as possessing the greatest Shakespeare statue in the world’, once ‘that was done, he believed they would be able to set aside a sum of, say, £3,000, to provide an annual prize – a sort of Nobel prize – to promote and encourage Australian literature and dramatic art’. Backhouse had to leave the meeting early and the proposal for a statue was ‘adopted unanimously’; Farmer Whyte’s ‘proposal [was adopted] as a subsidiary scheme’ (‘Shakespeare Memorial: Statue and Prize Fund’ 1912). Such contentions were always inflected by the discourses then in circulation about an imperial Shakespeare (AngloSaxon suprematism, the ‘blood of Britons,’ ‘British stock’ etc). Thomas Carlyle’s 1840 essay ‘The Hero as Poet’ was the paradigmatic expression of this version of imperial Shakespeare, with the particular attraction (perhaps) for American and Australian readers of its argument about the inclusivity of Shakespeare’s sovereignty by contrast with the more narrowly nationalist institutions of Englishness at the centre of empire: ‘England, before long, this island of ours, will hold but a small fraction of the English: in America, in New Holland, east and west to the very Antipodes, there will be a Saxondom covering great spaces of the globe’ (Carlyle 1969: 113).5 Carlyle refers to the loss of the American colonies and the future growth of other dominions, like Australia, and how political institutions alone can’t hold ‘Saxondom’ together; only ‘King Shakespeare’ is able to do that: ‘Here, I say, is an English King, whom no time or chance, Parliament, or combination of Parliaments, can dethrone! This King Shakespeare . . . [w]e can fancy . . . as radiant aloft over all the nations of Englishmen, a thousand years hence’ (ibid.: 114). The other attraction of Carlyle’s race-­ based, millennial Shakespeare was his accessibility of ownership: ‘From Parramatta, from New York, wheresoever . . . English men and women are, they will say to one another: “Yes, this Shakespeare is ours; we produced him, we speak and think by him; we are of one blood and kind with him” ’ (ibid.). Carlyle was more prescient than he might have known, at least

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about the growth of empire, if not about the demographics of modern Australia: Parramatta, the second settlement at Sydney in 1788, is 24 kilometres inland and was settled after the government farm at Port Jackson proved inadequate. It is now a satellite city, the administrative and financial capital of Greater Western Sydney, but one of the most ethnically and religiously diverse, or least ‘Anglo’ communities of modern Australia. Also part of the colonial hangover of this discourse on commemoration was the idea of Shakespeare and the perfectability of man; Shakespeare as a possible name for Australia’s as yet unnamed federal capital, courtesy of the Minister for Home Affairs in the federal government, King O’Malley; and the imperishability of Shakespeare’s works themselves as monument (Milton).6 By February of 1913 the broadly constituted City of Sydney’s Citizens’ Committee of the STMF had seriously modified the proposals of the Executive Committee. It resolved to raise a Citizen’s [sic] Fund of £25,000 for the purpose of establishing a Shakespeare wing at the New South Wales National Library, to include Shakespearean and Elizabethan literature generally, together with a statue, bust, or other form of sculpture as may be decided later, and provision for a suitable hall for lectures and dramatic representations: a financial provision to be made for prizes for the study of Shakespeare among the young; (2) that the State be asked to provide for the housing of the library. ‘Wanted, £25,000. Shakespeare Memorial’ 1913 And the Citizens’ Committee was also convinced by Whyte’s persistent advocacy of the study and encouragement of Australian literature in relation to Shakespeare commemoration and decided that: one-­fifth of the money raised (not exceeding £3000) be devoted to the encouragement of Australian literature and

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dramatic art, either by means of an annual prize, or in such other way as may hereafter be determined. ibid.7 Eventually the consensus in London had been for a national theatre, a space for remembering Shakespeare via live performance; while in Sydney there was an analogous consensus about the desirability of keeping Shakespeare’s memory alive, even though differently inflected for the postcolonial setting. Within the discourse of Sydney Shakespearean Tercentenary commemoration, the nexus of library resources, educational and performance space and the encouragement of Australian literature did include a diminished monumental aspect, in the idea of a sculpture, but in the miniature form of a bust, and only subsequent to the other elements of commemoration, to be ‘decided later’. Somewhere between the end of 1912 and the beginning of 1913 the Executive Committee’s unanimous decision about a statue was overruled by the Citizens’ Committee and relegated to a bust. The Citizens’ Committee moved on raising funds for its proposals with a Shakespeare Ball, delayed until 22 May, and which raised £480. By 1913 every school in New South Wales was participating in an annual Shakespeare Day (23 April) (‘Puck’s Girdle’ 1913). The height of the fundraising and celebration was the four-­day Shakespeare Festival of April 1914, which raised £256 for the fund.8 Gullett was a member of the Citizens’ Committee but it was a large committee, including senior figures from the university, city administration and business, and its views clearly differed from the Executive Committee’s. The agreement that Bowden and Gullett had pushed through at the end of 1912 about the statue proposal was out of step with the broader thinking about Tercentenary commemoration in Sydney. The mention of the ‘statue, bust, or other form of sculpture’ reads like a mere concession to the monumental fixation of Gullett and his small group of supporters. Far from deterring Gullett, though, this decision of the Citizens’ Committee in fact spurred his determination to shape Tercentenary commemoration in the

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way he had envisioned since the early years of the century. Decades later, these contending strands in Tercentenary memorializing mentality in Sydney, in the years leading up to the First World War, shaped by various historical contingencies, would be strangely materialized (or not) in the city’s built environment: a large Shakespeare monument, rather than a bust, visible from the State Library’s Shakespeare room (rather than wing) and the absence of an inner city space dedicated to Shakespeare performance and education about Early Modern English and drama. Anyone who notices the Shakespeare statue today might think it was raised by a broad civic agreement about how to remember Shakespeare at the time of the Tercentenary, whereas in fact it represents the belated victory of a very privatized version of Shakespeare remembrance over the more democratic and culturally aware vision of the Sydney citizens. With the outbreak of war, only five months after the Shakespeare Festival of 1914, and Australia’s involvement in the Gallipoli campaign from early in the following year the sociability of Tercentenary Shakespeare and the timetable for commemoration in 1916 were seriously disrupted. As the Sydney Morning Herald recognized in April 1916: No doubt if war had not fallen upon us the tercentenary of the death of Shakespeare would have been universally commemorated; not even the clash of war, though it be the greatest war the world has seen, will preven[t] the nations from rendering homage in some sort to the memory of this man.   Even in Germany special celebrations have been arranged to mark the event . . .   Circumstances have inevitably modified the original intentions of the tercentenary committee: for with the coming of the war the collecting of subscriptions for the establishment of an Elizabethan Library ceased. But there is a sum of £1000 in hand, and the question for the committee to consider now is what is to be done with [it]. ‘Shakespeare Tercentenary’ 1916

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In that same year, the funds raised by the STMF, actually £1,423, were turned over to the Public Library of New South Wales for safekeeping and so that the library could ‘take steps to revive the [memorial] movement when the time shall be considered opportune’ (‘Shakespeare Memorial Fund’ 1916).9 In 1923 these funds were formally entrusted to the Public Library by an Act of Parliament. In the event, the whole remembering of Shakespeare in Australia suddenly became entangled in the contingencies of the war, just as it did in England and the United States, but differently in each case. The crucial historical conjunction in Australia and London in April 1916 is a result of the fact that the invasion of the Gallipoli Peninsula by a joint Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (ANZAC), part of an Allied force under British command sent to open the Dardanelles and neutralize Turkey’s role in the war, began on 25 April 1915 and from 1916 this date became the anniversary of the landing, or Anzac Day, side by side with the traditional date of the Shakespeare and St George’s Day anniversaries, 23 April. In 1916 Shakespeare commemoration was overshadowed by Anzac commemoration, and Shakespeare commemoration continued to be shaped by these accidents of history and their disruptions of the Tercentenary for fifty years. The story, often forgotten, of how Tercentenary commemoration in both Australia and England became antipodally imbricated in Anzac history, partly from the simple coincidence of dates, has been told elsewhere (see McMullan and Mead, ‘Introduction’, pages 2–9 in this volume). This story includes the complex and contradictory rhetorical and aesthetic equation of glorification and remembrance layered onto the social impulse of commemoration and the desire for monuments. The Sydney Tercentenary events of 1916 and the belated Shakespeare memorial have many points of connection to that history of war commemoration, both cultural and aesthetic – indeed they helped to shape each other – but they also have an afterlife that veers away from the crucible of 1916 into a different, changing stream of remembering and forgetting Shakespeare in Australia. This trajectory is about the function

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and fate of a statue, as an object of commemoration, within the modern city. It is obvious from the statements of Gullett and his supporters in the debates about Tercentenary commemoration how remembering Shakespeare is driven by an imperial ideology of Englishness – and vice versa – and how this should be materialized in the design and building of the city. Shakespeare the man, not the books or the performances, is the sign of this pathology of remembering, and a statue provides the illusion of an enduring, instructive reminder of the man. But more than that, because of the design and function of the statue as civic art, enhanced by the impressive pedigree of its sculptor, Sir Bertram Mackennal, as an imperial artist, the city itself needs to form itself around and to accommodate this reminder of Shakespeare the man. In fact, the London debates reflected, as well, an essential tension in Shakespeare memorialization – perhaps all memorialization – about the ‘live’, but in misrecognition and paradox: the rhetoric of memorial statuary is all about ‘the man’, keeping a sense of a long-­dead person alive within civic memory; likewise the rhetoric about performance and performance space is about ‘living’ memorials to the works of a deceased person. How memory ‘lives’ is the dichotomous tension that is unresolved within these versions of memorialization. A firm adherent of the view of statues’ ability to keep memory alive, Gullett’s ambition was that the city of Sydney should be built around a material sign of the King of Englishness himself. But as it happened Gullett did not live to witness any of this afterlife of Shakespeare commemoration in Sydney, including its initial entanglement in Anzac commemoration. He died of a heart attack at his home in Wahroonga on 4 August 1914, the day Herbert Asquith declared war on Germany. In the years leading up to the First World War, when the form that the Sydney Tercentenary commemoration would take was being debated, Gullett might have thought he could persuade Sydney-­ siders with a stake in the Tercentenary commemorations to support the idea of a statue, but the Citizens’ Committee’s

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lukewarm and temporizing response to the idea was the final straw. Gullett’s personal wealth was an important factor in his commitment to the idea of a statue, as was his aesthetic sense of the imperial city. But it was his opposition to a particular commemorative proposal that reveals his deeper sense of what kind of memorialization was due Shakespeare in the recently postcolonial settlement of Sydney. As an anonymous reporter for the Adelaide Register wrote in 1922: Mr. Gullett was an ardent Shakespearean, and for some years was President of the Sydney Shakespeare Society. When a proposal was made to establish a memorial hall in honour of the poet in Sydney, Mr. Gullett opposed that form of memorial, on the ground that the hall would be used for other purposes, and that its main purpose would be obscured. After the proposal had been dropped Mr. Gullett decided to present a memorial of Shakespeare to Sydney on his own account. ‘Great Australian Artist’ 1922 Similarly, as ‘Observer’ reported in the Sydney Morning Herald, looking back on Gullett’s commemorative mentality, at the unveiling of this statue in 1926, he had been unchanged in his view that a statue was the finest memorial that any generation of men could raise to one of their own race who had greatly deserved of them. He was not an admirer of our Sydney statues; indeed, his frank opinion of most of them was that the statues and their subjects were worthy one of the other. But the statue was to him the last gesture of our age in respect of a national figure, and Shakespeare he looked upon as not only the typical man of letters, but also, and even more, the typical Englishman. ‘Observer’ 1926 Acting on his determination to see Shakespeare commemoration in statue form in Sydney, Gullett had written to the London-­

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based expatriate Australian sculptor, Sir Bertram Mackennal (1863–1931) in 1913, with a personal commission for a Shakespeare Tercentenary statue. The Register reporter was writing about a visit he made to Mackennal’s studio in Marlborough Hill while Mackennal was completing the Shakespeare sculptures. Negotiations for this commission were under way in 1914 when Gullett suddenly died. But the cause of Gullett’s statue was taken up with vigour by two of his surviving daughters, Dr Lucy Gullett (1876–1949), an early pioneer of women’s medicine who had graduated from Sydney University in 1900, and Minnie Gullett (1875–1943), a mental health philanthropist and amateur Shakespeare enthusiast. In a commemorative impulse Lucy and Minnie persuaded their other two sisters to honour their father’s commission to Mackennal out of his estate (their mother had predeceased Gullett in 1900).10 Although his work on the Shakespeare statue was then interrupted by the First World War, Mackennal’s commitment to the project remained strong. He evidently shared Gullett’s sense of the imperial and civic significance of the Shakespeare monument for Sydney and Australia. Gullett’s initial approach and Mackennal’s unwavering commitment were likely under­ pinned by both men’s shared imperial mentality, reinforced by their antipodal careers: Mackennal, born in Melbourne, became a successful sculptor in England, a member of the Royal Academy from 1923, while Gullett, born in Devon, England, emigrated with his family to Australia in 1853, eventually becoming a successful journalist, newspaper shareholder and member of the NSW Legislative Council. There is some suggestion, in newspaper reports, that Mackennal had been at work, when Gullett contacted him, on a Shakespeare memorial statue for India, in other words on an imperially commemorative Shakespeare. But if he was, he converted this work to what became the Sydney monument and his enthusiasm for the project, and his prestige as a sculptor of empire, are crucial aspects of the history leading up to its eventual installation in 1925–6.11 When Mackennal’s statue was shipped to Sydney in 1924 the sculptor and the Gullett sisters’ strong allies in the Principal

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Librarian of the Public Library of New South Wales, W. H. Ifould, and the Minister for Agriculture, Frank A. Chaffey, were able to convince the Premier, Sir George Fuller, on the recommendation of a committee consisting of Ifould, the Under Secretary for Works, the Under Secretary for Agriculture and the Director of the National Art Gallery that the large area between the entrance to the Mitchell Wing of the State Library and the entrance to the Botanical Gardens should be remodelled and landscaped as Shakespeare Place in preparation for the installation of Mackennal’s statue as its central feature (‘City Plaza: A Remodelling Scheme’ 1925). This major renovation of an area of central Sydney is a sign of the agreement among Gullett’s descendants, Mackennal and the city authorities concerning the importance for the city of the Shakespeare memorial project.

FIGURE 2.1  Sydney Shakespeare Monument Courtesy Peter F. Williams, Monument Australia.

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The Shakespeare Place landscaping even involved the shifting of the statue of Governor Richard Bourke, Sydney’s first statue, to where it stands today to allow Mackennal’s statue pride of place in the middle of Shakespeare Place, a more imposingly open space at this time, before the building of the Dixson Wing of the State Library. Mackennal’s statue is obviously influenced by Lord Ronald Gower’s Shakespeare memorial, also bronze and stone, now in the Bancroft Gardens, Stratford-­upon-Avon. Gower’s memorial of 1888 includes four figures from the plays, while Mackennal’s has five; there are two figures in

FIGURE 2.2  Max Dupain, Botanic Gardens, Macquarie Street Entrance, c. early 1950s Courtesy Rex Dupain

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common (Falstaff and Hamlet); Gower’s Shakespeare is seated, Mackennal’s is standing. Like Mackennal’s statue, Gower’s also has a history of changing landscape setting. Mackennal’s statue was unveiled in 1926, as much a family memorial to Henry Gullett, from his loving and dedicated daughters, as to Shakespeare, as the inscription on one side of the statue citing the date of Gullett’s own death as well as Shakespeare’s, suggests: Shakespeare 1564–1616 Presented to the City of Sydney by Henry Gullett August 1914 The Adelaide Register reporter, writing on his visit to Mackennal’s studio in 1922, recognized the dual memorial purpose of the statue in what sounds like an endorsement from Mackennal of the statue’s memorial purpose to Gullett: ‘it is fitting that the name of Mr. Henry Gullett also should be held in grateful remembrance by the citizens for this splendid posthumous gift to the city in which he lived and worked’ (‘Observer’ 1922). It was Mackennal, after all, who actually carved the inscription on the side of his own sculptural work and thus marked it as a double memorial. The broad consensus about how to remember Shakespeare in Sydney in the years leading up to 1916 and the Tercentenary was in favour of Early Modern book and library resources, literary education, performance and performance space, and close affiliation with a developing national literature. The interruption of the war and the relatively small amount of funds raised saw these memorializing ambitions materialized, but only much later, in the State Library’s Early Modern holdings and the small Shakespeare Room of the Dixson Wing – opened in 1942 – akin to other larger, retro-Renaissance

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spaces in new world settings like Pierpont Morgan’s library in New York and the Boston Public Library. The more recent history of the twenty-­five-year Bell Shakespeare project (1990– 2015), ‘Australia’s most established company dedicated to performing works from the Shakespeare canon’, can be read as an attempt to take up the performance and educational role of Shakespeare commemoration that the Sydney Citizens’ Committee had originally envisaged (McMullan 2007: 350). Further, John Bell’s vision of an Australian Shakespeare company that, while it is busy re-­nationalizing Shakespeare in an Australian context, helps to develop and perform original Australian plays, also harks back to the Sydney citizens’ sense of Shakespeare’s memory as an ‘encouragement’ to a developing national literature. When Gullett and Mackennal’s statue was unveiled in 1926 it represented a very different version of remembering Shakespeare from those other impulses to memorialization initiated by the Tercentenary. It was an old-­fashioned gesture of commemoration designed to enhance, retrospectively, the late-Victorian–Edwardian heritage-­scape of twentieth-­century Sydney. As Graeme Davison argues, public statuary of Gullett’s and Mackennal’s kind was designed to signify homage to ‘heroes, patriotic instruction for later generations, [and] beautification of the city . . . With public parks, squares and museums they helped to create that sense of classical order which colonial conservatives sought to impose on the topsy-­ turveydom’ of the antipodal world (Davison 2000: 39). Mackennal’s style of commemorative sculpture, which had attracted Gullett’s commission for his hero Shakespeare, belonged to a pre-­war and imperial mentality of civic remembering, didactic and public in purpose, exemplified by Waterloo Place-­like equestrian statues of monarchs and allegorical figures of imperial victory. Gullett and Mackennal would have agreed with Governor Sir George Gipps’s words, in 1842, at the dedication of the statue of his immediate predecessor Richard Bourke, on what was to be the Shakespeare Place site, about ‘the social utility of public monuments in a

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young colony. Of all the arts, he remarked, sculpture was ‘ “the most enduring and therefore best fitted to transmit to remote posterity the memorial of a people’s gratitude” ’ (ibid.: 38). In this sense, the Sydney Shakespeare statue is a kind of zombie memorial: it comes to apparent life, as a tableau vivant from the pre-First World War ‘heroic age of colonial statuary’ and urban design, twelve years after its commissioner’s death and a decade after the Tercentenary itself. As an object of retro-­ commemoration arising from Mackennal’s sense of imperial public art, Gullett’s beneficiary wealth and the memorializing spirit of his daughters (ibid.: 41). The Shakespeare statue also belongs to another conjunction in commemorative space and time that is not immediately obvious but that has asynchronous lines of association with Shakespeare’s role in Anzac and First World War commemoration a decade earlier. The artistic and cultural DNA of Mackennal’s edifice of Shakespearean remembrance is nearly identical to that of the Sydney Cenotaph, less than a mile away in Martin Place. The conjunction of Shakespeare and First World War commemoration, that had had its own commemorative complexity, is further extended in the city’s Cenotaph, another Mackennal commission and a near relative of the Shakespeare statue, aesthetically, but dating from after the Shakespeare monument. While in Australia in 1925 for the raising of the Shakespeare statue, Mackennal was commissioned to design the Cenotaph by the patriotic entrepreneur Hugh D. McIntosh and the NSW Premier at the time, J. T. Lang. There had been indecision and delay about what form Anzac and First World War commemoration should take in Sydney. For these politicians Mackennal represented a welcome solution to the complex contentions around war commemoration. Mackennal was the eminent Australian sculptor of Shakespeare but also of statues of Queen Victoria, Edward VII, the ‘Glory’ of the Boer War, and of ‘imperial coins and postage stamps for the reign of King George V’ (Inglis 1999: 38, 299). But like the Shakespeare monument, the Cenotaph is a strange memorial object. For one thing, it is a sign of the problematic absence at

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the heart of First World War remembrance, a war in which none of the Australian fallen had been repatriated, who would always be absent. Mackennal’s response to this tragic difficulty of commemorating the absent dead was to model the two figures of the sailor and soldier at either end of the anonymous stone sepulchre on two living servicemen, Private William Pigott and Leading Seaman John William Varco, both of whom returned from the war and were living at the time of Mackennal’s artwork. Like the Shakespeare monument, then, these ‘life-­like’ figures are very deliberately designed to encourage us to imagine and to commemorate their living originals, not their deaths. And an effect of Mackennal’s mode of monumental sculpture, in this connection, is to remind us that Shakespeare, ‘a national figure’ for Gullett and Mackennal, is nevertheless unrepatriatable for Australians. The Sydney Hyde Park Anzac memorial, not opened until five years later, would represent a radical alternative to such public remembering: George Rayner Hoff’s dramatic bronze sculpture, Sacrifice, of the very dead body of an unknown warrior, with its stripped-­back allusion to the Spartan myth of the soldier’s return home either with his shield or on it. Back in England, Mackennal fashioned the two bronze sentinel figures for the Cenotaph in his St John’s Wood studio where he had also designed and made the Shakespeare bronzes, and after they were transported to Sydney the Cenotaph was able to be unveiled in February 1929 (Inglis 1999: 302). The ‘Shakespeare fetish’, as Martyn Lyons calls it, is one of the main drivers, after the war, of a commemoration mania that runs up to the start of the Second World War and that is a kind of contrail from the concentration of imperial commemorative energy generated, partly, by the Shakespeare monument. In 1938, for example, an ‘Anzac Festival’ was held at the Sydney Conservatorium, including a ‘Pageant of April’, which simultaneously commemorated St George’s Day, Shakespeare Day, Anzac Day and Cook’s discovery of Australia’ (Lyons 2001: 390). Such commemorations were regular features of Sydney cultural life in the decade before and, as

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Lyons observes, this conjuncture of Shakespeare, Anzac and Cook ‘implied that Englishness and Australian national consciousness were mutually complementary’. However superficial it might have been, this implication was reinforced by reports in the Sydney Morning Herald that ‘frequently juxtaposed articles and photographs of Shakespeare Day and Anzac Day on the same page’ (ibid.). This imagery and rhetoric of imperial history was deeply embedded: as far back as 1879, speaking at the dedication of Sydney’s statue of Captain Cook, New South Wales Governor Sir Hercules Robinson didn’t mention Shakespeare, but he did make the equation of Cook, empire, statue and language: ‘A monument of this kind cannot in any degree enhance the reputation of Captain Cook, whose name and fame will be remembered so long as the English language and history shall continue on the earth (cheers) (Davison 2000: 39). But after the seismic political and cultural shifts of the Second World War and with the wave of post-­war modernization of Sydney, the rhetoric that jumbled together and animated empire, language and civic monuments, and which had been in circulation for so long, is left an empty shell; just as Shakespeare Place is demolished and Mackennal’s statue is left in a kind of urban no man’s land, a monument to the ruin of an earlier mentality of Shakespeare remembrance.

Afterlife of a statue The Cahill Expressway, Australia’s first freeway development, planned and built in the late 1950s and early 1960s, obliterated what was Shakespeare Place. It was initially the subject of public protest and has long been denigrated by Sydney-­siders as a baleful example of urban development. In a 2006 study of The Great Mistakes of Australian History, for example, it appears as the worst planning debacle of the late twentieth century, an architectural monstrosity (Ashton 2006). Construction began in 1955 and the freeway was opened on 1 March 1962. This was also the year of the Australian artist

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FIGURE 2.3  Jeffrey Smart, Cahill Expressway, 1962 Estate of Jeffrey Smart. National Gallery of Victoria.

Jeffrey Smart’s painting Cahill Expressway, which represents, both graphically and allegorically, this instance of Sydney urban remodelling. Smart’s painting is well known to readers of my generation because it was used on the cover of Peter Carey’s first collection of short stories, his first book indeed, The Fat Man in History, published by University of Queensland Press in 1974. It was also used on the cover of Expressway: Invitation stories by Australian writers from a painting by Jeffrey Smart hosted by Helen Daniel, published by Penguin in 1989, both a homage to, and an extension of, Carey’s legendary collection of stories. There is a simplistic synergy between Smart’s painting, repurposed as book design, and the science fiction modes of Carey’s stories. The title story, for example, is about a post-­ revolutionary state where obesity has become a sign of persistent pre-­revolutionary evils (Carey 1980: 11). Alexander

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Finch, once a revolutionary district official in what sounds like a futuristic version of Melbourne, has become alienated from the cause and is now the secretary of a clandestine cell called ‘Fat Men Against the Revolution’. The story even includes a commemorative statue, the ‘16 October Statue’, which the fat men are planning to dynamite (ibid.: 13). The story turns out to be a report on a social engineering project about leadership in counter-­revolutionary groups, authored by the partikom Nancy Bowlby. Whatever the tenuous lines of association between Carey’s book cover and the landscape of its title story, of interest here, in relation to the history of remembering and forgetting Shakespeare, is what happens to the actual statue in what was Shakespeare Place and the statue that appears in Smart’s painting. This looks like a version of the Sydney Shakespeare Monument, given the title of the painting and the explicit Sydney-­specific locale, but it has undergone a metamorphosis, like the city around it. Smart’s painting is a kind of allegory of the fate of the actual statue and both are significant in terms of how Shakespeare is remembered and forgotten in Sydney. If, as K. S. Inglis argues, ‘much of the civic culture of colonial Australia may be reconstructed from a sensitive reading of its public monuments’, then Smart’s painting of the Cahill Expressway development is a symptomatic sign of a much later and more serious disruption to Shakespeare remembrance in Australia (Inglis cited in Davison 2000: 40). While the architectural and built elements of this part of Sydney are recognizable in the painting, and are more obvious in the pen and ink studies Smart made for it, the painter has obviously revisioned the cityscape as he witnessed its being modernized (Capon 1999: 92).12 The painting reveals the inner city as a deserted building site, rather than as the cultural precinct it appears as in Max Dupain’s photograph, and is usually read as a parable of modern alienation. But it is also a site of the ruins of memory and the renovation of monumental history. The expressway construction involved, first, the removal and then repositioning of the Shakespeare monument, and the use of the space designed and landscaped as Shakespeare Place

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to connect the entrance to the Mitchell Library and the Botanical Gardens as a dual, four-­lane freeway. Smart’s painting shows how the newly completed freeway leaves the Shakespeare statue disconnected from its architectural and cultural relation, the Dixson Wing of the State Library, a division reinforced by the brutalist brown office towers, guardrails, noise barrier, and lamp posts. Shakespeare Place has disappeared under the multiple lanes of what will become the M1. A brutally anti-­pedestrian landscape, engineered in every way to accommodate the motor car (eerily since there are no cars or buses in the painting, just as there are no construction workers). Most readings of this painting, including Smart’s own, focus on the one-­armed man in a blue suit, a desolate-­seeming, stranded pedestrian with nowhere to cross or walk, rather than on the refiguring of Mackennal’s Shakespeare monument on the overpass directly above him. Viewers of this painting tend not to notice what has happened to Shakespeare and his group of statuary characters; they tend not to notice, that is, what happens to cultural memory and civic art.13 The statue is recognizable from behind by its bare pedestal back, a feature of the Mackennal statue Smart has capitalized on. Mackennal had originally designed the statue, at Gullett’s suggestion, following a discussion with the then New South Wales Premier W. A. Holman, to be placed against a wall of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, a less grand location than Gullett’s daughters and their city connections were able originally to engineer. But Mackennal’s figures have been rearranged. His Shakespeare holds a quill in his right hand, close to his body, rather than making the declamatory gesture of the figure in Smart’s version, an unmistakable allusion to Thomas Woolner’s 1874 statue of Captain Cook in the Sydney Domain, a few hundred yards away. It is possibly Falstaff and his sword that are partly visible on the right of the pedestal, but if so he has been transposed from his place on the left of Mackennal’s group of Shakespeare characters to the side where Romeo and Juliet appear. Falstaff, specially stipulated in Gullett’s commission, is, of course,

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another fat man in history, or at least in a history play, but it is not him that we remember looking at the painting, it is the fat man in the blue suit. More likely here Smart is quoting from another element of iconic Sydney imagery, Conrad Martens’s 1842 painting, Governor Bourke’s Statue, overlooking the Harbour, kept in the Mitchell Library’s collection.14 In Martens’s painting the figure of Bourke, also viewed from behind, like the statue in Smart’s painting, shows his left hand resting on a sword, a mirror image of the partial figure on the lower right of Smart’s statue – resting on a sledgehammer? Smart is clearly thinking about statues and paintings of statues, and perhaps the fact that the Bourke statue, which once stood where Smart’s altered version of Mackennal’s statue stands, was the first statue unveiled in Sydney in 1842. The Cahill Expressway site has an originary resonance in relation to the history of Sydney and public sculpture, but the Mackennal, Woolner and Martens elements in Smart’s painting only provide a partial view – from behind and below – of a pastiche of a monument. Smart retains the outline and location of Mackennal’s statue – in that sense he doesn’t want us to forget what this statue once signified – but at the same time his rearrangement and restyling of the Shakespeare group overwrite any aesthetic value the work might have had as an inviolable sign of Edwardian heritage, civic commemoration and cultural memory. Further, Smart’s cybertron statue, in the midst of a built-­over Shakespeare Place, suggests a social realist simulacrum and a tribute to the Gosplan-­constructivist city, no doubt ironic: ‘forward to the future, comrades, on the Eastern Distributor!’ Shakespeare was no ‘engineer of the soul’ (Stalin).15 The writer Shakespeare, hero of Western humanism and imperial Englishness, recognizable urban icon of the Victorian and Edwardian eras and surrounded in Mackennal’s work by materializations of his imaginary creations – Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, Portia, Falstaff – is shape-­shifted into an unmistakably proletarian heroic figure – the iconography of soviet-­era futuristic power replacing the iconography of rear-­ view cultural heritage.

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As a ‘parable of the dislocation of memory in the modern city’, Smart’s painting suggests the numerous ways in which an actual monument, ‘erected for the specific purpose of keeping’ Shakespeare and his works ‘alive in the minds of future generations,’ as Gullett and Mackennal intended, can be forgotten or misremembered, even ruined (Vidler 1992: 181, 177). Toppling, defacing or blowing up a statue – all possible fates of Smart’s monument we imagine, as Peter Carey did – are symbolic gestures of counter-­memory and revolution. And while the Sydney Shakespeare Monument hasn’t suffered any of those extreme fates, it has been relegated from its original prominence as a heroic sign of imperial Englishness, connecting in its retro-Edwardian style and setting an institution of cultural knowledge (State Library) and a citizens’ domain, by the relentless rebuilding of the modern city, in other words by post-­war modernity. That specifically late-Victorian and urban mode of remembering Shakespeare, itself a displacement of unfulfilled Tercentenary intentions, has been surpassed and different modes have arisen – in film, in the millennial project of the Bell Shakespeare to reterritorialize Shakespeare as Australian, in postcolonial and globalized teaching paradigms, in Early Modern reconstructions, in multinational, new media and antipodal performance projects (see for instance Flaherty, Gay and Semler 2013). But the story of this instance of commemorating Shakespeare, however strong any original impulse to remembering him might be, is about the enactment and materialization of this impulse as belated, radically impermanent in public memory and subject to shifts across the social and cultural terrain. It is ironic that such effects of memory and history should seem most in evidence when the impulse to commemoration is materialized in the most immovable and enduring of objects, a statue. Gullett’s and Mackennal’s memorial is actually the occasion of false Shakespeare memories. Even if it is noticeable within the busy commuter space of the city, its appearance, in a dedicated commemorative urban space, as a contemporary, univocal expression of an imperial Tercentenary Shakespeare is entirely

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misleading. Notwithstanding the silent, immovable appearance of an antipodal monument like the Sydney Shakespeare one, remembering, including remembering Shakespeare, is not a coherent or unidirectional process. It is a complex social arc of sometimes individual, sometimes communal, volition and historical contingency with no predictable temporal logic, and uncertain inflections of artistic practice, urban space and capital.

3 The Shakespeare Hut for Anzacs: building commemoration, performing memory, 1916–19 Ailsa Grant Ferguson

One April evening in 1919, an audience of Anzacs sat in a wooden hall in London, nearly 12,000 miles from home, gazing at a simple stage.1 Through the curtain stepped a fifteen-­ year-old girl, cross-­dressed as Henry V. This girl was the young Fabia Drake, later a well-­known actress and director, who proceeded with gusto to perform the king’s most stirring speeches. Recalling the performance six decades later, Drake gushed with patriotic pride: ‘We had no extras, we had no army, but we had an audience of four hundred soldiers and Edy Craig had the inspiration that I should come out in front

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of the curtain and speak the Agincourt speech to my Army on the floor’ (Drake 1978: 36). Featuring a cast that included the illustrious Ellen Terry herself, the gala Drake describes was staged at the Shakespeare Hut, a large U-shaped, mock-Tudor building at the corner of Keppel and Gower Streets in Bloomsbury (to which additional prefab bungalows were added later in 1916 and in early 1917). A YMCA building dedicated to the memory of Shakespeare, the Hut aspired to be a home from home for serving Anzacs from 1916 to 1919. In 1920, it became the base of the Indian YMCA before its demolition in 1923, beginning its swift descent into oblivion. But, according to Drake, on that night in 1919, the Hut could not have been more alive, as ‘[f]our hundred war-­weary men rallied to the cry of “God for Harry, England and Saint George”, springing to their feet and cheering to the rafters’ (ibid.: 37).

FIGURE 3.1  The Shakespeare Hut, as seen from Gower Street. c. 19172 Courtesy YMCA archive.

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Drake’s Henry V on the Hut stage is a performance we can only access via the account she wrote sixty years later. This is accompanied by an image of her in costume, captioned ‘World War I: “Harry of England”/Henry V to the ANZAC soldiers’ (Drake 1978: 36). She reiterates several times the Anzac identity of the soldiers in the audience and claims that this particular performance was held on Shakespeare’s birthday, 23 April, in 1919. This is both performance and place as commemoration of Shakespeare. Drake spells out the rationale for using these ‘magnificent speeches’, as she calls them, citing their ‘urgency’ and describing them as ‘a rallying force that can be incandescent’ (ibid.). Her pride in the power of these speeches and, clearly, in her own performance of them is related to her perception of Shakespeare’s ability to rouse a ‘foreign’ or imperial army of Anzacs. Given the 1919 date, her sense of the ‘urgency’ and ‘rallying force’ she commends in these Shakespearean speeches is no longer necessary as a means to rally these men to fight. Perhaps Drake saw herself as part of the patriotic project of rallying the Anzacs’ imperial loyalty before they were to return to Australia and New Zealand, sending them off full enough of their memories of ‘Harry of England’ to offset the widespread Antipodean disillusion with British imperial rule the war had catalysed. Yet, while she describes them ‘cheering to the rafters’, the true response of the Anzacs to these speeches cannot be known. The speeches, belonging as they do to moments before and during battle, could in fact be seen as a tactless choice for a demobbed army, no longer in the theatre of war themselves. Instead, her choice to present the speeches to this post-­war, liminal army, soon to return, for most, to civilian life, may have been a moment more of commemoration than of rallying: memorializing war itself as much as Shakespeare. The Shakespeare Hut (Figure 3.1) was one of many YMCA huts across London and at the front. Built to provide respite to soldiers on leave, these semi-­temporary structures were the closest thing to home most ‘Dominion’ soldiers would see during their service. The huts all included dormitories and

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some comforts and entertainments, but the Shakespeare Hut was the largest, grandest hut the YMCA had ever built. It was unusual, too, in its designation for a specific nationality, though the Aldwych Hut for Australians was built in the same period.3 The Shakespeare Hut, though, was the only YMCA hut to be named as a memorial. These definitively temporary buildings were not normally used for any such ‘permanent’ function. While the Hut bore Shakespeare’s name, its status as a commemorative object is complex to define. There is nothing unique in the naming of a functional building as a memorial, yet the combination of this wartime practicality with a memorial to a civilian – even to one of the most famous English civilians in history – is unusual. By and large, as Allyson Booth has noted, wartime ‘architectural memorialization of the dead and missing [was] kept distinct from the design of architecture that would be used and inhabited by the living’ (Booth 1996: 127). In the sense that the Hut was not technically memorializing lost soldiers, this distinction might not apply. Yet, as I shall show, the Hut had a multifarious commemorative function for the British public, for the Anzacs who stayed there and for relatives back in New Zealand and Australia, representing not only Shakespeare’s legacy but also the memory of those men for whom the Hut was the last home they ever saw. How, then, did the English movement for commemorating Shakespeare and the 1916 Tercentenary of his death come to be marked not with a statue or imposing building, but with this temporary – and long-­forgotten – pragmatic construction? To understand this, we need to consider the contexts and personalities involved in order to explore the wider significance of the Shakespeare Hut and what it can tell us about collective memory, commemoration and, perhaps more particularly, forgetfulness. We must also consider the Hut as a memorial that is located at the intersection of place and space and as a site of remembrance that became as multi-­layered as it was multi-­ functional before it was – with remarkable speed – forgotten. The Shakespeare Hut was both successful and awkward. While the blend of assertive English heritage and ‘war work’

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function it expressed suited its moment of construction in the spring and summer of 1916, neither its physical existence nor the performances it housed was destined to suit posterity. Anzac identity opens a fissure in the edifice of empire: it marks (or mythologizes) the emergence of national/postcolonial Australian and New Zealand identities that are asymmetrical to the imperial relationships that preceded them, and the paternalistic benevolence of the Shakespeare Hut does not sit comfortably with the assertiveness engendered by emergence of the Anzac story. The Hut facilitated other kinds of assertiveness, but not necessarily ones well matched to the birth of Anzac. In addition, the performances within the Hut’s theatre were run by feminists, including its regular director, out lesbian and outspoken suffragist Edith Craig. This feminocentric model, though influencing post-­war women’s theatre, once again became threatening to the theatre and broader establishment. Furthermore, after the New Zealanders and the Australians had been shipped home, the Shakespeare Hut was leased to the new Indian YMCA and became, so the few surviving accounts have it, a space for radical discussion of Indian independence, providing the British authorities with a further reason for the rapid, wholesale forgetting of the Hut. Forgetting, so often seen as a negative, as a lack of remembering, is as active a cultural process as remembering.4 As Gary Taylor notes, ‘culture is not what is done, but what is passed on’ – to which we can add ‘and not passed on’ (Taylor 1996: 89). The story of the Shakespeare Hut begins with active commemoration – the drive to ‘remember’ (that is, to construct a particular cultural ‘memory’ of) Shakespeare. As Gordon McMullan has shown in Chapter 1, debates over how best to effect this commemoration had been fraught enough in the early years of the twentieth century even before the complication of the outbreak of war, reflecting a time of distinct unease over the ways in which Englishness was to be constructed for a new century. Ideas for memorials to Shakespeare ranged from an imposing stone or marble statue of the playwright to a benevolent gift in his name, such as Shakespeare almshouses,

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to a library and to a ‘reconstruction’ of an Early Modern playhouse – of which Shakespeare’s Globe is the contemporary manifestation.5 Eventually, as McMullan notes, advocates of a memorial statue to Shakespeare made an uneasy alliance with the movement for a national theatre when, in 1908, the Shakespeare Memorial National Theatre (SMNT) campaign committee was formed. Combining notions of memorialization that were little short of worship with a practical remembering of Shakespeare effected by way of performances of his plays for ‘the man on the street’, this alliance was precarious and often contradictory. But the question of how to commemorate Shakespeare was about to become still more vexed. At the outbreak of war, and increasingly as the conflict brought with it a tide of loss, the methodology of com­ memoration of the dead changed amid an unprecedented pandemic of grief, both public and private. Memorialization of the dead became part of the day-­to-day physical, architectural, emotional and psychic landscape as never before, producing, as Paul Connerton graphically phrases it, ‘an orgy of monumentalisation’ (Connerton 2008: 69). Perhaps largely because of this traumatically heightened era of monumentalization and despite years of discussion of how best to commemorate Shakespeare, the two ‘solid objects’ that materialized in the name of Shakespeare’s Tercentenary in London were neither statue nor theatre.6 As McMullan shows, Israel Gollancz, Professor of English at King’s College London and Honorary Secretary of the SMNT, had taken, for many years, a central role in campaigning, fundraising and promoting the erection of either a theatre or a monument (or both) to Shakespeare. In 1916, Gollancz was directly responsible for creating the only two tangible English ‘memorials’ to Shakespeare for the Tercentenary: the Book of Homage to Shakespeare and the Shakespeare Hut. Compared to the stone ‘permanence’ of a statue or a large theatre, these were precarious, fragile memorials of paper and wood. In a time of unprecedented modern warfare and increasing privation on the home front, entrenched notions of permanence

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inherent in commemorative activities such as the erection of memorial statues vied with makeshift, temporary, spontaneous and individual expressions of commemoration. At times, the lines were distinctly blurred. One of the most popular monuments constructed at the ending of the First World War was Lutyens’s Cenotaph, originally built of plaster and wood in 1919 but replaced with a stone version a year later in response to public demand for it to become permanent; versions of the Cenotaph were then erected in many cities across the country and replicas were created in their thousands for people to buy cheaply and display in their own homes. This expression of the temporary and the permanent in constant flux is paradigmatic of the larger complex dynamic of mourning and commemoration that took place during the First World War and in its immediate aftermath. This was the vortex within which the 1916 Shakespeare Tercentenary came to be situated. It led both to the unprecedented style of commemoration enacted in the erection and use of the Shakespeare Hut and to its subsequent annihilation from public memory. In their account of the ‘rhetoric of museums’, Carole Blair, Greg Dickinson and Brian Ott offer a re-­exploration of the relationship between place and memory: ‘if we think of space as that which allows movement’, they propose, ‘then place is pause; each pause in movement makes it possible for location to be transformed into place’ (Blair, Dickinson and Ott 2010: 23). The Shakespeare Hut’s multi-­functionality offers a particularly sharp focus for exploration of these notions in the context of the idea of the ‘memorial’. The projected Shakespeare Memorial National Theatre, the Bloomsbury site for which this cluster of buildings was to usurp, would have offered its own version of a multi-­functional memorial site, yet the Shakespeare Hut offers a different and very particular interaction of function and meaning. A library or a theatre bears direct relation to the established perception of Shakespeare’s ‘legacy’ to the nation, the Empire and the world: the book and the play. The mode of commemoration enacted in the pragmatism of the Shakespeare Hut is less clearly defined

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since it constitutes neither the pure benevolent ‘name’ of Shakespeare, suggested in the unpopular and short-­lived idea of the Shakespeare almshouse, nor the direct ‘preservation’ of his legacy that would be facilitated by a theatre or library. Instead, the ‘Shakespeare’ of the Shakespeare Hut is an amalgam both of performance or learning and of a form of patriotic English ‘parenthood’ for the ‘boys from beyond the seas’. Further complicating the Hut’s commemorative function, its main recreational area, the Lounge, was in fact funded by a donor, Mrs Alec Tweedie, as a memorial to her son, Lieutenant Leslie Tweedie, who had been killed in action in 1915.7 Thus one room in the Hut, at least, represented two distinct layers of memorial. Mrs Tweedie’s very personal, individual dedication, the Leslie Tweedie Memorial Lounge (as it was named) was spliced with an act of collective commemoration, of impersonal worship of a cultural icon, not expressing grief or personal loss per se but serving a quite different cultural function. The naming of a place forms place out of space: ‘a place that is bordered, specified, and locatable by being named is seen as different from open, indifferentiated, undesignated space’ (Blair, Dickinson and Ott 2010: 23). Naming is thus an act of delineation and enclosure, fixing that space as a bordered place that has a specific use, meaning and physical tangibility. In the case of places that are named as memorials, the act of naming creates a border that encompasses both the physical presence of the place and the person, event or location that is represented in the name. In the particular case of the Shakespeare Hut, the undelineated space of the SMNT committee’s Bloomsbury site, bought at a high price in 1914 for the erection of the Shakespeare Memorial National Theatre, became increasingly problematic. We know from contemporary newspaper reports and the correspondence of the SMNT committee that the reputation of the movement was already tarnished by accusations of elitism, money-­wasting and ineffectuality, all of which would be brought brutally into focus for those passing by this expensive, unused site.8 The theatre site was a geographical space that smacked of impracticality and excess

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in a time at which the only acceptable patriotism was characterized by austerity and wartime sacrifice. Associating Shakespeare’s name with an empty ‘space’ of this kind for any length of time would surely have spelled further disaster for the already failing SMNT scheme. At the same time, it is important to recall how ardently the personalities who had driven the schemes – Gollancz especially – had fought for the commemoration of Shakespeare. And, more broadly, we must appreciate the role and importance of Shakespeare’s name in the war effort itself. It is in these contexts that the delineation of the Bloomsbury site as a pragmatic memorial becomes crucial in the story of Shakespeare in 1916. The Hut allowed Shakespeare’s name to be tied not only to national pride but also to pragmatic urges to contribute to the war effort, a mode of memorialization that did much to save the project to commemorate Shakespeare from the growing perception that it was the superfluous pursuit of the rich (Bryce and Lytton), the scholarly (Lee and Gollancz) and the eccentric (Poel and Shaw). A newspaper clipping among Gollancz’s papers (dated 6 February 1916) wryly notes the new plans for the Tercentenary celebrations in London: From one point of view the War seems to have done real good in regard to the Shakespeare Tercentenary . . . At least, there is now withdrawn all temptation to waste any money on statues and marble shrines and things of that sort. We do not even hear anything of the ‘Shakespeare Garden’ scheme, which was brought out officially at the Mansion House a year or two ago, when the National Theatre enthusiasts were growing restive. Somehow, in that Shakespeare Garden I could not help detecting the thin end of the statue!9 Clearly the notion of commemorating Shakespeare by way of a statue or ‘shrine’ had by this time become laughable. By the outbreak of war, and increasingly between 1914 and 1916, these schemes were viewed by many commentators as an unacceptable, even distasteful, extravagance.

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An English Hut for Anzacs Israel Gollancz mooted the Shakespeare Hut idea in early 1916 and, once the partnership with the YMCA had been approved in March, the Hut was built rapidly in the early summer and was fully functional by mid-August. Gollancz fundraised energetically to erect and maintain the Hut, since the SMNT committee was unwilling to release funds from the National Theatre scheme account for a temporary structure, however worthy it might be. Yet the Hut proved a popular cause with the general public and thus began to unite those who had previously been at odds over the commemorations, in particular easing tensions between the academics, aristocrats and practitioners who together comprised the Shakespeare memorial lobby.10 In contrast to the preceding years of limited achievement in fundraising for a national theatre, the comparatively modest sum of money needed for the Hut was raised in a matter of mere months, boosted by the enthusiasm of one major donor. Just before the war, Sir Oswald Stoll, the Australian-­born theatre producer and philanthropist, had donated 1,616 guineas to the SMNT as prize money for a competition to design a Shakespeare Memorial. In March 1916, Gollancz approached Stoll to ask if a portion of the money could be used as seed funding for the Shakespeare Hut. In his letter heartily accepting this suggestion, Stoll refers to the Hut idea as a ‘patriotic and humane scheme, so fully in consonance with the patriotism and humanity of Shakespeare’.11 These words reflect Shakespeare’s new wartime function, one that has been articulated by Clara Calvo as ‘Shakespeare the patriot, Shakespeare the soldier, who did his bit for the war effort by helping to collect funds for the Red Cross and the soldiers’ huts run by the YMCA’ (Calvo 2010: 199). The YMCA was unsurprisingly positive about the scheme. Basil I. Yeaxlee of the YMCA responded enthusiastically to Gollancz’s proposal for a YMCA ‘Shakespeare Hut’, and his letter encapsulates the blend of patriotism, commemoration and practicality that the Hut came to represent:

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Your proposal is that the site should be used for a practical and national service in the spirit of Shakespeare, who would certainly desire that those who are maintaining the tradition of his England should be sustained and inspired, not only during the war but afterwards. It seems to you that our work offers the best facilities for this and the grant will enable us not only to provide a building on the actual site of the ultimate memorial, where the purpose of the Shakespeare memorial could be at present fulfilled as far as possible during war time by the arrangement of lectures and rendering of plays, but to give practical expression to his spirit of patriotism in other ways.12 The Hut thus not only altered the mode of commemoration adopted for Shakespeare’s Tercentenary but also altered the Shakespeare being ‘remembered’. This is a Shakespeare not for the interest groups involved in fundraising for the Memorial Theatre but for the ‘man on the street’, the conscript and the war hero. Note, too, Yeaxlee’s perception of the site as already destined for a memorial, already a space delineated as a place, ‘the actual site of the ultimate memorial’. The Hut was earmarked from the outset for New Zealand Anzacs, possibly due to Stoll’s Antipodean roots, and it opened on Friday 11 August 1916.13 Thousands of men stayed there over the course of the war – sometimes over 2,000 soldiers a week – and it was staffed almost entirely by female volunteers – around 350 of them. Over one twelve-­ month period nearly half a million meals were served, and over 95,000 beds were let (‘The N.Z. Press Delegates at Home’ 1918). Shakespeare remained central to the Hut in a range of ways, including regular performances of his work, to which I will return later. Life at the Hut also included a special emphasis on education for the young Anzacs, which was to include a Shakespearean element in the ‘curriculum’, presenting Shakespeare as the mark of English national heritage and as a ‘gift’ to – or birthright of – these ‘Dominion’ soldiers.14

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The Shakespeare Hut’s physical presentation is of course integral to how we read its meaning as a memorial or commemorative object. It was swiftly designed by architect W. Charles Waymouth and planned as the grandest YMCA hut ever built. As is clear from surviving photographs of the Hut (Figure  3.1), mock-Tudor beams framed the external walls. This was a deliberate design feature, overtly signposting the Hut’s link to Shakespeare and ‘his England’. In his letter to Gollancz in March 1916, Yeaxlee makes it clear he is already proud of Waymouth’s concept, pointing out that ‘he has provided in the elevation for Tudor touches’. Indeed, as soon as the Hut scheme was made public, the idea of the Shakespeare Hut as an architectural homage to Shakespeare’s age became firmly entrenched, with newspapers frequently pointing out its ‘Elizabethan style’ (‘A Shakespeare Hut’ 1916). The Hut’s idiosyncratic design is equally crucial to its commemorative and to its broader ideological functions. It represented a form of cosy, utopian Englishness for the benefit of Anzacs, yet the very incongruity and anachronism of the Hut within its architectural surroundings – Gower Street, visible at the rear of the Hut in many photographs, consists principally of substantial Georgian terraced properties – confounds the notion of its representing a recognizable ‘England’ in any convincing sense. It was very much a gesture, one that ostensibly commemorated Shakespeare but additionally acted as a conspicuous reminder, embedded incongruously within the residential and institutional architecture of central London, of an Arcadian ‘merrie old England’ worth fighting for. When Anzacs bought postcards of the Hut to send home, their relatives received pictures of the Hut’s comfortable rooms, its innocent pursuits and, in the building itself, an image suggestive of ‘Shakespeare’s England’, the benevolent Imperial motherland. A few descriptions of the Shakespeare Hut and its advantages survive in New Zealand newspaper archives, from which we can read how the Hut was marketed to the general public in the resident Anzacs’ home country. One such article extols the wonders of the Shakespeare Hut:

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The Shakespeare Hut [is] the centre of social life for the Dominion troops . . . the ‘boys’ are looked after at the Shakespeare Hut, and the happy atmosphere . . . pervades that comfortable home while they are in London . . . This hut has probably done more to make up for the loss of home life that our troops must necessarily experience during the time they spend in London than any other agency, and it will be a satisfaction to many anxious parents in the Dominion to know that this is so. ‘The N.Z. Press Delegates at Home’ 1918 Surviving accounts such as this show that efforts were made to represent the Shakespeare Hut to New Zealanders as a place where their loved ones would be safe and well looked-­ after. Shakespeare’s name adds gravitas to the place as well as linking it with a sense of the ‘positive’ side of England, encouraging a notion of shared history and national identity. Werner Habicht identifies the use of Shakespeare as a ‘cultural weapon’ during the First World War as a distinct change from the ‘hero-­worship’ demonstrated in the 1864 celebrations of Shakespeare’s birth tercentenary (Habicht 2001: 449). Allied authorities had invoked Shakespeare’s name, early in the war effort, to recruit young men to join up and fight. Posters using Shakespearean quotations were put up as one of the many strategies employed to arouse a level of patriotic spirit sufficient to generate volunteers for the front. An early recruitment poster shows a simple message: ‘Stand not upon the order of your going / But go at once’ (Macbeth, 3.4.118–9), taking the line so far out of context as to endow it with an entirely different meaning.15 Yet in the process this fragment of text becomes a synecdoche for Shakespeare ‘the Patriot’, directly associating Shakespeare with generalized concepts of English heritage, ancestry and way of life. In Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, Septimus Warren Smith, one of the most lasting literary portrayals of a shellshock victim, ‘went to France to save an England which consisted almost entirely of Shakespeare’s plays and Miss Isabel Pole in a green dress

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walking in a square’ (Woolf 2000: 73). In a certain way, Shakespeare was England, and the Shakespeare Hut took its place, however incongruously, within the residential squares of north-­central London. But does this understanding of the Shakespeare Hut as propaganda object belie the complexity of its function and its importance for Anzacs, volunteers and the general public who encountered it? In a time of brutality punctuated by government messages of cheery patriotism, the YMCA huts seem to have acquired an identity distinct from government and were understood not to be directly complicit in the causes or effects of wartime decision-­making. By approaching the YMCA, Gollancz created a pragmatic memorial to Shakespeare that, while firmly associated with the ‘war effort’, remained distinct from the chain of command. The Shakespeare Hut thus aligned Shakespeare, for both the wider British public and for its Anzac users, much more with the ‘fighting man’, its user (son), and the ‘caring woman’, its volunteer (mother and sister), than with the government or commanding officer (father). The Shakespeare Hut’s function as a fragment of an England of which Dominion troops could be proud also merged with a sense that the Hut could be used to show appreciation of the sacrifices and endeavours of these troops from ‘beyond the seas’. In 1917, Queen Mary visited the Hut and, while this event received only small coverage in the UK press, in New Zealand it was much bigger news. One paper reported that The men – mostly New Zealanders – were delighted to meet her Majesty. The Queen saw a wounded New Zealand soldier, and sympathetically inquired where he was wounded and in what fight. Then a Maori met her eye, and was proud to chat of ‘God’s Own Country’, while later an Australian soldier claimed her interest. After the inspection, the Queen presided behind the canteen counter, and handed to each man a cup of tea. ‘New Zealand YMCA’ 1917

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The fact that the Queen herself served tea to the soldiers was also pointed out in the English papers. The New Zealand reports, however, specifically highlighted the Queen’s con­ versation with a Maori soldier about ‘God’s Own Country’, a patriotic term by then widely used by New Zealanders for their homeland. The effect of this phrase, and the attention given by the Queen to a Maori soldier, as well as the social inversion represented by the Queen serving tea herself, all represent the Shakespeare Hut as a place where New Zealanders would be given very special treatment in return for their loyalty and where their homeland was officially respected both in and of itself and as a key component of Empire. The Shakespeare Hut Lounge (Figure  3.2) also demonstrates the conscious presentation of the Hut as a little piece of New Zealand in London where, within its ‘Shakespearean’, English, mock-Tudor walls, the men would discover a room decorated

FIGURE 3.2  The Shakespeare Hut Lounge Courtesy YMCA Archive.

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with colonial furniture, tropical plants and the Maori greeting ‘Kia Ora’ emblazoned above a very English fireplace. In addition to their obvious purpose as shelters, one of the key functions of YMCA huts was to provide what the organization perceived to be a healthy environment, both physically and morally speaking. The Shakespeare Hut was portrayed in the New Zealand press as a safe, wholesome, home-­like haven for the Diggers, where they could see the sights of London while keeping their morality intact, where, in the words of a reporter, ‘[h]undreds of New Zealand sons have been kept straight by the fine accommodation at our hut’ (‘Y.M.C.A. Work’ 1917). The YMCA’s wholesome image was directed to all Allied soldiers during the war, but in relation to Dominion and Empire troops it took on additional significance. In the New Zealand press, London is seen as the dangerous side of England, where all manner of unhealthy habits and temptations lurk, while the Shakespeare Hut offers the idyllic, leafy ‘merrie old England’ of nostalgia and affection. The building and the entertainments that took place within its walls thus aligned Shakespeare with the softer side of England, with hospitality, care and a sense of the welcoming past. Rather than simply tying the Shakespeare Hut to the patriotic Shakespeare who called young men to war through stark quotations on recruitment posters, the Shakespeare of the Hut seems to have represented a maternal, nurturing homeland. In his autobiography, A Canterbury Tale, New Zealand soldier Francis Bennett describes being taken to Shakespeare’s birthplace on a visit organized by the Hut staff: On the notice board back at the Shakespeare Hut were details of a soldiers’ excursion to Stratford-­on-Avon the next day. To me it was more a pilgrimage than an excursion . . . We went in the room where Shakespeare was born. I was examining the famous window with its many signatures. Our guide invited me to add mine and handed me a diamond stylus. I found a corner and wrote . . . It is an honour usually reserved for the famous, the only qualification being merit.

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Perhaps my guide was indulging an egalitarian whim. Perhaps I was signing in honour of my country, for the news had just come through that the New Zealanders had captured the walled town of Le Quesnoy . . . But, motives aside, the signature was made and is still there. BENNETT 1980: 78 Bennett believed that by signing his name he was somehow representing New Zealand’s contribution to the war effort. His contemplation of the guide’s ‘egalitarian whim’ echoes the interaction of Shakespeare and New Zealand within the Hut, a far from straightforward intersection of Anzac and imperial identities. The etched autograph on ‘Shakespeare’s’ window takes on a particular significance through its permanence – a new Anzac mark on a highly symbolic English heritage site.

Performance as memory The visual appearance of the Hut, as we have seen, fed into its myth, but the entertainments offered within were equally significant. Even before the Shakespeare Hut had been completed, an Entertainment Committee was formed to plan the programme and nature of events for its users. Star actress and president of the Actresses’ Franchise League, Gertrude Elliott (Lady Forbes-Robertson, wife of famous Shakespearean actor Johnston Forbes-Robertson) tirelessly oversaw and participated in the performances given at the Hut for the rest of the war. Shows at the Hut were frequent – at least once a week – and Elliott arranged and even appeared in many of them.16 The Hut’s performance hall thus became a unique space of wartime performance, in which some of the biggest names in theatre performed a truncated or revue-­style fragmentation and reconstruction of Shakespeare’s text for a private audience consisting mostly of Anzac soldiers. The stage was tiny; in a rare account of one of the performances by a member of the audience, journalist and soldier Gordon Stowell

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declares that ‘anyone who could act on that could act on a tea tray’ (Disher 1948: 252). The Hut’s little stage and its black and white timber and plaster background are visible in several surviving YMCA photographs. The black and white stripes function paradoxically in a way: they simultaneously draw attention both to the pseudo-­historical, mock-Tudor design of the Hut’s exterior and to the temporary, transient substance of the Hut’s structure. In a letter dated 26 April 1917, Elliott wrote to director Edith Craig about the aesthetic problems of the stage: ‘Can you also tell me’, she asks, ‘if it is possible without great expense, to get a painted cloth to hang at the back of the Hut stage always, instead of that . . . white striped effect that is in the woodwork? I can only think of an effect of curtains’.17 This modest request for simple painted cloths to hide the black and white stripes of the Hut’s walls reveals Elliott’s acceptance of the wartime austerity of resources but at the same time questions the aesthetic or artistic emptiness of the Hut’s stage as an adequate space for performance. As it happens, Edith Craig’s general production style prior to the war had been known for its minimalist sets and props: one of her trademarks was to use only cloths as scenery (Cockin 1998: 123). Elliott’s appeal to Craig demonstrates her resolution to maximize the effectiveness of the Hut’s basic space at a time of war when theatre was perhaps inevitably subject to accusations of frivolity. The basic, austere performance facilities offered by the Hut remind us that its existence was premised on temporariness, transience and liminality. The result of this on the relationship between memory and performance expressed by the Hut is, as I have already suggested, difficult to define. The ongoing imminence of the building’s destruction was, tragically, shared with its audience, due as they invariably were to return to the front after their brief time in the Hut. The performers’ space is separated from the audience not only by the layer of imagination required by the spectator but also by the relative safety and normality of their lives, a luxury not shared by the men who looked on. The tragic, then, must always have been

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present in the Hut’s entertainments, regardless of text or performance, by means of its unique audience, both corporeal and memorial. Marvin Carlson has valuably described theatre as a form of ‘ghosting’, as the reiteration of character, body, space and text in performance. For Carlson, theatre – in which he includes space, performance, performer and spectator – and memory are inextricably linked: Theatre . . . 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 a new circumstances and contexts. The present experience is always ghosted by previous experiences and associations while these ghosts are simultaneously shifted and modified by the processes of recycling and recollection. CARLSON 2003: 2 Reflecting on the concept of ‘ghosting’ in relation to performance in a temporary theatre space such as the Shakespeare Hut offers a further layer of complexity, given the transience of the space and the rapid turnover of its residents, both due to the brevity of military leave and due to the numbers of the troops who were never to return from the trenches. Performances in the Hut thus necessarily negotiated ghosts both of the Shakespearean past and the very immediate wartime present. Furthermore, the Hut was a space in which highly regarded actors performed yet were not necessarily recognized by the very particular audiences to which their creativity was directed, due both to the audience members’ geographical origins and to their cultural preferences, thus curtailing elements of the ghosting that these actors might normally have expected to attend their performances. Moreover, the Hut was a space in which the most famous of texts were spliced and fragmented in every performance, again complicating our reading of the significance of the Hut as a Shakespearean performance space. Add to this the fact that the place was originally designed to transform an unused, negative

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space into an active site of commemoration – along with the proximity of violent death with which all of the audience members lived – and the Hut’s role as a locale for a particularly complex form of ghosting becomes very apparent. Any theatre built ‘in memory’ as a commemorative object offers a challenge to our understanding of the relationship between performance, space and memory. The commemorative function of a building can be viewed as quite distinct from the dynamics of memory and from the ghosting taking place within it. Yet a theatre named after a historical performance practitioner could equally be seen as one that offers an extra metadramatic quality in its ghosting. The historical practitioner’s influence over the subsequent performance and over the audience’s experience appears guaranteed by the use of his name – an obvious designation of a certain quality confirmed over time – and is likely to encourage certain expectations in the audience of the approach that will be taken to the performance. Indeed, before the Hut was even conceived, there had been considerable tension over the dynamics of appropriate commemoration for an actor and dramatist. Johnston Forbes-Robertson himself strongly objected to the naming of the National Theatre after Shakespeare, believing, with Barker and Archer, that the performance of Shakespeare, rather than the naming of a place, should be the true memorial to the life and work.18 When, in 1919, Gollancz suggested that the New Shakespeare Company, supported by the rental payments due from the Hut in peacetime, might take on the memorial function of the proposed National Theatre until the economic and practical shadow of the war had subsided, those members of the SMNT committee with a firm belief that only a physical theatre could guarantee cultural memory reacted with horror. Thus both Forbes-Robertson and Gollancz, from their very different professional perspectives, held that performance itself can have an adequate, or perhaps even a superior, commemorative function in comparison with the formal naming of a physical structure. Performance thus becomes in itself memorial. The Shakespeare Hut as a building

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is named, clearly, as a memorial object yet the entertainment that took place within it formed a significant element of its commemorative function. The Shakespeare Hut thus approached commemoration from two directions: performing commemoration and building it. Yet both remained ephemeral: the building had neither permanent planning consent nor the appropriate physical construction to be seen as a permanent or even long-­term memorial, while the performances lived in the memories of the spectators and the practitioners for their lifetimes but are now lost to us in all but textual traces. Ill-­suited as it was to the demands of full-­length Shakespearean drama, the stage remained a key Shakespearean focus for the commemorative function of the Hut. Instead of full productions, the Hut presented gala or revue-­style entertainments, often consisting of a series of Shakespearean scenes interspersed with music, readings and speeches. These fragmentary and diverse programmes, even on evenings purely devoted to Shakespeare, make playful use of Shakespeare’s perceived ‘value’, and in so doing they arguably reflect the suffragist politics of many of the entertainers and of the principal director, Edith Craig – performance as education, performance as activism.19 Indeed, the choice of extracts often reflected suffragist uses of Shakespeare while simultaneously creating a representative ‘revue’ of the individual plays that were most often used to bolster morale and even recruit troops. A surviving programme for one of the annual Shakespeare galas documents the format of a Shakespeare gala event held at the Hut. Co-­directed by Gertrude Elliott and Edith Craig, it included Johnston Forbes-Robertson performing a soliloquy from Hamlet and Jacques’s ‘Seven Ages’ speech, ‘Shakespeare Songs’ (Lady Maud Warrender), an address by Professor Gollancz, Ellen Terry as Portia (the same role reprised in the Drury Lane gala’s pageant), scenes from Henry V (performed by the all-­female, teenage troupe, the Junior Players) and a range of other songs and extracts, including scenes from King John.20 By piecing together elements of the text of Shakespeare, the Hut performances did not necessarily create synecdochic

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representations of the plays from which the extracts were drawn, nor simply present a patriotic message. Instead, fragments were assembled to create a performance that suited the new cultural and entertainment space offered by the Hut, one that subverts the expected ‘ghosting’ process expressed in the reiteration of a familiar text which becomes subject to the ghost of itself in the memory of each spectator, if that spectator has some previous experience of the text, but which, for many spectators among the Hut’s somewhat ‘captive’ audience, who seem to have had limited or no experience of live Shakespearean performance and for whom knowledge of the plays may well have been based on reputation alone, may have had no prior significance, thus short-­circuiting the ghosting process. Perhaps because of this – because the audience lacked a framework of prior (or subsequent) performances with which to link the shows they saw in Bloomsbury – the Shakespeare Hut performances are all but forgotten. There are barely a handful of references to the very existence of the Hut, let alone in studies of Shakespearean performance history. As McMullan notes in Chapter 1 of this volume, in her 1982 history of the RSC Sally Beauman described the Hut cursorily (and clearly inaccurately on two counts) as ‘a small wooden hut in which to entertain British troops’ (Beauman 1982: 69; my emphasis). In this and its other rare mentions in theatre histories, the Hut is represented as a space for amateurs to entertain the troops.21 Thus a significant element in the history of Shakespeare on the British stage has simply been erased, both by neglect and by selective memory.

Forgetting the Shakespeare Hut In 1920, after the last Anzacs had sailed for home, the Hut became the home of the newly formed Indian YMCA. As we noted in Chapter 1, the rent paid for the formation and touring of the Stratford-­based New Shakespeare Company until the sale of the site and the Hut’s demolition in 1923–4; the Hut

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thus continued, obliquely, to retain a role in the sustaining of Shakespearean performance, even if not on the actual theatre site. Yet by 1939 the Hut is wholly misremembered as an American Red Cross facility, and it simply faded from memory as time went by (Brown and Fearon 1939: 299). Built on the Hut site during the mid to late 1920s, the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine now forms an imposing part of the local architecture. Its website offers an interactive timeline of the history of the institution and its location, yet – given what we now know of the significance of the Shakespeare Hut to its users and volunteers, and indeed to the history of Shakespeare and commemoration – the description of the site prior to the building of the School was for a long time hauntingly inaccurate. In 2012 it stated simply that ‘the vacant site remained a wilderness of huts and rubble until the mid– 1920s’.22 In such ways has the Hut been written out of architectural and cultural history and therefore out of collective memory. Paul Connerton, in his taxonomy of forgetting, articulates the centrality of forgetting to our understanding of remembering, especially in collective and public contexts. ‘We generally regard forgetting as a failure’, he writes. ‘This implication has cast its shadow over the context of intellectual debate on memory in the shape of the view, commonly held if not universal, that remembering and commemoration is usually a virtue and that forgetting is necessarily a failing’ (Connerton 1989: 59). For the Shakespeare Memorial movement, the rhetoric of failure, of the neglecting of patriotic duty, is central to the fervent arguments its members made for the erection of a solid memorial to Shakespeare in England. Rather than a straightforward desire for a simple, joyful celebration, the driving force of the movement seems to have been the horror of the possibility of ‘forgetting’ Shakespeare, a fear that arguably stems from anxiety over the playwright’s supposedly elusive life, personality and body, which cannot ever fully be ‘re-­membered’. Given that, by this time, the cultural understanding of Shakespeare was so substantially

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bound up with notions of Englishness, to forget him might, for the English, be to forget themselves. In his earlier work, Connerton suggests that social memory is distinct from ‘historical reconstruction’, which, he writes, consists of ‘traces . . . the marks, imperceptible to the senses, which some phenomenon, in itself inaccessible, has left behind’ (ibid.: 13). The construct ‘Shakespeare’ consists of just such traces, and the process of ‘remembering’ him cannot function in the same way as that for an individual who is remembered as a body or a defined personality. Commemoration of a long-­dead, mythicized figure such as Shakespeare necessarily elides historical reconstruction into social memory, suggesting and implanting notional memories in collective perception. In Shakespeare’s case, this process is particularly vexed and, in the wartime context of 1916, the creation of Shakespearean ‘memory’ is all the more significant as an agent of national identity. In the memory of the Diggers who used the Hut, their last images of many lost friends may well have held primacy of place. For users of the Hut, the conflict between cultivating its memory and the temptation of forgetfulness would, like other aspects of their active service, be troublesome. Allyson Booth, examining the notion of ‘wartime architecture’ in the First World War, sees individual forgetfulness of the trauma of war as being facilitated by the forgetting of specific, related objects. ‘When the past that has pooled into objects is a past that includes the war,’ she writes, ‘characters sometimes take advantage of that reification as a way of discarding an experience they would just as soon forget. If memories are conceived of as residing in certain objects, it becomes possible to place, manipulate, or discard those memories’ (Booth 1996: 147). Indeed, the number of amnesiacs entering into society in the aftermath of war served to destabilize a process of forgetting and remembering that might previously have been expected to be orderly. At the same time, official endorsement of certain aspects of remembering, such as the officially sanctioned memorial sites, can be seen as an attempt to regulate

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memory, to erase or prohibit dangerous cultural recall, such as the remembering of the mistakes of the British military command that led to so much loss of life. Moreover, in the rush to memorialize the dead, those who returned from the war with their memories or limbs wrenched from them were themselves an inconvenient reminder of the war that defied myth-­making for many decades beyond the Armistice. A further element in the forgetting of the Hut is arguably the ‘female’ identity it acquired through the gender of many of its entertainers and workers. In several ways, as we have seen, it represented to its users day-­to-day the female face of the war. After the war ended and the Anzacs slowly returned home, the hundreds of women of the Hut returned to their pre-­war roles, often as middle-­class wives and mothers. As Booth has noted, attitudes to women returning to the domestic sphere after their ‘war work’ often added up to their contribution being valued as training in domestic ‘hard work’ so that they would solve the ‘servant problem’ by becoming good servants to their husbands or fathers, newly equipped with the capacity for physical labour; ‘in other words’, she notes ironically, ‘the war . . . taught women to be servants’ (Booth 1996: 129). If the Hut was remembered as the product of women’s ‘war work’, then this may well have contributed to its exclusion from public memory. As it happens, the Shakespeare Hut almost became an even more complex memorial construct, one whose reiterative premise can seem, given the history of the Hut, almost parodic, if unintentionally so. In 1919, a group of Anzac servicemen proposed to build a war memorial and the form they decided upon was a replica of the Shakespeare Hut, to be reconstructed in New Zealand. One New Zealand paper reported that ‘Officers, non-­coms, and men of the Division . . . are subscribing to build a Hut in a New Zealand city on the lines of the Shakespeare Hut, London . . . as a memorial to those fallen during the war’ (Ross 1919). The scheme was never realized, in all likelihood due to funding problems. Nevertheless, this incident shows how crucial the Shakespeare Hut had become

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as a symbol of the New Zealand Diggers. A temporary memorial to Shakespeare in London would have become a fixed memorial in New Zealand – a permanent replica of a transitory building, commemorating the men who stayed in the Hut, thus layering commemoration of the wartime dead onto the foundation provided by the historical reconstruction expressed through the name of Shakespeare. Just as Lieutenant Leslie Tweedie’s memorial was incorporated into a space designed to commemorate Shakespeare, so the monument represented by the replica Shakespeare Hut would have merged Shakespeare’s name with those of hordes of fallen New Zealand soldiers. What this plan also underlines is that the Shakespeare Hut moved from the opposite of forgotten – that is, from the intention to replicate it for posterity – all the way to oblivion in just a few decades. In Gary Taylor’s words, ‘Buildings are, paradoxically, more perishable than poems. Of magnificent buildings . . . there is only one specimen; survival depends upon the perpetual preservation of that solitary original’ (Taylor 1996: 78). The original Shakespeare Hut was, in these terms, not only physically but also culturally demolished. In the end, the ‘forgetting’ of the Shakespeare Hut broadens our perceptions of the function and meaning of commemorative objects during the First World War, of remembering Shakespeare, and indeed of notions of commemoration in a much wider sense. The differentiation proposed by Paul Connerton between the actually ‘remembered’ (and therefore mourned) and the ‘historical reconstruction’ of the long-­lost person or event is a useful starting point in dealing with the commemoration of Shakespeare at the time of the Tercentenary. Yet, in the case of the Shakespeare Hut, these definitions become blurred. In the first instance, Shakespeare’s name shared the space with that of Lieutenant Leslie Tweedie, whose memorial faded wholesale with the demolition, and then the forgetting, of the Hut. Hauntingly, too, while the Hut was designed for relaxation, entertainment and shelter, the high death toll of the war by 1916 was already all too apparent to

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its residents. The Hut can be thus seen as a memorial not only to Shakespeare but to everyone who passed through it, contradicting Booth’s claim that during the First World War the ‘architectural memorialization of the dead and missing was kept distinct from the design of architecture that would be used and inhabited by the living’ (Booth 1996: 127). On the contrary, the Hut, this curious instance of temporary commemorative architecture, performed both functions. The invocation of Shakespeare’s name to delineate the Bloomsbury site as a physical place both of cultural commemoration and of practical use by Anzacs led to a unique intersection of the living and the dead, the historical and the newly mourned, England and an Empire in its last days. The largest material commemorative object dedicated to Shakespeare in 1916 was merely temporary, merely functional – yet, as we resurrect it from oblivion, we find that it serves valuably to blur the boundaries of any attempt to define commemoration.

4 From the Shakespeare Hut to the Pop-­up Globe: Shakespeare, memory and New Zealand, 1916–2016 Mark Houlahan

Shakespeare, New Zealand and the First World War ‘Is this your grandfather?’ the archivist Dolores Ho asked me, several days into my research visit to New Zealand’s National Army Museum, Waiouru, an imposing concrete fortress in the middle of the North Island (not far from the mountain slopes where key sections of Peter Jackson’s six Tolkien films were made). Indeed it was: piled in the banana box were miscellaneous papers from F. J. (Francis John) Bilton, my mother’s father. There was no direct link in the box, sadly, to my quest for New Zealanders who might have been in London during the First

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World War and who then might have recalled visiting the Gower Street Shakespeare Hut; I will report on those who did below. But there were photos from the voyage out from New Zealand across to Albany in Western Australia, up the Indian Ocean to Bombay and thence through the Suez Canal to Egypt, the normal route for shipping soldiers from Australia and New Zealand to the northern hemisphere.1 There were shots of my grandfather, aged eighteen (looking like nobody’s grandfather), posing in the desert with his mates, named on the back of photos: ‘George Woolhead, Les Roberts, Dick Whittiker and mine self’. For several months he had been based at Zeitoun, outside Cairo, where soldiers trained before being sent to the battle fronts. Frank (as he was always called) left New Zealand midway through 1915. He served in the campaigns in Palestine and then, after being injured, worked as a clerk in the New Zealand Expeditionary Force’s HQ outside Cairo. A brochure in blue card in this box advertised tours up the Nile Valley to Karnak and the Valley of the Kings. A typescript records Frank’s own impressions of the trip, complete with a sketch of the temple at Karnak and comments on the food and service at the various hotels where he and his friends stayed. Here was a whole world of profit and delight, of innocent pleasure to set against the global violence that had drawn him so far from the South Island of New Zealand. Granddad never made it to the Shakespeare Hut in London. He was discharged in 1919 and claimed a pension on the grounds of grenade fragments lodged in his legs and back. I begin this chapter with his records not because they are unusual but because Frank’s story would be so obviously replicable in so many other family archives. Frank’s journey from the South Island of New Zealand to the Middle East and back was, literally, antipodal, crossing from one axis or ‘foot’ of the earth to the other. Frank never discussed this journey (so far as I recall), but he lived with its consequences. Moreover, for the rest of his life he was surrounded by emblems of his time in Egypt and the Palestine of the First World War. A framed poster of the Shellal Mosaic hung above his chair in his lounge.2 He had copies of the

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popular works on the Dead Sea Scrolls which were in vogue after their discovery in 1947. These were talismans of the knowledge and lived experience of Egypt and the Near East that Frank bought back to New Zealand. This antipodal axis, I suggest, might serve as an analogy for the antipodal Shakespeare which this book proposes, not as a one-­way process, whereby those in the South (Australia and New Zealand) look north for Shakespeare sustenance (from England), but rather as a series of dynamic transfers of cultural insight and learning, fully in train in 1916 and the years following and echoing dynamically still, a hundred years later. This purely chance encounter with a past I never knew brought home to me the ‘real’ that underpins these archives and underlines our closeness to the events of a century ago. It is not just that this was unquestionably one of my ancestors, for everyone has family connections they can trace back to the period of the First World War. More broadly, looking at these photos underlines how close we all are to these events. These are people like us. My granddad, aged eighteen, is no older than my first-­year students. What would happen to them at the front, I find myself asking, when they can hardly manage to submit assignments on time? As scholars of the English Renaissance, we repeatedly struggle to reconstruct historical habits of thought and practice that at times seem unremittingly strange. In those terms, though, 1916 can seem startlingly present and alive. I know that my grandfather did not in fact visit the Shakespeare Hut so vividly described by Ailsa Grant Ferguson in her chapter in this book; yet, as I will show and as Grant Ferguson demonstrates, many soldiers like him did visit the Hut and, as part of their respite from the war, contrived to have a good time there.3 Surely he would have too, given the chance. In New Zealand, official museum displays to commemorate the war focus on battlefield reconstruction and on the iconic battles in the Dardanelles campaign. To focus exclusively on these, our antipodal perspective shows, is to under-­read the war, suggesting that we need to work that little bit harder to retrieve cultural memory in its broadest sense. This, then, is an essential part of

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FIGURE 4.1  Frontispiece, Sir Walter Raleigh, History of the World, 1614

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what it means to link the Shakespeare Tercentenary with a wider cultural analysis of the First World War and is, we suggest, a necessary duty for Shakespeareans, as we re-­examine the ‘vast gap of time’ of the four hundred years between Shakespeare’s death and the present. In the frontispiece to Sir Walter Raleigh’s 1614 History of the World, History is depicted as a force holding the world up to the light of truth, showing the deeds of good and bad fame for all to see. Below her feet, History tramples the figures of death and oblivion. The insights of history, as the image assures us and Raleigh’s massive volume offers to deliver within its large compass, will rescue us from the negating indistinctions wrought by death and oblivion. The emblem is accompanied by a poem by Ben Jonson, explicating the image’s visual terms. In 1614 Jonson was not credited for his work, but he published it in his final collection of poems, Underwood (1641), as ‘The mind of the Frontispiece to a Book’: From Death and dark Oblivion (near the same)   The mistress of man’s life, grave History, Raising the world to good or evil Fame,   Doth vindicate it to eternity . . . Time’s witness, herald of antiquity,   The light of truth, and life of memory. Bevington, Butler and Donaldson 2012: 134–6 In classical times, oblivion was a quality associated with the River Lethe that ran into the underworld, its waters serving to wash the newly dead clean of their associations with the world above, preparing them for the new eternity of nothingness and indistinction. Thomas Blount’s 1656 Glossographia usefully expands Jonson’s sense of oblivion: forgetfullness, unmindfulness . . . a feigned river of Hell, the water whereof being drunk, causeth forgetfulness of all that is past; Hence it is used for Oblivion or forgetfulness.4

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Blount’s quality of ‘unmindfulness’ presents a key challenge both for this chapter and for the wider collaborative project this book reports on. It is not, after all, that we have forgotten the First World War, nor, of course, that have we forgotten Shakespeare. But, as our collective archival projects show, we have been insufficiently mindful of the many links between Shakespeare and the First World War. The Bloomsbury Shakespeare Hut itself, for example, has long since vanished, the site subsumed into the sprawling complex of the University of London (now largely fragmented into its component parts), but through syncopating between London archives (as Ailsa Grant Ferguson has done) and New Zealand newspapers, manuscripts and ephemera (as I will do in this chapter), we can recover a good deal of the Shakespeare Hut’s brief life and purpose. This approach can then be extended to other Shakespeare-­focused activities that engaged New Zealanders, principally through the tercentenary year 1916 but also, as the records amply show, throughout the First World War. Yet there is surely a paradox in applying mindfulness to the rescue of cultural memory from oblivion. Complete mindfulness would, after all, be a numbingly inchoate impossibility. The volume of scholarship in all fields linked to the First World War, rightly prompted by the reflection a century enables, can seem like a deluge in which all perspectives drown. Yet even with the new mass of archival material (such as for example those available since 1991 from the former Soviet Union), together with the democratizing effect the digitizing of records has made possible worldwide, we have to choose. In our approach in this book we choose a signal year, 1916, and a signal author, Shakespeare, around whom to thread a series of cultural narratives. My own task in this chapter is to be mindful of the strenuous efforts New Zealanders made in relationship to Shakespeare, despite and partly because of the epochal conflict in which New Zealand played a role from 1914 through to 1919. ‘Commemoration’, Gordon McMullan writes in the opening chapter of this book, is a ‘looking back, a remembering, but it also . . . involves a good deal of

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negotiation . . . and forgetting.’ New Zealanders remembered to remember Shakespeare in 1916; in that year they also began the habit of remembering the 1915 Gallipoli campaign, now an overwhelming presence in national memory, as it is in Australia. But over the past hundred years we have forgotten many of the ways in which 1916 was a key year for Shakespeare remembrance. What we can trace, then, is a kind of double relation. New Zealand’s involvement in the war looks a little different once the Shakespeare activities described here are taken into account. But the global reception of Shakespeare also looks different, more complex, with this evidence. Through these traces there are signs of the awkward fit McMullan describes between Shakespeare as an English legacy and Shakespeare as a globalized cultural icon. And one of these signs is perhaps the forced joviality, the willed air of masquerade, with which New Zealanders joined in the Tercentenary and which hangs over the kind of forced tourist march they engaged in through the sights of London and up to Stratford-­upon-Avon. With these thoughts in mind, I will first address the theme of the Shakespeare Hut, showing what New Zealanders recollect of their time there, followed by the evidence of New Zealanders at home actively supporting the Hut. I will then consider the wider range of performances, lectures and concerts staged in Shakespeare’s name during wartime in New Zealand itself, focusing in particular on two quite distinctive Shakespeare clubs, one in Auckland, the other in Dunedin. I will then consider the ‘official’ New Zealand contribution to the Tercentenary, William Pember Reeves’s poem in Israel Gollancz’s Book of Homage to Shakespeare (1916). A hundred years later these antipodal links enmeshing New Zealand with the cultural phenomenon that is Shakespeare are still a force, as we will see in the activities of the Pop-­up Globe which arose and exuberantly entertained Auckland audiences through the later summer and autumn (February to May) of 2016 and plans to do so again in the late summer and early autumn of 2017.5

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New Zealand and the Shakespeare Hut On Monday 4 August 1919, A. R. Stone ‘took the bus back to Kingsway and walked to the Shakespeare Hut’. He ‘called at the New Zealand Headquarters to see Thompson Mackay but the place was shut’ (Stone n.d.).6 He adds, sadly, that ‘New Zealand control of the Shakespeare Hut ceased last week.’ This would have been his third visit to the Hut during 1918 and 1919. Stone’s diary gives a definitive end to New Zealand soldiers’ fond associations with the Bloomsbury Hut over the previous thirty-­five months, exemplified by another soldier,

FIGURE 4.2  Flyer for the Shakespeare Hut Waikato Museum of Art and History 1993–11–163. Photo Dan Morrow.

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Harry Hall, who mentions his pleasure at attending the opening of the Hut: Thursday 24th August 1916. On Tuesday inst. went to opening of AOTEA ROA HUT – good – free supper. Hall n.d. 7 There is no evidence that this loss-­leading opening offer was repeated, but one aspect of the Hut that soldiers clearly appreciated was its value for money as one of the cheapest places they could stay in London, whether on leave from the Western Front or from the main training facility for New Zealand soldiers based in England, the camp at Sling on Salisbury Plain. William Miller, in a letter to his mother, reported enthusiastically on the Hut’s virtues: Shakespeare Hut is run by YMCA and no matter when a soldier arrives he can always get a meal. The place was crowded with soldiers on leave. It cost sixpence for a bed. The dormitories were all full as well as a big hall which was laid down with wire stretcher about six inches from the floor. We slept in this concert hall. [T]ea consisted of 1 sausage, 1 egg, potato, 1 slice of bread and a piece of pastry. The whole lot cost 1/3 and we considered that cheap. W. MILLER n.d. 8 Miller concisely reviews the main features of the Hut that attracted soldiers, and led them clearly to recommend it to each other.9 As a place to sleep for the night it was effectively a backpacker lodge for soldiers, similar to many such places in King’s Cross, Euston and Bloomsbury today. The concert hall which Ailsa Grant Ferguson has shown to be a space for professional performance on this occasion was pressed into use as an extra dorm room. Soldiers clearly felt they ate both well and economically at the Hut. ‘One could get a fair feed

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there for about 1 [shilling]/3 [pence]’, Alexander May wrote home on 12 February 1917, six months after the Hut had opened (May n.d.). New Zealand soldiers were well paid while on service (compared at least to their English counterparts) but their diaries are full of the kinds of quick accounts and reckonings of sums of money to hand familiar to anyone who has travelled on a limited budget. Miller’s remark that the tariff for bed and board was cheap is replicated in many of the diaries, as the soldiers were clearly alert to getting value for money and are colloquially terse when they feel they have been ripped off.10 Along with the guarantee of a good sleep and a good feed, soldiers were deeply appreciative of the chance to wash and scrub up before hitting the town. The most frequent action on arrival reported in the diaries, irrespective of time of day, was to have a bath, as Andy Dewar records on 4 February 1918: I had a bath, a change of underclothing, a shave and haircut . . . It was a little touch of Heaven after nearly twelve months of Hell across the ditch! DEWAR n.d. He repeated the pattern for the first morning of each of his three subsequent visits to the Hut, on 18 December 1918 and 17 May and 17 June 1919. As with Stone’s diary and many others I have read, these entries remind us that for Commonwealth soldiers, as for Americans, their war in Europe extended for months beyond the Armistice of 11 November 1918, as the logistics of returning soldiers to their homelands were complex. Then too soldiers were still required for the range of duties we now group under the umbrella term ‘peacekeeping’. For the duration of the war, soldiers were entitled to leave after a year’s service. The rhythm of visits to the Hut notably increases after 11 November 1918, so leave was clearly (and understandably) more readily granted after hostilities ceased. Of course, not all soldiers kept journals, though there are letters and diaries from several hundred New Zealand soldiers.

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Not all the diarists consulted for this project felt their time in England worth mentioning in detail, focused instead on recording action at the front and picking up their entries only when they returned to the battle front. Those quoted here, however, tended to be enthusiastic chroniclers of all their experiences. Volunteering (or being conscripted, as New Zealand soldiers were for the latter years of the war) necessarily turned them into tourists, and they perforce underwent a version of the experiences New Zealanders group under the term OE (Overseas Experience). Fighting for the Empire might seem an unnecessarily grim way to gain such experience, but their records show them contriving to take pleasure where they could – hence their delight in the pleasures of the Hut and London’s other attractions. They frequently seem to have dedicated themselves to sampling London’s great sites in considerable haste.11 Leave afforded them only a few days in London, and they would know there was no guarantee of a return. Thus they hustled along to St Paul’s and the Tower of London, to the Palaces and the British Museum (which was just around the corner from the Shakespeare Hut). They are fascinated by the Tube (there being no such thing in New Zealand then or now) but maintain a sense of colonial independence. Thomas Mitchell reports being in a group of twenty soldiers who on 17 October took a guided bus tour: ‘We visited the Tower of London, St. Paul’s Cathedral. Royal Stables, Westminster Abbey.’ ‘What a great city,’ he marvels. ‘No doubt it is a proper empire city . . . The underground trains are marvellous.’ Yet, with perhaps a sense of truculence, he defensively claims that there ‘are just as fine buildings in NZ’ and adds: ‘I would not want to live here’ (Mitchell n.d.). On the evening of this tour, Mitchell records another familiar London tourist activity: he went to an (unnamed) play at night. He also reports the hazard of London playgoing in 1917: ‘Terrible Zep raid at 8.30pm’. Since Thomas Platter’s visit in 1599, taking in a show has of course been reckoned one of the delights of ‘London town’, as not a few of the diarists

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breezily describe it. Victor Lawn, ‘on Leave in Blighty’ late in 1918, took in Maid of the Mountains, Chu Chin Chow, The Boy, Eyes of Youth, Chinese Puzzle, La Pouppe, Tails Up, Yes Uncle and Fair and Warmer (Lawn n.d.). As this makes clear, Lawn, like many of the soldiers, opted for West End entertainment, not Shakespeare. Likewise in 1916 John Moloney and his companions ‘chose Razzle Dazzle at the Empire. It was very bright’. There is pathos in his final comment, which underpins the appeal of a musical after months at the Front: ‘To us after months of starvation in the musical line, it was delightful to hear even the rag time of a revue’ (Moloney n.d.). Thus it seems as though soldiers were far more likely to take in a musical than attend a Shakespeare show. In the accounts I have read (from approximately three hundred soldiers), I have found dozens of such visits to light entertainment but only two clear descriptions of attending a Shakespeare play. An unknown soldier went to a performance of Twelfth Night on 19 February 1919 (Unknown Soldier n.d.); and in March 1916 Francis Leverson-Gower West went to The Taming of the Shrew at the Apollo Theatre: Oscher Asche & Lily Brayton were good as usual. First time I have seen this play & first one of Shakespeare’s I have seen in London. WEST n.d. West’s social position distinguishes him from most of the soldiers whose accounts I have read. He does not seem to have stayed at the Hut; rather, his diary reports weekend stays at country houses, and his comments suggest he was more accustomed than most soldiers to take in high, as opposed to popular, culture. The infrequency of soldiers recording attendance at a Shakespeare production underlines a key aspect of the archives I have so far consulted. Soldiers in the Hut report eating, sleeping and listening to music; in postcards they can be seen relaxing in the lounge, playing billiards, writing letters in the library. But, despite the records of

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performances there by renowned actors, I have found no reports of Shakespeare activities within the Hut from soldiers who stayed there. A soldier wrote home to the Dunedin Shakespeare Club on 11 October 1917 reporting that he had been in ‘the Middle Temple Dining Hall & stood on the actual boards where Shakespeare first played Twelfth Night’.12 In April 1919 A. R. Stone took a day trip and [r]eached Stratford-­on-Avon about 11.30 . . . Had lunch in the town and then went over to the house of Shakespeare’s birth place and then to the village church where Shakespeare is I think . . . went about a mile out of town and went over to Anne Hathaway’s cottage. This is a Stratford-­upon-Avon circuit familiar to many Shakespeareans. Francis Bennett notes a similar ‘soldiers’ excursion to Stratford-­on-Avon’ which was advertised at the Hut. ‘To me’, Bennett continues, ‘it was more a pilgrimage than an excursion’ (Bennett 1980: 89). This suggests that, though some of the soldiers were mindful of Shakespeare as part of the English legacy the chance disasters of war allowed them to inspect, they were in a distinct minority. Some of the New Zealand soldiers were quite bookish: these include William Smallfield, who during the war read George Eliot’s Romola, re-­read Dickens’s first blockbuster The Pickwick Papers and eagerly anticipated the next Conan Doyle. In a few cases this bookishness took Shakespearean form, as it did with Edward Millar, who writes to his mother on 24 February 1918 that, ‘escorted by an erudite gentleman’, he had been on the Strand and Fleet Street, ‘where I bought a volume of Shakespeare’s sonnets and poems’ (Millar n.d.). The relative lack of evidence of ordinary soldiers in the Hut engaging with Shakespeare offers some resistance to the impression given by those responsible for the creation and running of the Shakespeare Hut that the poet’s works were of primary importance to all who passed through its doors. Clearly this was not the case, and it is important to set this

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against the internal propaganda and to recognize a certain slippage between intent and effect. Yet it is unquestionably true that New Zealanders back home were well apprised of the Shakespeare Hut and its restorative importance for London-­ based leaves through letters such as McMaster’s and the postcards many sent home with images of its rooms.13 New Zealand newspapers also reported enthusiastically on the Hut. They show that, at least in 1916, the story of the Hut’s origins was known to many, for they report the backstory of the £70,000 raised for a National Theatre and the diverting of the location for the Hut.14 Fundraising was a prominent Shakespearean theme in 1916, and this applied to the Hut also. New Zealanders knew how well used the hut was. Stories placed late in the year emphasize the success of the Hut and the quality of its fit-­out, costed at an initial £8,000. But, these stories continue, the Hut needed more – more curtains and furniture, more equipment, was needed for it to be fully furbished. If the Dominion could rally with £2,000, that would seal the deal. Again here it is striking that the emphasis is placed on comfort and solace for the troops; this is borne out by the postcards too. The archives show a plethora of Shakespeare-­related activities in New Zealand during the war. The three-­hundredth anniversary of Shakespeare’s death was widely noted in newspapers, and a constant stream of reports kept readers up to date with English celebrations. On 29 April, the Auckland Star went large with a full broadsheet page, showing the celebrations in England and putting in populist form key known facts about Shakespeare’s life and times. In the New Zealand of 1916, these pages often featured a depiction of Shakespeare being worshipped by his children, the tacit implication being that settlers in their colonies are the real descendants of Shakespeare, part of the cultural ‘better Britain’ historian James Belich (2001) describes.15 Reports throughout February, March and April designate 3 May as the official tercentenary day, a date chosen, as Gordon McMullan notes, officially at least, to accommodate the shift from the Julian

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Calendar observed in England until 1752 to the reformed Gregorian one. As McMullan explains, this was done also to avoid 23 April, which in 1916 fell on Easter Sunday. Thus, through April and May, celebrations were staged across the land; these were partly in Shakespeare’s honour and partly to fundraise for the war effort. In June Wellington’s Shakespeare Tercentenary Committee handed over £248 4s. 7d. for the Belgian Red Cross fund. At this time there was a Wellington Shakespeare Club, as there still is, but they were unable to help as for some years they had been unable to attract decent numbers to their readings and talks. The ad hoc 1916 committee did rather better, staging a three-­day Shakespeare festival at the Opera House on Courtenay Place, with community performers acting scenes from Shakespeare and Shakespeare-­related musical items. An editorial in The Dominion on 22 April (the day before Shakespeare’s birth and death day) expounded Shakespeare’s centrality to the children of the Empire, and in a sermon late in April at the Unitarian Free Church in Wellington the Reverend Augustus G. Hale addressed the rhetorical question: ‘Is Shakespeare worth remembering?’ The reports of this sermon, the 1916 equivalent of a TED talk, appeared in a range of newspapers across the southern part of the North Island. Newspaper records from 1916 show public zeal for Shakespeare across the whole of New Zealand. The Grafton Shakespeare club, on the outskirts of what is now Auckland’s downtown core, held a 3 May recitation event. The Auckland Public Library exhibited its bequest from Sir George Grey of the first four Folios and the 1640 edition of Shakespeare’s poems.16 In Wanganui the Wesley Guild held Shakespeare recitations, and in Levin a festival was staged, again with the stated aim of raising funds, in this case for the Red Cross. Further north in Hawera, a concert and Shakespeare recital was held. Across Cook Strait, South Island towns were not to be outdone. Nelson staged a concert, and in Ashburton, south of Christchurch, the Baring Square Literary Guild hosted an evening both of recitations and a lecture on

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Shakespeare’s biography. The discovery of gold had made Dunedin the first wealthy New Zealand town; it still prides itself on its cultural capital.17 Here the Congregational Church on Moray Place, right in the middle of town, hosted an address on Shakespeare’s humour and recitations of musical items; the lecturer was Professor Gilray from the University of Otago (as Dunedin’s university is called). Local academics were put to good use in Auckland and Wellington also. Newspapers kept people abreast of the main themes of these lectures. As they reported the festivities in Stratford-­uponAvon, so too they recounted the views of English scholars. Sidney Lee’s lectures on ‘Shakespeare and Empire’ and ‘Shakespeare and the War’ were given prominence. On 3 May the Auckland Star carried what reads like a full summary of the lectures, emphasizing themes relevant directly to the War effort: ‘Generally speaking, Shakespeare’s dramas enforce the principle that an active instinct of patriotism promotes righteous conduct.’ The promulgation of Shakespeare as an instrument of righteous conduct is an unsurprising public observation from the middle of the First World War. Lectures on righteous conduct by themselves, of course, do not fully account for the panoply of Shakespeare-­related activity that New Zealand archives reveal, and there is perhaps a subtler way of accounting for the variety and relish with which New Zealanders, especially those at home, at the other end of the world from the Western Front, went about celebrating Shakespeare – in marked contrast, as we have seen, to the New Zealand troops actually staying in the Shakespeare Hut in London. Of course, many people were aware of Shakespeare as a crucial cultural legacy brought to the South Pacific by their ancestors. But, in many circumstances, they also enjoyed hearing his plays and debating Shakespeare-­related issues, and this for me forms a key link to the other leave activities of the soldiers. It makes human sense that, against the face of battle, in John Keegan’s phrase, people would seek out pleasure wherever they could. That seeking of pleasure, Shakespearean or otherwise – the

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taking-­in of Twelfth Night or the Rag Time Revue – was part and parcel of the war effort, and treating Shakespeare as wholly distinct from popular entertainment may in this context be to miss the point.

The Shakespeare Clubs Many of the 1916 Shakespeare celebrations were devised for the Tercentenary year itself.18 The need to keep Shakespeare’s legacy alive in the Antipodes can also be demonstrated through the activities of Shakespeare clubs and societies active throughout New Zealand in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. There were such groups in Dunedin, Ashburton, Hawera, Wanganui, Wellington, Gisborne, Hamilton and Cambridge, and there were several based in Auckland. Of these, the minute books of the Parnell Shakespeare Club offer a complete picture of events from the 1880s through to the 1930s and thus afford a comprehensive glimpse of what such a club engaged in, not just in 1916, but for the duration of the war.19 In 1914, for example, the Parnell Club met nine times, reading together six plays, including Henry VIII. In 1915 there were ten meetings, reading six plays followed by an evening of anthology pieces. In 1917 they met ten times, reading nine plays. Throughout 1916 the Club adhered to its customary schedule, which a 1915 rule change had put on a more regular footing, meeting every fortnight from 12 May to 13 October, with the postponement of the 21 July meeting because ‘the weather was very bad on the previous day’. These are the months which extend from late autumn through to early spring, with coolish nights and plenty of rain pouring from the Tasman Sea across the Auckland isthmus. Presumably the club members had other things to do outdoors in the long summer evenings, turning to cultural matters as the evenings close in, as New Zealanders still do now, especially with chamber groups, symphony orchestras and opera. Meetings were held in members’ houses and at

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each a play or part of a play was read. In 1916, the Club worked through Henry V, The Taming of the Shrew, Richard III, The Merry Wives of Windsor, Coriolanus, Two Gentlemen of Verona and Macbeth; and they finished the year again with an anthology evening from The Merchant of Venice, Coriolanus, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Taming of the Shrew, Henry VIII, Antony and Cleopatra, The Comedy of Errors, The Tempest and Romeo and Juliet – thus generously sampling the tragical, historical and the comical and, we might note also, drawing from the full chronological range of Shakespeare’s output, from perhaps the very first (Two Gentlemen of Verona) to almost the last (Henry VIII). The club secretary records intriguing evaluative comments. Most of the full plays were read over two nights, taking in Acts  1 to 3 one night, followed by Acts  4 and 5 at the next meeting. Some of these are puzzling to modern eyes. The minutes note of Two Gentlemen of Verona (15 September 1916) that since a good bit of cutting is necessary in this play a few long speeches were shortened. We were indebted to Miss Wright for a pretty capable rendering of the Song ‘who is Sylvia’. It added much to the Interest of the Play. The play is already short by Shakespearean standards, however, raising questions about the logic of the choice of cuts and about the Club’s reading pace. You would expect a decent ‘who is Sylvia?’ to be sung in pretty much any restaging of the play, and it is no surprise to find a 1916 group unstirred either by the issue around the attempted rape in the last act or by the difficulty early twenty-­first-century audiences find in accepting the tonally jarring rapprochement between Valentine and Proteus. The next fortnight saw the Club read Macbeth ‘with cuts’, the minutes note; again the comments are instructive:

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It is practically a one man & woman Play, & to lengthen it there is good deal of padding in it. If it could be done with the music which was written for it – it would probably improve it greatly. Promoters of the Middletonian witch scenes, or the semi-­ operatic Restoration adaptation, likely would agree. Subscriptions to the club were set at 2s. 6d., and meeting in members’ parlours must have kept costs down. Accordingly the club ran a surplus that year. Some of this was used to fund tickets for members to see the Allan Wilkie productions toured from Australia in 1916. Members opted either to see Twelfth Night or The Merchant of Venice. The minutes describe the reading series as a ‘season’, as we would understand a repertory programme from a professional theatre company, as if the Club thought of its readings as a kind of performance. Their enthusiasm for attending Australian-­based Allan Wilkie’s shows suggests the Club understood Wilkie’s company to be offering something different from the Club, more coherent and extensive than any local, New Zealand-­based Shakespeare event could, at that time, be expected to provide. The minutes do not mention the war directly. Modern Shakespeareans will note the reading of the martial-­themed Coriolanus and Henry V, but at these entries there is no overt editorializing through which to focus a reading of the Club’s activities. Perhaps one way to understand this is to see the Club to be not so much a response to the war as a way of escaping it. The Dunedin Shakespeare Club, by contrast (the records for which also survive intact), operated on a grander and more public scale.20 It ran from the 1880s through to the 1950s.21 Whereas the Parnell Shakespeare Club readings were events for the benefit and entertainment of members, the Dunedin Club set out to entertain the whole town. Every year they aimed to present three public readings in a large theatre. They met constantly throughout the year, to organize, rehearse and then critique each of the readings, which were then reviewed by the local press as attentively as if they were fully staged

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performances. The actors, by custom, wore full evening dress.22 In 1916, the Club presented three plays on this scale to the paying public: The Taming of the Shrew, Richard III and Hamlet. These were all well received. The April performance of Richard III took £34 at the box office. The club resolved to absorb all the expenses associated with the reading and donate this money to ‘the Soldiers Sick and wounded fund’, thus foregoing a third of their performance revenue for the year. The reading of Richard III took place on 27 April, the week of the Tercentenary of Shakespeare’s birth. The Otago Daily Times fulsomely reported on English Tercentenary events (as did many New Zealand newspapers); it also noted a speech before the Dunedin reading acknowledging the anniversary. In peace time, the orator remarked, the celebrations would have been far more extensive, and any funds raised would have supported the campaign for a national (that is to say, English) Shakespeare Theatre. The First World War then being fought, he went on to say, meant a retrenchment of Shakespeare celebrations and made it more appropriate for funds to be diverted (as the Club then resolved) to support the war. As this suggests, participating in Shakespeare-­related events and readings and supporting the war could be seen as one and the same thing by New Zealanders. The reviewers had some criticism of the performances but noted in particular the deployment of ‘Mr Hanlon’s elocutionary powers’. Alfred Charles Hanlon had served as President of the Club and was a celebrated New Zealand trial lawyer, noted for the grandiloquence with which he mounted his defences. Those gifts obviously served him well in playing Richard, one of the first great orators Shakespeare invented. ‘Indeed, at one time’, Geoffrey Hall notes in his biography of Hanlon, ‘he seriously considered acting as a career. Elocution and dramatic recital seduced him’ (Hall 1993). As spaces of cultural memory, the room and halls where the clubs met, read and ‘performed’ Shakespeare then can be seen

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to combine playfulness with a willed earnestness. On the one hand they show New Zealanders perfectly capable of playing with Shakespeare on their own terms with considerable relish, in between being vouchsafed visits by the travelling companies who brought ‘English Shakespeare’ to New Zealand throughout the seventy-­year period during which both clubs operated. On the other hand the minute books, letters and newspaper reports also suggest a high seriousness about the proceedings of both the Grafton and Dunedin clubs. The clubs clearly took Shakespeare seriously, and their Shakespearean gravitas perhaps is what allows them to sustain the pursuit of Shakespeare in time of war. The Dunedin speech mentioned above makes it clear that the duty and privilege of re-­enacting Shakespeare is one of the things soldiers so far from their New Zealand homes were fighting for. Debates about playing Shakespeare in New Zealand continue to be freighted with this kind of earnestness. The play matters, but a Shakespeare play, it seems, can matter in all kinds of places beyond the playhouse.23

William Pember Reeves and ‘The Dream Imperial’ For a final antipodal counterswing – back to the London axis – I will turn to the signal and overtly ideologized contribution to 1916 made by William Pember Reeves, whose poem ‘The Dream Imperial’ was included as the New Zealand entry in Israel Gollancz’s tercentenary Book of Homage to Shakespeare.24 Reeves was among the first generation of New Zealanders of English descent who were born in New Zealand. He served as a cabinet minister in a notably reformist, left-­ wing government in the 1890s (Sinclair 1993). He had also been New Zealand’s Agent General in London (as Gollancz noted in the Book of Homage). In 1916 he was running the London School of Economics, which is across the road from

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King’s College, where Gollancz worked; most likely it was this proximity that led to the invitation to contribute on behalf of New Zealand. Reeves was a distinguished poet and a historian as well as a politician. He wrote the first widely read general history of New Zealand, The Long White Cloud: Ao Tea Roa, which held sway through many reprints and revisions until the late 1950s. Like so many of the soldiers whose diaries and letters I have read for this project, Reeves is sure in his identity as a New Zealander: ‘I have lived in New Zealand, have seen it and studied it from end to end, and have had to do with its affairs: it is my country’ (Reeves 1898: vi).25 We can readily recognize this as symptomatic of the pre-­postcolonial or imperial phase of New Zealand identity, quite typical of those of British descent. Like the soldiers, Reeves acknowledges a separate category of ‘New Zealander’ to which he belongs; at the same time, being a New Zealander is subsumed into the larger imperial mission of being British. It is the signal role Shakespeare’s works have played in reifying that Britishness round the world which Reeves celebrates in ‘The Dream Imperial’: Then as our warring, trading, reading race Moved surely outward to imperial space, Beyond the tropics to the ice-­blink’s hem The mind of Shakespeare voyaged forth with them. They bore his universe of tears and mirth In battered sea-­chests to the ends of earth, So that in many a brown, mishandled tome, Compacted spirit of the ancient home, He who for man the human chart unfurled Explored eight oceans and possessed the world. GOLLANCZ 1916a: 311–12 In these lines, Reeves draws on the sea-­soaked rhetoric Stevenson so famously deployed in his prefatory poem for Treasure Island, shifting that rhetoric into an overtly ideological register.26 Here the ‘mind of Shakespeare’ takes on an almost

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sci-­fi aspect as a form of intelligent life able to travel at will across the globe in an instant. That ‘mind’ takes embodied form in the shape of so many volumes of the Complete Works carried by sailors and settlers around the world. The physical book becomes a palimpsest enfolding within it the territory encompassed – much of it, like New Zealand, then claimed for the British crown: ‘He who for man the human chart unfurled/ Explored eight oceans and possessed the world’. Exploring the oceans and the extent of human nature, Reeves claims (making a standard humanist claim for Shakespeare’s efficacy), is one and the same thing. Reeves would also know (having documented the voyages in his history of New Zealand) the extent of Captain James Cook’s three famous voyages across the Pacific, as far south as Antarctica and as far north as Alaska. Cook’s arrival in New Zealand in October 1769 is the definitive beginning of an English New Zealand. Reeves makes a nicely poetic convenience of the wandering of Shakespeare’s book overlaid with explorers such as Cook. In this case, as it happens, poetry rhymes with fact (though this was not known to Reeves himself), for on the Endeavour voyage (1768–71) the personal library of Sydney Parkinson, an artist in Sir Joseph Banks’s scientific entourage, included a copy of Shakespeare’s works. New Zealand thence became British and Shakespearean in a single historical moment. The significance of Reeves’s poem seems to be that as a self-­ acknowledged ‘Antipodean’ he is making a strong contribution to the invention of an antipodal Shakespeare. The terms Antipodean and antipodal are not, as the introduction of this book points out, to be understood as the same thing, but from within the case studies gathered here, they oscillate productively together. The ‘imperial space’ of the ‘ends of the earth’ is occupied by the ‘mind of Shakespeare’. The ‘brown, mishandled tome[s]’ then effectively become portals for the space of Shakespeare and Empire, which are seen in the poem as coterminous. Reeves is asserting two things in 1916. Firstly, if there is to be a global Shakespeare, something would be missing if New Zealand were not seen to contribute. To this

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extent we can recognize Reeves as working out of his sense of nationality. Yet, secondly, Reeves’s concept of Shakespeare seems to be highly traditional, preserved in the rollicking octosyllabic couplets of a poet clearly well read in traditional Renaissance verse forms from canonical English poets. The mottled, sea-­marked covers of Shakespeare’s works are a talisman sent across the globe as a remnant, a beacon of cultural hope to New Zealanders at the outer edge of Empire. Reeves looks outward from London and sees Shakespeare beckoning New Zealanders back to the imperial capital.

Coda The most visible highlight of the Shakespeare 400 celebrations in New Zealand was a nine-­week season of plays in a building that, like the Shakespeare Hut a century earlier, was designed to be temporary: a pop-­up Globe. This was a prefabricated reconstruction of the second, post-1613 Globe, built from steel tubing, plywood and aluminium, constructed as a massive kitset or IKEA-style structure. Quickly erected, it was designed to be reassembled elsewhere, a signal difference from Shakespeare’s Globe in Southwark, which was built to be a permanent theatre on its site, as have been other Globe reconstructions elsewhere in the world. The venture was itself something in the spirit of Anzac, as it brought together in a common purpose New Zealanders and Australians.27 Auckland backers worked with an expatriate New Zealand director, Miles Gregory, who has worked for many years in theatres in England; and the reconstruction was based on the thirty years of design work reconstructing the 1613 Globe by Tim Fitzpatrick of Sydney University. The Pop-­up Globe’s statistics are impressive. Nine plays in all were presented, and the season extended several weeks beyond the initial planned finale on Shakespeare’s birthday, 23 April. One hundred thousand tickets were sold. Of these, 20,000 were for school performances. School trips aside, 80,000 people willingly

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paid either to stand as groundlings in the yard or to sit in a graded series of galleries or private boxes. Social media feeds showed that the pop-­up was an instant hit: audiences were drawn by its temporary nature (as a pop-­up is by definition only available for a certain time), by its improvised use of local construction materials, eschewing the period plaster and daub used in the London Globe, and perhaps above all by the fact that this was a Shakespeare commemoration driven by New Zealand-­based talents. Opinions on the quality of the performances and productions differed widely, as you would expect – some local professionals were haughtily dismissive – and with a range of professional, student and amateur productions performing in the theatre, the skill with which the space was used certainly varied.28 Audiences maintained their enthusiasm throughout, however, embracing the intimacy of playing in the yard, sharing the plays with actors and their assumed characters. Some took formally to cosplay, dressing up as parties for a twenty-­first-century take on ‘ye olde England’, especially in the Lord’s rooms, where catering could be delivered to the seats.29 It was evident that audiences of all kinds were seeking a Shakespeare ‘booster-­shot’, as it were, and could be seen and heard enthusiastically planning their next trip to the pop-­up as they left each performance I attended. The Pop-­up Globe, as promised, was taken down and carefully stored. It reopened in a new site (beside the members’ stand of a local Auckland racecourse) in February 2017 for another late summer/early autumn season. This refurbished facsimile of the second Globe was updated according to new research and had a more glamorous, finished look than in 2016, with a ‘hand-painted . . . brand new Jacobean-inspired frons scenae (stage front) with two balconies and a stunning new ceiling’.30 There were further plans to export this revised facility round the world, together with some of the productions devised specifically for it. This is antipodal Shakespeare on a grand scale. If the Pop-­up Globe pulls off this feat of sending north a New Zealand Shakespeare deriving from Australian-­

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based research, it will frame a lively antipodal balance to the passive consumption of London Shakespeare that National Theatre and RSC live film screenings have made possible worldwide. There is, it seems, still a ‘girdle round about the earth’ linking New Zealand to London; in terms of antipodal Shakespeares, these links still pulse with life.31 A few weeks after the Pop-­up Globe season finished, I passed by the Auckland site on a sunny, autumn morning in May, recording ‘ocular proof’ of the theatre’s coming down.32 How could a Shakespeare scholar not think, at such a moment, of Prospero’s iconic, apocalyptic speech in The Tempest promising the melting away of all insubstantial pageants? Prospero has in mind it seems the ultimate dissolution of the cosmos, but surely in this speech the ‘great globe itself’ encodes Shakespeare’s acknowledgement to his audience and to the physical space of the Globe he must have known so well, a material form dedicated to shows where evanescence was, inevitably, a core structuring principle. We can track New Zealanders pursuing Shakespeare from 1916 through to 2016 in a series of highly specific places. The Shakespeare Hut has vanished and, for the meantime, the Pop-­ up Globe has been packed away. Through the traces of evidence we can catch glimpses of New Zealanders at play with Shakespeare, taking pleasure across time in his many invented worlds. We have to remember the Hut, as physically it no longer exists. This kind of remembering suggests something that is more than playful, because cultural memory requires the work of retrieval and recreation. You would only work so hard if it was important, personally and culturally, to do so. Thus the evanescent threads of evidence from which the links between Shakespeare and New Zealand, between the Southwark Globe and another one in the Southern Hemisphere, can be adduced suggest a kind of urgency. The cultural memory must be played out for it still to have a living force. But there is a further turn which, as usual, Shakespeare anticipates. Once the ‘insubstantial pageant’ fades, Prospero assures his hearers, not a rack will be left behind. In 1916 and again in 2016,

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playing Shakespeare was something at least some New Zealanders felt they had to do. The nexus of New Zealand and Shakespeare, in and between 1916 and 2016, retains, it would seem, a curious tendency to the impermanent (the temporary Shakespeare Hut, the Pop-­up Globe), a quality which might appear almost culturally derogatory were it not for the severe challenges involved, as we have seen, in the creation of permanent memorials to Shakespeare in any of the antipodal locales that have been the focus in this book. Yet there is a curious process of reiteration here – temporary structures repeated across a hundred years expressing improvised antipodal engagements with Shakespearean and other forms of memory. The organizers of the Pop-­up Globe are, to my knowledge, wholly unaware of the history of the other, earlier temporary structure for commemoration and performance, the Shakespeare Hut, yet

FIGURE 4.3  Pop-­up Globe, Auckland, February 2016 Photo Mark Houlahan.

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FIGURE 4.4  Pop-­up Globe deconstructing, May 2016 Photo Mark Houlahan.

in a certain way their contemporary reconstruction ghosts a particular Shakespearean past in a way that can best be described as uncanny, offering a further layer of complexity to the antipodal account offered in this book.

5 Lest we remember: Henry V and the play of commemorative rhetoric on the Australian stage Kate Flaherty

Fixing memory: staging the birth of a nation One of the issues the chapters in this volume considers is the extent to which commemorative activities planned for the Tercentenary of Shakespeare’s death in 1916 suffered interruption by war. This interruption took different but related forms in London, Auckland and Sydney. Focusing on the Australian context, this chapter will investigate the efforts of rapprochement between Anzac Day (25 April) and the Tercentenary and will assess the ways in which this early-­ century intersection continued to play out in discourses of

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nation-­founding, especially in Australian productions of Henry V, throughout the following century. A key tenet of this investigation, one shared with the other chapters in this volume, is that commemorative practice is performative. By this I mean that while ostensibly preserving something from the past, the commemorative process is shaped primarily by the needs of the present. The purpose driving commemoration – to fix an object in memory – results, conversely, in a fossilization of the remembering subject. The postures and attitudes of those who remember, however, are unremarkable in their own era because they are continuous with the living tissue of which they are a part. Only hindsight brings the incidental edges of the impression into focus – the political and cultural preoccupations that generate a particular act or culture of remembrance. In other words, the intention to repeat or retrieve something, combined with the existential impossibility of doing so, makes commemorative events vivid expressions of their own – rather than a past – moment. Theatre history works in a similar way. A production of a particular play which in its time aspired to recover Shakespeare, in hindsight illuminates much more about the context of performance. This fossil record is made legible because the play, like commemorative ritual, is performed in successive eras and multiple locations. The adjustments and alterations that become evident within the formal and structural continuities of the play reveal what has changed in the world. Shakespeare’s plays are frequently treated within performance discourse – whether positively or, more recently, pejoratively – as ‘monuments’ of culture. In a study which investigates memorials and commemoration it is apposite to subject this habit of thought to some scrutiny. The durable rigidity ascribed to a thing called ‘Shakespeare’ is a part of a self-­perpetuating discourse that produces Shakespeare’s monolithic status. Crucial to note is how this status is manipulated to generate different kinds of political and cultural reassurance in different eras. In 1916, as this chapter will reveal, ‘Shakespeare’ was read in Australia as representing

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English racial pedigree and solidarity with Empire. In more recent times Shakespeare continues to be read as monolithic and durable, but now as part of an oppressively hegemonic imperial culture.1 Note how both cultural projects encode an imaginative reflex in which ‘Shakespeare’ is understood as a static monument. A longitudinal view of a particular Shakespeare play in performance, however, reveals that its durability inheres not in its rigidity, but in its culturally and politically useful plasticity. To return to the fossil metaphor, the play’s performance history offers up a historically intelligent composite; one which documents the performative encounters of ‘Shakespeare’ with living culture. The fossil proves a useful figure in that it also captures a core paradox of commemoration: the contrast between living and dynamic activity and the fixed, material objects of commemoration. The disputes about how best to memorialize Shakespeare which led up to the Tercentenary year in London and in Sydney reflected this difference as an ideological tension. From as early as 1912 in Sydney the central proposition for the form this memorial would take was a fixed object: a statue. This proposal, though, had intelligent and vocal critics. In a piece for the Sydney Morning Herald, one such critic argues for a strategy of commemoration which is performative, living and local: And it is to be hoped that our tercentenary celebration of Shakespeare will not stop at a statue, if statue it is to be. The finest tribute to him, and the most valuable witness of his achievement to ourselves . . . would be an organised effort towards the more frequent production of his works. After all, love of them is our only justification for memorialising their author, and love of them may be talked of with enthusiasm, but is impossible, nevertheless, without knowledge of them. And knowledge of them implies not merely the reading of them but the study of them in their actual presentation as the stage plays Shakespeare intended them to be first and foremost. As stage plays they had their

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conceptions and origin . . . A more frequent opportunity of seeing the plays would splendidly memorialise Shakespeare for Australians. ‘The Shakespeare Memorial’ 1912 The writer goes on to add a radical suggestion – that ‘Shakespeare might be figured as the master-­inspiration of literature generally, and funds to commemorate him set aside for achievement in Australian letters, with special reference to that languishing branch of them, Australian drama’. Contrasting in tone and sentiment is the opinion of Henry Gullet – President of the Shakespeare Society of New South Wales from 1904 – who commends the statue and systematically dismisses all other suggestions. As rigid as his proposed monument, Gullet’s argument reflects pointedly colonial anxieties. The memorial theatre proposal comes under fire as having particularly ‘uncomfortable’ and ‘perilous possibilities’ because, as a commercial enterprise, theatre is a responsive commodity. While on one hand its economic precariousness could see the ‘experiment’ result in a ‘colossal failure’, its success as a subsidized operation may deter ‘the distinguished actors and companies who visit us at regular intervals’ from continuing to do so (Gullett 1912). As is hinted in this last concern, and as is fully articulated in other parts of his letter, the function of the Shakespeare memorial is to consolidate racial and cultural ties with England, not to replace them. Gullet cites the statue of Captain Cook in Sydney’s Hyde Park as an ‘embodiment of the adventurous spirit of the English people’ and as a ‘national, racial and artistic success’ that could be repeated with a statue of Shakespeare. In the success of the Shakespeare memorial statue ‘we’, Gullett opines, will have realised to some extent Carlyle’s prophetic vision: ‘This King Shakespeare, does not he shine, in crowned sovereignty, over us all as the noblest, greatest, yet strongest of rallying signs? We can fancy him as radiant aloft over all

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the nations of Englishmen, a thousand years hence. From Parramatta, from New York, wheresoever, under what sort of Parish Constable, soever, English men and women are, they will say to one another: “Yes, this Shakespeare is ours; we produced him, we speak him and think by him; we are one blood and kind with him.” ’ ibid. The term ‘rallying sign’ indicates that the idea of Shakespeare has a perceived cultural utility far beyond the actual dramas so ‘loved’ by the advocate of ‘more frequent productions’. From its very beginnings the terms of the debate about apt forms of memorialization of Shakespeare in Australia are distinct from those in England, for they have to do with belonging to England and participating in England’s imperial martial triumph. The task set for the memorial in Sydney, then, was more politically complicated than that in London; the Sydney memorial must consolidate the bonds of Empire and shared racial pedigree for a newly federated and geographically remote nation. In the terms of our shared antipodal analysis, this is an asymmetrical relationship which is nonetheless characteristic, in effect imposing a burden of additional work on the southern half of the binary. For this purpose, perform­ ance of the plays is entirely inadequate, for in its specificity and responsiveness to local contingency, performance works against monumentality and the possibility of turning a historical phenomenon into a monolithic cultural signifier. Consequently, as Philip Mead has pointed out, Sydney settled on a somewhat backward- (or perhaps homeward-)looking form: a statue and the Shakespeare Room, a repository for Shakespeare-­related books in the State Library of New South Wales (Mead 2015: 82). It would be difficult to imagine two less theatrical ‘monuments’. The historical irony for which this chapter will argue is that, despite receiving no subsidy from the Shakespeare Tercentenary Fund, theatrical performance has proved a more durable and multifaceted repository for Shakespeare in Australia than any other kind of monument.

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Within this I will also argue that subsequent performances of Henry V preserve legible traces of a specifically Australian Tercentenary moment. Henry V is a play that Jonathan Baldo claims offers a ‘remarkable study of how a nation remembers’ (Baldo 1996: 132). Henry V, like many of Shakespeare’s plays, reflects a sophisticated dialectical treatment of remembering and forgetting. Arguably the military action that occupies the plot is framed as a strategic distraction from remembering the usurpation that preceded it – Henry V takes his father’s advice from 2 Henry IV to ‘busy giddy minds/ With foreign quarrels, that action hence borne out/ May waste the memory of former days’ (2 Henry IV, 4.3.341–3).2 And on the eve of Agincourt Henry even tries to distract God – ‘think not upon the fault / My father made in compassing the crown’ (4.1.267–8) – and proffers accounts of the contrite commemorative rituals he has lavished upon the usurped King Richard’s remains (277–9). But it is not Henry V’s backward-­looking memorialization that singles out this play for particular focus here; it is his pre-­ emptive commemoration. Illuminating the performative power of commemorative acts Henry inverts the temporal direction of commemoration: This day is called the Feast of Crispian. He that outlives this day and comes safe home Will stand a-­tiptoe when this day is named . . . Then he will strip his sleeve and show his scars And say, ‘These wounds I had on Crispin’s day.’ Old men forget; yet all shall be forgot, But he’ll remember, with advantages, What feats he did that day. (4.3.48–51) This showcases the performative potential of commemorative practice in the way it looks forward to looking back. Note how the future is folded into the present through the body of the soldier who, although he will show his ‘scars’, will say to

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his listeners ‘these wounds I had on Crispin’s day.’ Standing so close to this rhetoric of wounds and scars, ‘remembering the feats done on this day’ evokes the re-­membering of a body and, figuratively, reconstituting the body of the day. This receives further support in the intervening phrase: the soldier ‘will remember’ ‘the feats done on this day’, says Henry, ‘with advantages’. Most editors gloss this as ‘with added touches’ or ‘embellishments’ without commenting on how brazenly it counters commemorative logic. Henry suggests that because they were there and because they bear the scars, the soldiers will be enfranchised – not to preserve an authentic record of the event – but to give it their own nuance. The surviving soldiers will reconstitute the battle of Agincourt in private discourse for their own ends, exhibiting their own scared bodies as authenticating monuments. In this moment Henry seems to be projecting a radically pluralized form of commemoration in the form of individual oral histories. Actually, he is manipulating the concept of commemoration for his own ends through a rhetorical trick of tense. The looking forward to looking back in which the autonomy of individual memories is celebrated is nothing but a ploy to convince the men to relinquish all autonomy and charge into almost certain annihilation. Commemoration operates in this instance, and not for the last time, as recruitment. While the First World War is retrospectively understood as an interruption to the planned activities of Shakespeare commemoration in 1916, the Australian response to the calendar clash reflects an ecstatic sense of opportunity. If, as I have suggested, the projected task of the Shakespeare memorial was to consolidate the bonds of Empire and underscore the true Englishness of Australians, the marking of the first Anzac Day only compounded these aspirations. In the conflation of Shakespeare commemoration and the first anniversary of the Gallipoli landings, it is possible to detect a unified discourse which distinguishes Australian from English commemoration. While, as the introduction to this volume points out, in London, decorum dictated that Shakespeare not be celebrated at

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this juncture – prompting Herbert Beerbohm Tree to tour to America – in Australia at the Tercentenary ‘Shakespeare’ is jubilantly mobilized to underwrite the emergent discourse of the ‘the birth of a nation’ which would eventually become the monolithic myth of Anzac. In Anzac Day and Shakespeare commemoration we can observe the paradoxical monumentality and performative plasticity of myths in formation and transformation. Their temporal adjacency and thematic interdependence sharpen the picture. This chapter explores the ways in which the accidental intimacy of these two entities extended beyond their first encounter. While the statue and the Shakespeare Room bear little trace of the performance of Shakespeare in support of Anzac Day, the performance history of Henry V in Australia is indelibly tinted by it a century later. The 1916 ‘Shakespearian Festival’ Tercentenary event in Sydney, postponed and resituated at the Adelphi Theatre to accommodate the first Anzac Day, was unabashed in its conflation of its two ‘causes’.3 Led by Australia’s extensively touring Shakespeare team – Allan Wilkie and his wife Frediswyde Hunter-Watts – the event was an eclectic entertainment comprising favourite scenes from Twelfth Night, Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, As You Like It and Othello as well as songs from Shakespeare and a lecture on Shakespeare and music. Proceeds from the matinee event were dedicated to the Anzac Day fund. In an address read out on the occasion, Sir William Cullen – the absent president of the Tercentenary Memorial Fund – expresses Shakespeare’s ‘love of liberty’ in his history plays, but offers a subtle rhetorical caveat for the anti-French Henry V: ‘was it not probable’, asks Cullen, ‘that Harry of England largely acquired from the French that spirit of chivalry for which the Allies were standing together today?’ (Anon, Sydney Morning Herald, 4 May). The most deliberate welding together of the embryonic Anzac legend and Shakespeare, however, came in the non-Shakespearean part of the programme, the account of which deserves to be quoted in full:

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[T]he programme closed with the impressive recital by Dulcie Deamer (in classic robes) of her own ‘The Pen and the Sword’ as part of a tableau, with Britannia enthroned, Anzac soldiers at her feet, all the artists on the stage, and an actor to represent Shakespeare. When the famous lines were quoted – ‘Come the four corners of the world in arms, but we shall meet them! Nought shall make us rue if England to herself do stand but true’ – Shakespeare clasped hands with a wounded Anzac warrior in khaki; and the audience cheered. The matinee closed with ‘Rule Britannia’ (by Mr. Weir), and the ‘National Anthem’ in general chorus. Philip Mead has elsewhere analysed the ironies of this tableau, in which Shakespeare is resurrected to shake hands with a wounded soldier played by an actual returned soldier. A more complex interplay and reversal of the living and static dimensions of commemoration could scarcely be imagined (Mead 2015: 80). For my purposes, however, this literally living monument captures a new pact. The figure of Shakespeare is invoked not to commemorate Shakespeare but to supplement a larger narrative newly in formation – that of the birth of the Australian nation. In this, the Dulcie Deamer tableau epitomizes Raphael Samuel’s insight about the constitution of history: [H]istory composites. It integrates what in the original may have been divergent, synthesizes different classes of information and plays different orders of experience against one another . . . it creates a consecutive narrative out of fragments, imposing order on chaos, and producing images far clearer than any reality could be. SAMUEL 1994: x To understand the intensity of the ‘birth of a nation’ discourse in 1916, it is necessary also to deconstruct the concept. In the imaginative figure of a nation’s ‘birth’, which is abidingly a part of the Anzac construct to this day, lurks the necessity for a witnessing progenitor. This explains why, in dramatic contrast

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to the politico-­cultural status quo that has prevailed since the 1970s, popular Australian patriotism of the early century was imaginatively continuous with a sense of belonging to the British Empire. Repeatedly in laudatory discourse about the Anzacs they are described as ‘England’s sons’ and Australia as a ‘young’ nation. Lineage is very important in narratives of birth, a feature which, as I argue below, has produced discomfort and innovation in the Anzac legend in more recent times. This intense identification with Britain was both the cause and effect of Australia’s commitment of troops to the British forces in the First World War. As has been argued elsewhere, in the approbation Australia received by the flamboyant British war correspondent, Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett, lay the veracity of Australia’s nationhood, a birth culturally produced by the protective and admiring gaze of the mother country.4 Dulcie Deamer’s tableau actualizes this gaze in the figure of Shakespeare who, at this juncture in Australian history, offered capacious representation of the qualities to which the new nation aspired. Both Ashmead-Bartlett and Shakespeare, as external figures of approval, gave Australia ways to conceptualize its own emergence as a heroic young nation. Perhaps this explains why Ashmead-Bartlett’s dispatches were printed in Australian newspapers ahead of those of Australian journalist C. E. W. Bean and have since become enshrined as the core of the Anzac legend. Literally competing with Shakespeare’s repertoire, Ashmead-Bartlett’s touring picture show offers another example of how the Anzac myth evolved through performative actualizations of the gaze of the mother country. In 1916, at precisely the moment when Australian capital cities were busy deciding how to adjust planned Shakespeare commemoration to accommodate Anzac Day, Ashmead-Bartlett was thrilling Australian audiences on an extensive tour of cities and towns with his footage of the front – With the Dardanelles Expedition – accompanied by live lectures. This novel journalistic entertainment, described as having the effect of ‘bringing Gallipoli’s battlefields right to one’s door’, provided a commemorative act of affective immediacy that competed with

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equivalent theatrical events.5 That Ashmead-Bartlett’s ‘show’ served the purpose of actualizing England’s paternal gaze is attested in the way it is anticipated in the press. According to the Brisbane Courier, he has been in a special position to notice the valour and resource of the Australians and New Zealanders at Anzac, and his bright stories of their exploits form much of the subject matter which he gave in London and which will be subsequently repeated in this country. ‘Music and Drama’ 1916 In this account Australia and New Zealand are confirmed as a central subject for admiration in London. Australia is also provided, through the medium of film, with a way of looking at itself as a nation. This perspective is focalized through the affirming gaze of the mother country and, as with the newsreel example discussed below, it is offered as assurance of a bright national future.

Memory serves: performing new cultural and political priorities In the period immediately after 1916, while Shakespeare commemoration continued to be a nationally compelling priority, we see an ongoing integration of Shakespeare with the discourse of nation birth. Inseparable from this is the ever-­ present theme of witness borne – of Australia being looked at and validated by a benevolent parent. An example of this process is apparent in 1923, the year that saw the Tercentenary Fund committed to the trustees of the State Library of New South Wales and that also saw the designer of the Shakespeare Memorial statue, Bertram Mackennal, commissioned to design the commemorative Cenotaph in Martin Place in central Sydney. On 23 April the Melbourne Argus reported that

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Bishop Green preached the sermon at St Hilary’s Church of England East Kew, yesterday morning, when an Anzac Day commemoration service was held. Bishop Green took as his subject – ‘A great cloud of witnesses’ (Hebrews xii., 1), and referred to the fact that in the next few days would be celebrated the anniversaries of such giants as Shakespeare, Wordsworth and Cromwell. These men, and our heroes who fell in the First World War, were the ‘great cloud of witnesses’, and we should show thankfulness for our wonderful heritage in getting away from class bitterness and sectional hatred. ‘ANZAC Day. Sunday Observance’ 1923 Bishop Green’s sermon is a commemorative act only a little less virtuosic than Henry V’s at Agincourt. In the Christian Bible, the writer to the Hebrews rhetorically inverts the usual direction of the commemorative gaze; rather than looking to the past for inspiration, his readers are to imagine themselves as looked at by their spiritual forbears. Green extends and secularizes this conceit; his congregation are to understand themselves as being watched by models of English cultural and political achievement – Shakespeare among them – and by the abstract figure of Australian wartime sacrifice: ‘our heroes’. By Bishop Green’s act of commemorative conflation the sanctity of the named greats is extended to the myriad nameless war dead. Shakespeare is inserted into the panoply of witnesses in order to corroborate the meaningfulness of their sacrifice and to witness the potential of the new nation. By 1923 it was already a cultural commonplace that Gallipoli had witnessed the birth of the Australian nation. The contradictions that this cultural and political ‘birth’ process encompassed are, to this day, repeatedly elided in hegemonic public discourse. What the Anzac ‘myth’ meant in its early days would be largely unpalatable, if not irrelevant, for modern Australia. Consequently, the myth is strategically transformed whenever it is activated so that it appears to consolidate the same meaning for successive generations. As the hundredth

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anniversary of Anzac Day approached, it became urgent that critical scholarship illuminate some of its contradictions: That Anzac Day observes with pride one of Australia’s greatest defeats, in which 8,000 men died and a further 19,000 or so were wounded, has often been remarked upon for its strangeness. REED 2004: 120 This fact is not so very strange, however, if we take into account Jonathan Baldo’s insight in his account of Henry V that ‘Control over how a nation remembers a momentous event like a war is almost as significant as the outcome of the war itself, given how crucial memory is for the legitimation and exercise of power’ (Baldo 1996: 133). Anzac, to borrow Baldo’s term, is one of Australia’s ‘wars of memory’. In 2010, a collaboration of cultural critics and historians published the provocatively titled What’s Wrong with Anzac? (Lake et  al. 2010). This volume articulated the ironies of the imaginative positioning of Gallipoli as the birthplace of the nation and critiqued the bipartisan political rhetoric that fortified the ‘myth’ of Anzac. Essays in the collection point out the unfitness of Anzac as a founding myth on the basis of its exclusiveness; its Anglo-Celtic hue, its masculinity, its imperialism, its origins in what was effectively colonial British propaganda, and also on the basis of its historical utility as a facade for miscarriages of justice within Australia. The writers also note the disturbing evolution of Anzac Day from a day of solemn remembrance into a day of jingoistic celebration. What’s Wrong with Anzac? reveals that turning the tragic tactical error of Gallipoli into a sacred legend of nation-­founding began with the approving gaze of Ashmead-Bartlett and continued through successive commemorative acts in twentieth-­century Australia. In this, like commemoration in Henry’s speech at Agincourt, and like the conceptual currency of ‘Shakespeare’ itself, the Anzac concept invites rhetorical manipulation and displays performative plasticity.

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Therefore, by the latter end of the twentieth century we observe a refashioning of the Anzac myth for greater inclusiveness and for a diminished emphasis on ties with Britain. Labor Prime Minister Paul Keating’s Remembrance Day address in 1993 exploited the indeterminate identity of the ‘unknown soldier’ to this end; despite the fact that (or perhaps because) we cannot know his origins or religion, we can know that ‘[h]e is one of us’ (Keating 1993). In 1997 Liberal Prime Minister John Howard extended the nebulous quality of Anzac to peace-­time hardship: the ‘spirit born on the cliffs of Gallipoli, then matured in the mud of the Western Front . . . A spirit which draws Australians together in time of need. A spirit which may seem to slumber but arises to draw new breath when needed, amid ash-­filled skies, flooded ground or the rubble of a disaster’ (Howard 1997). Notably absent from either address is the 1916 emphasis on Englishness and service of Empire. While the birth-­of-a-­nation theme is sustained, the keynote has been changed from sacrifice for Empire to service to nation – Australia is ready to produce itself commemoratively without the aid of witnesses. This self-­ sufficiency also extends to the spiritual plane. In a culturally hybrid, post-Christian society, Keating suggests that ‘in the sacrifice of the men and women whose names are recorded here there is faith enough for all of us’ (Keating 1993). In the absence of a national religion, remembering the story of Anzac, with advantages, gives Australian nationhood a satisfactorily spiritual focus. Nowhere is the sacrifice motif and religion replacement thesis more obviously played out than in the Anzac memorial in Sydney’s Hyde Park. Here one looks down on a sculpture entitled Sacrifice, the figure of a young soldier with his arms flung out across a sword as if crucified. The Anzac memorial was established, like the Shakespeare memorial, following a public appeal and an indecisive pause. The NSW Anzac Memorial Fund began in April 1916 and accrued $60,000 by the end of that year (compared to the Shakespeare memorial’s $25,000 in about ten) (Anzac Memorial, n.d.). Continuing the

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pattern of procuring validation from an imperial parent figure, the Anzac memorial in Hyde Park was opened in 1934 by the Duke of Gloucester. As a nameless monument to absent dead (bodies of the fallen were interred in Europe where they fell) the Anzac memorial operates as a space for negotiating the problematics of remembrance. It is not an object of remembrance so much as a venue for commemorative acts. Its ceremonial sweep of steps operates as a raked stage and its pool of remembrance creates a traverse theatre configuration. The Anzac memorial was, for many years, the venue for the ‘Shakespeare in the Schools’ performances – a movement augmented by the Tercentenary Memorial Fund. The venue’s use as a performance space for Shakespeare once again brings together the entangled commemorative projects of what had by this time become ‘Shakespeare Day’ and Anzac Day. A 1955 newsreel by the Cinesound Company documents a ‘Shakespeare in the Schools’ performance of Henry V by students of Sydney Boys’ Grammar starring a fourteen-­year-old Jack Thompson as Henry.6 That it was by the Cinesound Company is significant in that this was Australia’s home-­grown newsreel corporation with a self-­proclaimed mission of reporting exclusively Australian news, compared with their competitor, the American-­owned Movietone. The 1955 Cinesound segment is a commemorative act that reconstitutes, through performance of Shakespeare, the Anzac legend as an optimistic expression of Australia’s nationhood. The pervasive tone of the segment is a jocular, post-­war militarism. The opening tilts up to the four statues of Australian Diggers at the top of the memorial before taking in the young actors on the stage. The editing of the sound and image reflects a familiar idiosyncrasy of Australian nationalism: its unproblematic encompassing of imperial ambition: ‘we will close up the walls with our English dead’, proclaims the young actor with an Australian rising inflection as he stands on the steps of Australia’s grandest memorial to its own war dead. The next shot returns to the stage with the French envoy arriving on a ‘real charger’. The populist Shakespeare motif is continued

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with the next narratorial interjection: ‘youngsters get a real thrill out of the battle scene; done in symbolic style with swords, crossbows, pikes and staffs, stepping right out of the history books.’ Spectacular Shakespeare was, in Australia at this time, popular Shakespeare, and in the ‘real charger’ and the ‘real thrill’ of the ‘swords, crossbows, pikes’ we can read an impulse of theatrical nostalgia (see Waterhouse 2001: 26–7).7 The final move by the narrator is a paternalistic commendation of the event’s formative role in evolving nationhood: ‘modern education has certainly gone a long way beyond the three Rs, and the citizens of the future will be better citizens because it has.’ Posturing variously as entertainment, as a source of up-­todate information, and as a history archive for future generations, the newsreel is a formidably slippery cultural artefact. The film editing and camerawork are tightly controlled, along with music to smooth out the voice-­over transitions from jokey apostrophe – ‘bite deep on that apple, dearie’, encourages the commentator as the camera briefly catches a snacking youngster – to solemn reflection to self-­ aggrandizing pronouncements. Through the rhetoric of national progress the newsreel rehearses chauvinist and jingoistic attitudes and positions itself as a reliable repository of history. The future is called upon to underwrite a particular interpretation of the present in a strategy of pre-­emptive commemoration. And in this cultural work, Shakespeare and the nation-­founding legend of Anzac are, by 1955, produced as natural allies. Commemorative reverence for Shakespeare is seamlessly woven into the fabric of the nation-­founding myth of Anzac; an English play and a battle lost on foreign soil fought for the British Empire have become all about Australian nationhood and its bright future. If Australia enlisted Shakespeare to witness the ‘birth of a nation’ in productions of Henry V as recently as 1955, how did the arrangement survive the political and cultural ruptures that characterized the second half of the century? Beginning to break the formal mould in 1964, the young John Bell and

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Anna Volska played Henry and Katherine at the third Adelaide Festival in a circus tent. Hinting at a change of cultural climate, a contributor to the Festival Souvenir program wondered whether this production could achieve ‘a distinctively Australian manner of performing Shakespeare . . . without either forcing Australianism or diverting essential Shakespeare values’ (quoted in Gay 2001: 197). A more cataclysmic shift in artistic orientation, however, can be charted following the 1975 dismissal of Prime Minister Gough Whitlam by the Queen’s representative, Governor-General Kerr. Many theatre practitioners of this era see the event as a piece of political theatre that had direct ramifications for their work with Shakespeare. Speaking of the 1975 Nimrod Theatre’s Richard III, which opened on the night of the dismissal, actor Drew Forsyth describes rushing off stage to huddle over a radio and hear the latest developments (Kiernander 2001: 245). In response to this production one reviewer also saw the live political parallels, wishing that ‘after the political drama in Canberra the production would have been better if costumed in ‘pinstripe-­suits’ and ‘sensible tweeds’ (John Tasker, quoted in ibid.). In like spirit, Aubrey Mellor positioned his 1978 As You Like It for the National Academy of the Dramatic Arts as a direct response to the dismissal by ‘making the bad duke very much like the Governor General John Kerr who sacked Whitlam and . . . Jim Cairns was, you know, a bit of an old hippie – a Tweed jacket and talking about how wonderful it was in the forest’ (Flaherty 2011: 101). Theatre scholarship that explores this era sees it as a turning point in the emergence of a national consciousness expressed in productions of Shakespeare. One oft-­cited example is Robin Lovejoy’s 1973 The Taming of the Shrew for the Old Tote theatre in Sydney, which relocated the action of the play to a remote town in New South Wales (Fotheringham and Pensalfini 2007). Another is John Bell’s Much Ado About Nothing, which extended the enlivening rehearsal exercise of using Italian Australian accents into performance to wide acclaim (Kiernander 2001: 242–3). These productions and their

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reception highlight distinctly local cultural coordinates and a decisive departure from English points of reference. One review of Nimrod’s Italian-Australian Much Ado is particularly vehement in this regard: Damn the purists, damn the pedants . . . Ignore what the Prospect did and the Royal Shakespeare Company didn’t. Forget all the reverent nonsense you learnt about Shakespeare at school; forget all those productions that are faithful only to tired traditions and timidly believe the verse should stand by itself. For the spirit of Will Shakespeare – all the guts and wit, the comedy, the bawdiness, the biting intellect and basic desire to entertain – is indeed alive and well at Sydney’s Nimrod Theatre. GERALDINE PASCAL, quoted in Kiernander 2001: 244 The cultural-­political rift with Britain, therefore, did not entail a rift with Shakespeare. While the affirming gaze of the mother country was declared redundant, ‘Shakespeare’ took on new relevance as a mascot for irreverence and resistance.

Troubled memory: revision and reflexivity Where, then, did this leave Henry V – the ostensibly monarchist and militaristic drama that had been so useful since the Tercentenary for cementing the Englishness of Australia and superintending its birth as a nation? As far as available records indicate, the answer is: off the repertoire. Only three Australian productions of the play are recorded between 1964 and 1994, and only one of these by a professional, federally subsidized company.8 This infrequency is matched only by the lapse in production of the play between 1913 and 1924, one that is easily explained by the First World War allegiance with France.

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In 1989 Kenneth Branagh’s film of the play sparked the Shakespeare film boom of the 1990s and paved the way for understanding the play as a vehicle for exploring the moral ambiguities of war and its muddying of hierarchical distinctions. This development paved the way for a new kind of imaginative engagement with the play in Australia as is reflected in successive productions. In 1998 the Bell Shakespeare Company staged a conflated version of 1 & 2 Henry IV and in 1999 – the year of the referendum for an Australian republic – Henry V. In 2013 Bell Shakespeare again staged 1 & 2 Henry IV and in 2014 Henry V. A comparison of the interpretative choices made in these productions, fifteen years apart, provides a time-­ lapse impression of the cultural and political preoccupations that continue to unite discourses of Shakespeare, war commemoration and nationhood in Australia a hundred years after the Tercentenary. Traces of a reformulated Tercentenary pact between Shakespeare and Anzac can still be strongly detected. Established in 1991, the Bell Shakespeare Company, which badges itself ‘Australia’s national theatre company’, set out with a mission to ‘use Shakespeare as Australians – as a vehicle for self-­scrutiny and recognition: to make work that is of us, for us and about us’ (Bell Shakespeare n.d.). In this vein, Adrian Kiernander has posited that the 1998 Henry IV conflation, with its dilapidated urban aesthetics and sports hooliganism, provided a radical intervention into the understanding of British-Australian relations: It embodied an Australian approach to Shakespeare by avoiding almost all possible references to Australia, in effect making Australia the unmarked term, focusing instead on Britain as . . . provincial, tribalistic, heteroglossic and internally riven . . . with many of the negative characteristics – boorishness, and lack of polish, for instance – which many English habitually ascribe to Australians. KIERNANDER 2001: 248–9

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In his book, Kiernander sums up the production’s impact: By focusing on the less attractive aspects of English culture, it worked as an attempt from inside a part of the former empire to provincialise the centre. KIERNANDER 2015: 171 While the Henry IV conflation made Australia, as Kiernander puts it, ‘the unmarked term’, Bell’s 1999 Henry V did the opposite. It made explicit an emergent national narrative that, I argue, constitutes a kind of remembering with advantages. In one sense Henry V saw a return to the 1916 pact – Shakespeare, if not literally then figuratively, shaking the hand of the Anzac ‘Digger’. The cast were uniformed as First World War-­era British soldiers – evoking nostalgia for what was, by this time, collectively accepted as the moment of Australia’s birth as a nation. However, the role of Britain as benevolent overseer of the birth was altered. The scene in which Henry in disguise discusses the moral accountability of individuals in war with three rank-­and-file soldiers became for many reviewers a focal point for rehearsing a particularly Australian experience of war. This moment permitted a poignant, but this time interrogative, replaying of the sacrifice for Empire motif that formed the backbone of the mid-­war commemorative activities in 1916. By 1999 the Anzac myth had come to encompass a recognition of bungled British authority. When Henry claims that he ‘could not die anywhere so contended as in the King’s company, his cause being just and his quarrel honourable’, Williams counters: ‘That’s more than we know.’ Henry responds (in this production with only four lines) to the effect that the subject’s duty to the king does not absolve him of responsibility for his own soul. Bates then responds: ‘I do not desire that he should answer for me, and yet I am determined to fight lustily for him’ (4.1.120–3). Williams and Bates thereby offered models of resignation and sacrificial resolution that have been readily associated with Gallipoli since AshmeadBartlett’s dispatches. The way in which this moment exploited

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the ambivalences of the play’s treatment of war to articulate contemporary Australian perceptions of the past was registered by reviewer Narelle Harris: Particularly apt is one group of soldiers (Australian, in this World War One era production) who cannot say if the cause is just, but are nonetheless there to fight for the King of England – an echo of Australia’s presence in Europe in the First World War. HARRIS 1999 In this way the play was mobilized to fortify a new dimension of the Anzac myth – one that troubles the ties with Empire that were so integral to the first Anzac Day. This scene dramatized a moral absolution for Australian military action as the valour of ‘ordinary’ men conscripted to a quarrel whose justice was ‘more than they knew’ and perhaps more than we want to know. This reflects a shift of emphasis that has enabled the Anzac myth to survive, and even to thrive, in an anti-­militaristic cultural climate; a shift from the political big picture to the experience of the valiant, if ambivalent, individual. Joel Edgerton, who had played Hal in the previous year’s Henry IV, epitomized this emphasis in which the personal victory was primary: ‘In the end, the victory which Edgerton’s Henry celebrates is not in beating the French, but the victory over himself, over what he was at the beginning of the play, a young man only dimly aware of his responsibilities’ (Rose 1999). This production charted the coming of age of an Australian larrikin through assumption of the duties of war, by 1999 a familiar synecdoche for Australia’s coming of age as a nation. It is important to observe how, in this process, Australia’s Shakespeare of 1916 is remembered with advantages. In 1916 the utility of Shakespeare in Australian commemoration was a capacity to evoke the political ‘big picture’ of imperial solidarity for the nation. In 1999 the utility of Shakespeare’s drama was its capacity to dramatize a dilemma of political and cultural authority experienced by the individual who, in turn,

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symbolically stands in for the nation. Shakespeare’s ‘gaze’ is no longer synonymous with progenitor Britain, but has become a culturally neutral, trans-­temporal and liberating belief in ‘us’. This aligns with the philosophical position of the Bell Shakespeare Company that ‘Shakespeare’s legacy to successive generations is his firm faith in human potential’ (Bell Shakespeare n.d.). Creating this new, solipsistic Shakespeare object through commemorative rhetoric such as the use of the term ‘legacy’ was the combined work of the production and its reception in an Australian culture primed by political and artistic cues to offer such homage. In the same year, however, as Bell Shakespeare’s Henry V, in a national referendum, Australia voted against becoming a republic. Sentimental and political ties to the English monarchy, although no longer articulated as a defining aspect of national identity, were still clearly a part of how Australia understood itself as a nation. Intriguingly, Kiernander suggests that John Bell’s outspoken support of the republican cause may not have helped it: the scale of the defeat was partly attributable to a negative campaign that counter-­intuitively but convincingly stigmatised the republican side as elitist and represented monarchists as ordinary people. In this context, having Shakespeare used to promote the republican cause might have reinforced some perceptions that the opponents of the monarchy were indeed an intellectual and cultural elite. KIERNANDER 2015: 176 Kiernander then inverts this speculation with observation of Bell’s persistent and innovative mission to popularize Shakespeare throughout Australia. One thing the speculation serves to flag, however, is the radical contradiction within commemorative logic. As I explained above, the militant monarchism of ‘ordinary people’ is, in a sense, valorized and morally exonerated in both the play and in the Anzac myth. That Bell recognized and capitalized upon this suggests keen

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sensitivity to the popular pulse. That this could simultaneously be perceived as an expression of republican elitism testifies to the complexity of figurations of Shakespeare in Australian national remembering. In 2013 and 2014 the Bell Shakespeare Company again staged a conflation of 1 & 2 Henry IV and Henry V respectively. Damien Ryan co-­directed Henry IV and directed Henry V. Just one year before John Bell’s retirement from the Company, this arrangement seemed to signal a deliberate generational transition. Ryan broke with the Company’s usual practice of staging the plays in an unspecified contemporary-­era setting by applying a specifically historical framing concept. The whole play, as well as Richard II’s ‘death of kings’ speech and a reprisal of the Falstaff-­related parts of 2 Henry IV were performed by a group of school students taking refuge in a basement classroom during the London Blitz. The inspiration was an account Ryan had read of ‘The Boys’ Club’ who rehearsed and performed songs and concerts and plays by Shakespeare in Marble Arch station during the months of the Blitz. While it seemed to Ryan a risky endeavour, the production pleased both audiences and critics alike. Its economy of means and breadth of imaginative innovation set it apart from the bland extravagance of many main-­stage Shakespeare productions.9 By confining the performance to a cramped ‘room’ onstage and forcing performers to rely on the means they had at their disposal – tennis rackets, rulers, chalk and broken bookshelves – the design (by Anna Gardiner) restored the logic of the chorus’s comment about a ‘little room confining mighty men’ (5.2). The student characters, whose roles in the play were only one component of their roles in the production, exemplified imaginary puissance. Their role-­doubling and fluent manipulation of the ordinary objects in their environment to achieve extraordinary effects was mesmerizing. At one point they used a torch to project a shadow image of the English fleet at sea, and at another two sets of shelves, laid down on the floor and stepped through, evoked wading in the mud of the battlefield.

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The persistent intrusions of the framing narrative – bombing raids, death of the schoolteacher-­cum-Falstaff figure and arrival of an injured German paratrooper – meant that the audience was, throughout, experiencing not one play but two. This echoed and perhaps at moments overcomplicated the existing metanarratorial structure of Shakespeare’s play in which, as Norman Rabkin so famously pointed out, the chorus produces one Henry for the audience and the drama produces another (Rabkin 1977). However, this framing operated as a sophisticated acknowledgement that this play (to use Terence Hawkes’s phrase about Hamlet) has ‘always already begun’ in the collective imaginary (1985: 312). By staging a live reading of the play in a particular place and time, and by also staging the ways in which this intersected with its own present, this production dramatized how Shakespearean ‘meaning’ is generated through performance, both inflected by and determining aspects of the culture in which the plays are performed. The ensemble dynamic of the cast echoed Ryan’s articulated aim of making the production about a group of young people facing a ‘terrible ordeal’ rather than the story of a central hero figure. Ryan saw that the play expresses ‘a theme of childhood’ and observed that war is always about the sacrifice of the young (Ryan 2015). In this vein, the dedicated young cast worked for weeks before rehearsals began, meeting in the Shakespeare Room of the Mitchell Library and developing backstories for the student characters who, in the production, go on to play roles in the play. Far from simply exonerating Henry, however, Ryan said that ‘bits of the play disgust me and I wanted to bring them out’, and he used the metanarrative to do so. The interior drama of the Shakespeare play acquired new intensity because of the students’ ‘real-­life’ isolation, terror and fury. One often excised scene – Henry’s speech at Harfleur – was staged amidst a bombing raid and offered a moment of crisis for the metanarrative. The student actors recoiled from the script, overwhelmed by the schoolboyHenry’s harrowing threats at Harfleur that he howled into the

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dark through a shattered basement window. Accenting the play’s connections between rhetorical and actual violence allowed this production to challenge the pervasive idea implicit in the 1955 newsreel that performing Shakespeare is educationally and morally ‘good’ for young people. When asked about the plausibility of his metanarrative – why the students would simply go on reading a play after their teacher had died and through shattering bomb blasts – Ryan himself asked ‘why does anyone go on in such circumstances?’ and compared their dogged resignation to Pistol and Nym’s resolution to go to France together after the death of Falstaff. Comparing this production to the Bell Company’s earlier productions suggests a familiar and yet distinct process of mobilizing and destabilizing beliefs about national identity, war and Shakespeare. When asked what connections he imagined Australians would make with London and the Blitz, Ryan commented that Australians are still very connected to British history. He also said, ‘Australians have an intelligent political relationship to war because we’re so far away from everything and yet we join these wars all over the world (and we do have our own threats now) and I felt that Australians could handle a production that was a bit unusual about war.’ In an antipodal paradox, then, staging a ‘reading’ of Henry V within the recognizable twentieth-­century reality of London in the Blitz held the potential to bring it closer to the contemporary Australian imagination. The production modelled a fraught entanglement of the play’s moral conundrums with the intensities of modern wartime experience. I pointed out to Ryan that his drama, despite his interest in war experience, was a drama of non-­combatant civilians under fire. In this light, what Ryan’s production achieved was an anti-­ monumental expression of the moral complexity of war experience from the victims’ rather than the victor’s perspective. The production dramatized how myths of nation and wars of memory – which form a single strand of the braid of power discourses in Henry V – operate amidst the complexities of a living present. Arguably Shakespeare’s play dramatizes just

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that in the final chorus that looks back from the Elizabethan present and anticipates the ultimate futility of Henry’s ‘peace’ in the civil devastation that followed his reign. As an obvious point of contrast to Ryan’s production, Laurence Olivier’s 1944 film – made just after the Blitz and dedicated to the RAF – achieved a monumental fusion of nationalist sentiment which employed the Shakespearean text, severely cut, to underwrite what emerges as self-­evident qualities of English courage under fire. Ryan’s production revises these sentiments seventy years on, at the seventieth anniversary of D-Day, re-­ animating the existential intensities and terrible ambivalences of modern war. This is a war experienced at modern-­city scale, in the dark, at a distance; a war without a protagonist, without synecdoche for nation-­birth and growth and, therefore, without a monumental or commemorative function in the popular imaginary. For perhaps the first time, the alliance between Shakespeare and war commemoration is staged as deeply troubled. What war is changes with every war, the First World War being an obvious instance in point. Commemorative rhetoric arguably serves the function of finding a language to tame catastrophic failures of policy so that they may go on to serve specific political purposes. Australian and global political discourse has, since 11 September 2001, reflected belief that the world has entered a new era of haphazard and ideologically motivated violence by individuals. The Bali bombings of 2002, seeming to target Australians, brought ‘home’ awareness that Australia is not ‘far away from everything’ at all. Nevertheless, commemorative rituals and rhetoric that have evolved in the century since the first Anzac Day continue to style Australia’s military engagements as remote and performed on behalf of others even as they are continuous with the courage expressed at home in fighting fires and floods. This effects a convenient dissociation from the moral complexity of the commitment of troops to war and military action. In similar and interrelated ways Shakespeare is framed in popular Australian discourse as a stable signifier. The long view, however, reveals that what is

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understood to be the central significance of Shakespeare is constantly evolving through performance. In 1916 Shakespeare was on hand to make the pact with the Anzac soldier, to approve his courage and his Englishness and so to superintend the birth of a nation. In 1955 Shakespeare as imperialistic educational spectacle underwrites the bright future of this ‘young’ nation. In 1999, Shakespeare is radically repurposed; the complexity of his drama allows a revision of commemorative priorities, an extenuation of the ordinary soldier’s moral accountability, and a coming-­of-age narrative as synecdoche for nation. In 2014, in a staging of Henry V, the permeability of Shakespeare’s drama to its context is itself dramatized. Also, as in 1916, we see the bewildering fragments of trauma-­at-a-­ remove welded to the existing cultural monolith of Shakespeare to generate and to bolster a national mythology. What this has to say about the latest bend in the road of Australia’s commemorative logic, it is still too early to say. Perhaps later decades will detect the invisible edges of the impression. Jonathan Baldo claims that Henry V ‘both hides and – largely by making visible the process of hiding – reveals the stress points in the sense of nationhood to which the increasingly militaristic and imperial England of the 1590s was aspiring’ (1996: 134). It is not surprising, in this context, that performances of the play in twentieth- and twenty-­firstcentury Australia have continued both to conceal and to illuminate the inconsistencies of Australia’s ‘birth-­of-a-­nation’ discourse since 1916. Henry V continues to provide, through performance, an acute perspective on the paradoxes of national myth formation and commemorative practice. The play reveals that remembering Shakespeare in Australia is, temporally and thematically, entwined with remembering Anzac, and is thus unavoidably a form of antipodal activity, with the various pressures and asymmetries that the discourse brings with it – also, that, like all commemorative composites, this remembrance is a ‘remembering with advantages’ comprising a strategic, collective and virtuosic performance of forgetting.

Afterword: The antipodal dynamics of commemoration Catherine Moriarty

The introduction to this book began with an invitation to imagine the crowds at Waterloo Station on the evening of 25 April 1916 and, among them, those returning from two events: one a performance at the Old Vic to celebrate the Tercentenary of Shakespeare’s death and the other a parade and matinee to mark the first anniversary of the Gallipoli landings. Considering this convergence of audiences arriving from different routes in one time and place suggests how we might approach the dynamics of commemoration. Indeed, our retrospective projection of such a coincidence – an imagined conjunction of places and people in the past – is precisely what underpins commemoration and the ways it is mobilized as a cultural practice that conjoins both time and space. While the shared date of Shakespeare’s Tercentenary and the anniversary of the Gallipoli landings provides an instructive conjunction for this book, the preceding chapters have made clear the extent to which this is accidental because the events themselves, which are separated by centuries, merely align with each other through their placing on the annual calendar. By looking at the commemorative acts and processes connected to these events

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and observing the details of their form and content, we can see their dependency on context and the priorities of their time. It is because of this contingency that commemorative events are necessarily malleable. Designed in such a way that shifts in imaginative work and its meaning occur, they absorb and enact a wide field of forces specific to each contemporary moment. As this book demonstrates, the commemorative activities of 1916 were rich with tensions between the Edwardian and the modern, the imperial and the potentially global, between male and female, the singular and the multiple, the stage and the screen.1 While historical accounts, particularly the official military histories that were produced in the post-­war years, sought to compile a coherent narrative of historically significant events, commemorative activity was an entirely different form of recounting, reconstructing and registering. Orchestrated officially and also unofficially, it involved those who may have had particular experiences or individuals to remember – such as the ANZACs marching in London to mark the Gallipoli landings and their lost comrades of the previous year – but of course, as ceremonies were repeated over time, they included more of those who did not have such specific experiences and memories, those who had only the commemorative version of the past to recall. In the case of Shakespeare, the death to be marked had occurred centuries before and so the life became, as many have explained, a conceptual container for the legacy. This accumulated imagining of the past emerged as nation states evolved, gained sway during the twentieth century, and has accelerated in recent decades as the density of anniversaries, and the ends to which they are put, saturate our political worlds and cultural experiences. While commemoration can be understood as the remembering of particular events at a particular time, it has a broader history of its own connected to shifting ideas about remembering and the cultural forms that shape it (Gregory 1994). Writing in 1992, Pierre Nora reflected on his in-­depth, collaborative investigation of the construction of the French past, Les lieux de mémoire. He observed that over time the study itself had become part of an

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accelerating national culture of commemoration: ‘It is the present that creates the instruments of commemoration, that seeks out dates, and figures to commemorate, that ignores some and invents, sometimes artificially manipulating dates . . . and sometimes accepting dates as given but altering their significance (Nora 1998: 618).2 The making of this distinction now seems striking, as the commemorative ecology has become embedded politically and institutionally, determining museum programming, television scheduling and the strategies of government-­funded research and educational policy. Philip Mead and Gordon McMullan, in their introduction to this volume, acknowledge the commemorative prompt that brought their project into being, and each contributor’s experience of the combined centenary of the Gallipoli landings (shared with the centenary of the Easter Rising) and the Quatercentenary of Shakespeare’s death. The nature of commemorative forces and the relational dynamics upon which they depend emerges distinctly if we adopt the ‘antipodal’ as a concept that extends beyond its literal geographic meaning. As we have seen in the preceding chapters, commemoration is determined by relationships that are established over time and over space, and these can be shortened or extended, collapsed or expanded, remain singular or be hybridized. Looking at different commemorative contexts with an antipodal perspective allows us to consider afresh the flexible objects, performances and processes that they comprise. Remaining alert to their historical moment, and being sensitive to what drives and shapes them, is an approach that helps us both to reflect on the past and to remain perceptive to equivalent forces at work in the present. In his chapter on the Shakespeare statue in Sydney, Philip Mead considers the material properties of this sculpted object, funded by the President of the New South Wales Shakespeare Society, Henry Gullett, and unveiled ten years after the Tercentenary in 1926. As a project conceived before the First

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World War, Gullett believed a statue to be the ‘finest memorial that any generation of men could raise to one of their own race’ (‘Observer’ 1926). In Britain, although a statue had been proposed originally as a suitable Tercentennial gesture, the initiative was overwhelmed, as Gordon McMullan explains, by those who believed a national theatre would be a more fitting mode of commemoration. Mead, in his focus on the Sydney statue, addresses its evolving context as time passed and as the commemorative object itself was physically moved. The structure, a bringing-­together of a surmounting figure of Shakespeare with five of the characters from his plays on a platform encircling the pedestal below, conjoins the imagined and materialized form of the writer with the imagined and materialized characters he himself had imagined. Based, Mead argues, on Lord Ronald Gower’s precedent of 1888 at Stratford-­upon-Avon (though others consider it an amalgamation of various well-­known portraits), it conforms to expectation in its appearance, and also in its arrangement, as a well-­understood monumental hierarchy. It demands that we read Shakespeare’s figure in the same way as other statues of worthies erected in this period and before. In this way, the monument, by way of its material and spatial properties and its deployment of word and image, confounds the real and the imagined, the actual and the fictive, a literary English past with an urban Australian present. As we know, the war interrupted the production of the Sydney Shakespeare memorial as it did many other projects conceived before the summer of 1914. The greater demand to commemorate the vast numbers of war dead took priority. At both emotional and logistical levels, debate about the appropriate form memorials should take occupied communities in Britain, Australia, New Zealand and elsewhere (see King 1998).3 The resources and skills of those who knew how to organize and make such things were sought after. As Ailsa Grant Ferguson points out in her chapter, Shakespeare’s words were appropriated for recruitment purposes and, in 1916, the Royal Navy decided to give his name to a new destroyer whose

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role it was to seek out and torpedo enemy vessels.4 Early the following year, a Shakespeare exhibition at the Grafton Galleries was held in order to raise funds for the Red Cross, whose war work involved caring for the injured, recording the dead or those missing, and assisting the bereaved. Despite or because of these contrary contexts – for the tension between the martial and pacific is another dynamic that infuses Shakespeare’s work – both the writer and his writings acquired a renewed role in the context of the war. Though the war interrupted the celebration of his Tercentenary, it vested his legacy, as Clara Calvo (2010) argues, with renewed significance. In an address delivered at the opening of the Red Cross exhibition on 19 January 1917, Sir Sidney Lee alluded to this tension and employed an antipodal dynamic to link the past, present and future in his case for the validity of celebrating Shakespeare as the war continued and as casualty numbers mounted: In the one way we are alleviating, as far as is humanly possible, present griefs and anxieties; in the other way we are fostering confidence in our future by riveting attention on the noble assurances of our past. LEE 1917: 4 Inevitably, Shakespeare was also called upon when suitable lines were required to commemorate the dead. In 1919, Sir Cecil Harcourt-Smith, Director of the British Museum, coordinated a publication issued by Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, entitled Inscriptions Suggested for War Memorials. This selection was intended to assist those choosing words to mark the deaths of individuals or of groups absent from the various communities to which they belonged through either their profession, beliefs and interests, place of birth or residency. Both Selwyn Image, clergyman, designer and poet, and the socialist classicist John William Mackail assisted with the selection. Among the two hundred entries can be found texts

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by Matthew Arnold, Dante, Thomas à Kempis, Rudyard Kipling, Henry Newbolt, John Milton, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Thucydides, Leo Tolstoy and Virgil. A good number of entries are taken from the Bible and around the same number derive from anonymous authors, but even taking into account some repeated entries, Shakespeare is certainly the named writer with the most inclusions, with King Richard II, Measure for Measure and King John the most quoted plays (Smith 1919).5 Some years later, in 1923, Mackail was invited to deliver the inaugural lecture of the Australian English Association at Sydney University; its topic was Shakespeare. He asserted that Shakespeare was not a moral teacher, arguing that ‘he let morality take care of itself. He displayed life. His lesson was that we should not draw lessons from him; but should see, and feel, and understand’ (‘Shakespeare: Popular Errors’ 1923).6 The assembly of the Shakespeare statue outside the Mitchell Library took place in January 1926 and the following month its sculptor, the Melbourne-­born but London-based Bertram Mackennal, arrived from Britain. Greeted as a cultural hero – he was the first Australian artist to be knighted – Mackennal was immediately invited by the New South Wales government to create another significant public work in the city, a war memorial to be erected at Martin Place, Sydney. He decided to sculpt a bronze soldier and sailor to represent the Australian army and navy. This kind of figurative statuary that could act as a stand-­in for the absent war dead had already proved popular in Britain and in Australia.7 Unable to represent all the hundreds of thousands of dead buried overseas in cemeteries built by the Imperial War Graves Commission and the many with no known grave, communities of different constituents and sizes in many countries wanted an idealized soldier to represent all (Moriarty 1995). As scholars have demonstrated, in Australia the figure that came to represent the Anzac troops not only represented the dead, the landings at Gallipoli and those who had fought for the ‘mother country’, it also came to epitomize and idealize all those who were considered to have brought about the birth of the nation. Over the years, its power

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to occlude personal narratives or the histories of others intensified (see Astbury 1992; Lake et al. 2010; Ziino 2006). Sculptors and architects, who had been central to the making of the commemorative furniture of empire or the structures and performances of its governance, were, inevitably, called upon to execute commemorative objects. Just as sculptors such as Mackennal pursued careers that involved crossing the world, so was the actual making of memorials antipodal. Models of monuments were designed and produced by sculptors in different countries and then sent as plasters to Europe for casting in bronze. Long-­established foundries with the requisite facilities and expertise in Britain and Italy were kept busy with this work. The finished statuary would then be shipped to its final destination for installation. Sculpture intended for sites across the Empire usually originated in the studios of British sculptors. As such, far from being a static object, the statue was in fact highly mobile, transforming from clay to plaster to bronze and then transported worldwide; sometimes separate casts of the same sculpture were sent to different locations (Stocker 2015).8 The Sydney Shakespeare memorial was modelled in Mackennal’s studios in London and Bournemouth and then cast at the long-­established foundry of A. B. Burton in Thames Ditton, where Romeo and Juliet, Portia, Falstaff, Othello and Shakespeare would have rubbed shoulders with soldiers, sailors, winged Victories and palm-­ holding figures of Peace destined for mourning communities far and wide. The statue of Shakespeare designed for Sydney was not the only monument by Mackennal to be delayed by the war. An equestrian statue of Edward VII intended for London, which Mackennal had been working on since 1911, was finally unveiled in July 1921. He had created a further version for Melbourne, which had been unveiled the year before, and still another cast was located in Calcutta.9 The pedestal of the London version, designed by architect Edwin Lutyens, bears the inscription REX IMPERATOR. Yet the commemoration of the king had clearly been usurped by the need to

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commemorate his subjects and it was Lutyens who was instrumental in the conceptual shift this brought about. Appointed one of the principal architects of the Imperial War Graves Commission during the war, he played an important part in the worldwide administration of the imperial dead and in designing the built representation of this loss. He was instrumental in helping to plan the role that the Commission cemeteries and headstones would play in perpetuity (Barrett 2007). As is well known, in 1919 Lutyens was invited to design a temporary structure for the Peace Celebrations which, by popular demand, was then remade in stone and unveiled the following year, eight months before the monument to Edward VII. By this time the Edward VII monument must have seemed hugely anachronistic, for in many ways the Cenotaph, as the Whitehall structure came to be known, was a radical departure – in its intent to commemorate all the Empire’s dead, not just the Emperor; in its move away from figuration, thus signifying the absent dead through its abstract form and, indeed, its name; and in its origination as a ceremonial prop, a saluting point, for the returned troops taking part in the Peace Celebrations of 1919 – the Anzacs among them (King 1998). In 1912 Lutyens had, as Gordon McMullan notes, created an exhibition setting, including a temporary stage, at Earls Court (for the ‘Shakespeare’s England’ exhibition), and in 1919 at Whitehall he did this too, but for a very different performance. A painting by the Australian artist Dora Meeson in the National Army Museum, London depicts the Indian contingent of the Commonwealth troops, part of the 15,000 who took part in the event. It captures the performative and celebratory element of the occasion, the marching troops and the flying flags (Meeson 1919). Thus, the war itself precipitated commemorative mechanisms that were encompassing and far-­ reaching, indeed antipodal – actually and conceptually – a consequence of the war’s imperial origins and the adjusted allegiances and obligations of its aftermath. In 1920, a performance of great power added another layer of symbolism to this developing and interlocking

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commemorative programme. The burial of the Unknown Warrior enacted physically the previously imagined connection between the absent dead overseas and the bereaved. The journey of the flag-­covered coffin from the battlefields, across the Channel and down Whitehall was recorded on film, and through this piece of theatre – state-­sanctioned, though the King, it seems, had objected initially – the conceptual purity of Lutyens’s idea was disturbed but in a way that had great popular appeal (British Pathé 1920). Since the dead ‘warrior’ selected from the battlefield could have been a colonial soldier, the ceremony itself deployed antipodal forces. It set up an equivalence between all the Allied dead regardless of rank or nationality and established through performance a connection between home and overseas and, indeed, the dead and the living. Reported in the newspapers around the world, this ritual and its power were disseminated far and wide and, as the post-­war period advanced, communication technologies would play no small part in altering understandings of antipodal time and space.10 This sense of performed imaginings of the military dead and the monumental saturation of the city is embedded culturally in the post-­war years. In Mrs Dalloway, written in 1925 and set in the summer of 1923, Virginia Woolf describes cadets marching up Whitehall as one of the novel’s central characters observes them: life, with its varieties, its irreticences, had been laid under a pavement of monuments and wreaths and drugged into a stiff yet staring corpse by discipline. One had to respect it; one might laugh; but one had to respect it, he thought. There they go, thought Peter Walsh, pausing at the edge of the pavement; and all the exalted statues, Nelson, Gordon, Havelock, the black, the spectacular images of great soldiers stood looking ahead of them, as if they too had made the same renunciation (Peter Walsh felt he too had made it, the great renunciation), trampled under the same temptations, and achieved at length a marble stare. WOOLF 2000: 44

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This sense of both stasis and mobility in the city, between accumulating monuments and spectators at particular times, is well expressed in a poster produced in 1938 to promote London Transport (Figure A.1). The poster, which would have been pasted in thousands across the transport network, focuses on the historic richness of the capital’s built environment. While there is something in its tenor that suggests an anticipation of the coming conflict and the potential threat posed to the fabric of the city, the image and the collective historic inheritance it represents rests, nonetheless, on secure foundations in its verbal text, a boldly set quotation from Twelfth Night.11 The poster presents a layering of monuments (Mackennal’s equestrian to Edward VII is second from right), a London landscape dense with ‘things of fame’, an accumulation of markers of historic events and personalities. We can imagine the ever-­modulating view of the city as it unfolds to those (like Woolf’s Peter Walsh) passing through it, and this suggests not only shifting perceptions of the relationship between space, word and image, but between the past and the present, the fleeting and the enduring, the private and the public.12 The selected text from Twelfth Night acts as a foundation for the material objects constructed to evoke memory. In uncompromising sans serif capitals the text modernizes the literary legacy that both pre-­dates and supersedes the monuments illustrated. The poster – a multiple, widely distributed and ephemeral piece of paper – reminds us that texts are agile, adaptable, re-­settable, reproducible and exploitable (the ‘by London Transport’ strapline had concluded the company’s advertising copy for decades), a direct opposition to the supposed fixity and singularity of conventional monumental structures. The associational power of monumental forms was activated in 1920 when the Unknown Warrior was laid to rest in the nave of Westminster Abbey. Writing in 1994, Adrian Gregory described it as ‘one of the most striking demonstrations of emotion in British History’ (1994: 24). There, the soldier’s tomb was placed in relationship to those of English kings and queens

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FIGURE A.1  Fred Taylor, ‘I pray you let us satisfie our eyes . . .’, 1938 Poster published by London Transport. Width: 635mm, Height: 1016mm. London Transport Museum.

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many centuries past and, of course, those memorials created to acknowledge others of note, including that of Shakespeare erected, as the inscription records, 124 years after his death ‘by public esteem’ (Westminster Abbey n.d.). Thus the configuration of this national monumental epicentre – of the buried (with a tomb) and the memorialized (without a tomb) – became realigned. While the Unknown Warrior may or may not have been the first Australian to be buried in Westminster Abbey, by the early 1930s there were calls to include commemoration of an identified Australian of note, and this adjustment reflected an enthusiasm in Australia itself for public statues to those, as well as Anzac troops, who were considered to have had a formative role in Australia’s white, largely male post-Federation identity. During the 1920s and 30s a dispersed pantheon of Australian writers, politicians, soldiers, educators, doctors and churchmen emerged in the public spaces and institutions of the country’s urban, and sometimes rural, populations. When the poet, ballad and storywriter Henry Lawson died in 1922, a competition to design a statue was initiated. The committee selected the entry of Australian artist George Washington Lambert and the completed bronze was unveiled in the Domain, Sydney, in 1931. Another literary project of this kind was the campaign to commemorate the poet Adam Lindsay Gordon in Melbourne. A seated statue was unveiled in 1932. When the model was exhibited at the Royal Academy in London, in 1934, the art critic of The Times commented on its ‘easy naturalism’ (Our Art Critic 1934; see also Moriarty 2013: 279). That same year, to mark the centenary of his birth, a memorial to Lindsay Gordon, ‘the poet of the Australian people’s own laurelling’, was installed in Westminster Abbey. Like the Anzac dead his poetry was seen to embody ‘the qualities that have made that nation what it is.’13 Here again, the antipodal comes into play to strengthen British and imperial connection: the other side of the world is brought near, the commoner is aligned with royalty, the dead – by way of commemoration – cross from the past to the present. *

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The topic of Shakespeare’s Tercentenary, as the chapters of this book show, requires us to embrace an expansive sense of commemorative endeavour that is characterized by accumulation, transmutation and disaggregation over space, time and form. In thinking of commemoration as antipodal, we have considered the practices of public remembering from differing vantage points and from different times. We have been able to appreciate the mobility of commemorative effort, its political and societal drivers, and the ways it is brought into being by different patrons and presented to audiences in different contexts. Certainly, the studies presented here evolve established notions of sites of memory as discrete entities and suggest that we consider commemoration as a series of events where retelling and performing, in related or differing forms, creates a layering of activity. From the national to the international, across surfaces, screens and stages, embedded in texts, things and actions, the concept of an antipodal Shakespeare provides a way to rethink the forces of cultural construction and the production of remembering, in the past and into the future. Rather than accepting the relegation of Shakespeare in a commemorative sense to a kind of banal nationalism – a tendency towards which the concept of Anzac has dangerously descended over time – we need to recognize the way in which commemorative events are exploited by different actors for different reasons at different times. If Shakespeare’s texts are understood as an unstable and ever-­ evolving corpus yet also as a fixed point of reference and continuity, so too do processes of commemoration exhibit such internal contradiction. If the antipodal is relational, therein lies dialectic, and it was this that structured so many other tensions in the experience of war that, in turn, were manifest in language – the known and the unknown, the forgotten and the remembered, the returned and ‘the missing’, the spoken and the silent. If, to return to the point with which we began, the forces of commemoration work to provoke active imagining, then we can consider memorials and other commemorative objects

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as props that are articulated by performance and repeated performances. Likewise, as Kate Flaherty asserts in this volume, ‘the play, like commemorative ritual, is performed in successive eras and multiple locations’. Indeed, productions of Shakespeare’s drama can play with the significance of historical events, be it the Damien Ryan production of Henry IV and Henry V set in the London Blitz that Flaherty analyses or the Antic Disposition production of Henry V set at a military hospital which in 2015 commemorated the six-­hundredth anniversary of the Battle of Agincourt and the ‘ongoing centenary’ of the First World War and, in 2016, Shakespeare’s Tercentenary.14 A powerful experience of the emergence of the past marked a critical moment in the production. The shell-­ shocked soldier playing Bardolph, as a result of his enacting, experiences a fit. This collision of recent personal experience with the imagining of a distant past reminds us that the weight of accumulating anniversaries needs to be aligned with the personal experience of our own remembering. What the contributions to this book urge is an insistence on the historical context of commemoration, of objects and performances, and to scrutinize each element with an awareness of its particularity. Yet it also urges the taking of a long view that shows how these acts of commemoration evolve over time, what they come to mean as they accumulate, and the circumstances and experience of the viewing or participating subject. In 1926, Mackennal, in a kind of monumental mania, told a reporter that rather than including just five of Shakespeare’s characters around the pedestal of the Sydney statue, if funds had allowed he would have liked to create a monumental theatre, with each one of Shakespeare’s characters represented (‘Artist Returns’, 1926). Thankfully, this monstrous concept never found substance, but the very idea of it presents a powerful image of ossification. It throws into relief the possibility of memorial forms that require meaningful, imaginative work and that might be adapted as cultural and societal shifts take place. Did the decision in 1993 to limit the terms of reference of the original burial of the Unknown

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Warrior by actually digging up an unknown Australian and interring him at the Australian War Memorial in Canberra to mark the seventy-­fifth anniversary of the First World War suggest a perceived decline in our imaginative abilities? Certainly, it heralded the saturation of commemorative activity within the state calendar and its overt political instrumentality in the twenty years since, both in Australia and elsewhere. Thus, the 2016 aligning of the Shakespeare Tercentenary with the centenary of the Anzac landings and, for that matter, with the Easter Uprising in Dublin forces us to recognize the historical noise that now surrounds us. Meanwhile, we continue to experience those domestic events and family anniversaries that fill our lives and the lives of others and to which public commemorative events form a backdrop. Daily rituals and the milestones of lived experience – birthdays, weddings, funerals and the other events that punctuate our lives – provide an authentic counter to the prescriptive emotional charge of public commemoration. As Emilie Bickerton has recently observed, ‘Our sense of self is tied to the past we remember, to everyone and everything we have known’ (2015: 126). In his BBC Richard Dimbleby Lecture to mark the Quatercentenary, Gregory Doran, Artistic Director of the Royal Shakespeare Company, emphasized how Shakespeare’s work can help explicate the passages of ordinary lives the world over, and official anniversaries should champion an accessible, sustainable, authentic, ongoing encounter with Shakespeare and the inherited transformational potential of his work in future presents (Doran 2016). In a manner reminiscent of Mackail’s argument in 1923 that Shakespeare should help us to ‘see, and feel, and understand’, Doran argued for a participatory rather than passive response, collaboration rather than consumption. Thinking about these dynamics in the way the contributors of this book have done suggests that imagining can be reparative rather than reactionary: it depends entirely, as the essays in this volume have shown, on why, how and on what terms one engages with each commemorative performance.

NOTES Introduction 1 The Shakespeare Festival at His Majesty’s Theatre for 1916 was organized by Tree’s protegé John Martin-Harvey – ‘by arrangement with Tree’ – and lasted from 8 May to 17 June. 2 On the London Shakespeare League’s intervention, see Littlewood 1928: 9 fn. 3 Martin-Harvey noted that ‘[a] suggestion was made about this time that all Theatres should be closed . . . Mr Philip Snowden – as he then was – declared . . . “To talk about closing the Theatres during war is silly, from every point of view. There is enough sadness to-­day without making life more dismal and, if the step be advocated on the ground of National economy, the result of such a course would be to make things worse economically”’ (Martin-Harvey 1930: 460). 4 See e.g. Engler 1991, Habicht 2001, Kahn 2001, Calvo 2004, Foulkes 2006, McKernan 2007, Hoenselaars and Calvo 2010, Smialkowska 2010, Murphy 2010, Calvo 2012, Jansohn and Mehl 2015, and Calvo and Kahn 2016. 5 See Mead 2015, 2016, McMullan 2016b, Grant Ferguson 2013, 2014, 2015a, 2015b, McMullan 2016a. 6 Visit Shakespeare’s England Warwickshire, http://shakespeares-­ england.co.uk (accessed 17 August 2017). 7 This claim was reiterated in an interview for The Guardian on New Year’s Day 2016 by Paul Edmondson of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, who ‘believes that after Shakespeare bought [New Place] in 1597, all his thinking time was spent there, and that the late plays, including The Tempest, were at least planned in his library and probably written there’ (Kennedy 2016).

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8 A declaration of interest: one of the contributors to this book, Gordon McMullan, created and led the Shakespeare400 season with colleagues at King’s College London in tandem with members of the twenty-­seven cultural organizations that formed the consortium. See www.shakespeare400.org and https:// shakespeare400.kcl.ac.uk (accessed 17 August 2017). 9 Folger Shakespeare Library, ‘First folio tour host locations and dates’, http://www.folger.edu/first-­folio-tour-­host-locations-­anddates (accessed 17 August 2017). 10 See the Barbican’s website, http://www.barbican.org.uk/theatre/ event-­detail.asp?ID=17960 (accessed 17 August 2017).

Chapter 1 1 One index of the long-­drawn-out nature of the process is that the foundation stone was laid by the Queen Mother in 1951 on a site near the Royal Festival Hall, yet work on Denys Lasdun’s National Theatre – on a site east, not west, of Waterloo Bridge – did not begin until 1969 and the theatre was finally opened in 1976. 2 On Gollancz as ‘cultural entrepreneur’, see McMullan 2015: 182–201. 3 Israel Gollancz, draft of Mansion House statement, 9 May 1906, National Theatre (NT) Archive, (Shakespeare Memorial National Trust files) SMNT/1/2/2. 4 Archer and Barker 1907: xviii; Whitworth 1951: 73. At least one optimist argued for both a statue and a theatre: see Stephens 1905. 5 Building News, 26 April 1912, 596, quoted in O’Connor 1987: 79. 6 ‘Shakespeare’s England – A Piece of the Picturesque Past at Earl’s Court’, The Graphic, 11 May 1912: 674–5. 7 Lutyens 1911. See O’Connor 1987: 78. 8 ‘Shakespeare Memorial. Professor Gollancz and the Fund’, The Daily Graphic, 20 February 1913: 5, 13 (13). 9 On this, and for a comparative analysis of Shakespearean commemoration in Britain and Germany, see Engler 1991. The

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Sydney Morning Herald, reporting from London, is a little coy about 23 April being Easter that year, noting simply that ‘[t]he Shakespeare Tercentenary committee has fixed May 3 as Shakespeare Day, as April 23 falls on a Sunday’ (‘Shakespeare Day’ 1916). 10 Yeaxlee to Gollancz, NT Archive, SMNT/2/1/12. 11 Martin-Harvey, in his autobiography, notes that he felt that ‘if the public and the Government could have a practical example of what might be done by staging a continuous series of Shakespearean plays the nation might be brought to look upon our scheme of a proposed National Theatre more favourably . . . Sir Herbert Tree was at that time in the United States, and His Majesty’s Theatre being available, I concluded arrangements for a season of five weeks, to start on May 8th’: see Martin-Harvey 1930: 460, 461. 12 Unidentified newspaper clipping, 2 May 1916, NT Archive. 13 Cited in ‘Shakespeare. Tributes from Many Nations. Mansion House Meeting’, The Times, 2 May 1916. 14 ‘A Book of Homage’, The Times, 2 May 1916. 15 Gollancz’s choice of Ross as a contributor was, it turns out, prescient, since Ross’s Institute and Hospital for Tropical Diseases became part of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, built after the war on the Keppel Street site acquired by the Shakespeare Memorial National Theatre committee for the Shakespeare theatre they planned and which was instead occupied during the war by the Shakespeare Hut. 16 Reeves’s identification with Fabianism was such that he named his son Fabian, though he distanced himself from the group after his daughter Amber eloped to Paris with H. G. Wells, a member of the Fabian group, and became pregnant by him; Wells being already married, she married another man before the child was born. Fabian Reeves joined the Royal Naval Air Service and was killed in action in 1917. 17 Just before the war Stoll had offered the resonant sum of £1,616 towards the SMNT project. 18 See Chapter 3, note 6, in this volume. 19 Beauman 1982: 96, 69. This misreading of the plans is repeated by Whitebrook in his biography of Archer (Whitebrook 1993: 348).

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20 One connection between Poel and Gollancz is patronage. Poel built a model Globe on the basis of his 1897 plans which was displayed at the inaugural meeting of the London Shakespeare League in 1902: it was funded by Frida Mond, long-­term friend of Gollancz and funder of several of his projects and also, later, of the annual Gollancz Memorial lecture at the British Academy. 21 See O’Connor 2013: 37. O’Connor cites documents in the Poel Collection in the Theatre Department of the Victoria and Albert Museum. 22 See, for instance, the discussions in the various chapters in Carson and Karim-Cooper 2008, including Franklin Hildy’s discussion of Poel in his chapter, ‘The “essence of Globeness”: authenticity, and the search for Shakespeare’s stagecraft’ (Hildy 2008). 23 Poel’s evangelism eventually led to a split with Gollancz, with whom he had for a time established a working partnership in the London Shakespeare League. Poel ‘challenged Professor Israel Gollancz’s assertion that it was not the business of the League to attack the public theatres for their misrepresentations of Shakespeare’s plays on the London stage. The matter was brought to the vote, and Sir Israel Gollancz’s party was defeated. He and his supporters all resigned, and . . . formed the English Shakespeare Association, which holds its meetings at King’s College’ (O’Connor 2013: 40, citing Poel 1925: 73). There is a certain irony in the fact that the setless stage in the Shakespeare Hut had offered a context for the presentation of Shakespeare’s plays ‘independent of scenic effects’ à la Poel, though of course it was a far cry from the thrust-­stage theatre Poel had in mind.

Chapter 2 1 Gullett had been editor of the Sydney Daily Telegraph and then at the Sydney Morning Herald. There is every likelihood, judging by its content and style, that Gullett himself was the author of this anonymous column. He may also have been the author of

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the column, ‘National Music’, in the SMH for 20 January 1912, with its championing of commemorative statues: England is filled with memorials to British chieftains of peace, and British heroes of war, in canvas, and marble, and sculptured stone; and the cenotaph of Shakespeare, and the portraits of the admirals at Greenwich, are alike a trumpetcall to the fine instinct of national pride, and to the finer instinct of national endeavour. The great cities of the world, indeed, have always loved to fling upon their streets, and in their public places, statues, and busts, and pictures, and symbolical figures, meant not only for beauty of adornment, but also for incentive to pride of country (16). The Making of Shakespeare and other papers (Sydney, 1905), published by the Shakespeare Society of New South Wales, collects the papers read by Gullett before the Society: ‘The Making of Shakespeare’, ‘Troilus and Cressida’, ‘Shakespeare and Milton’, ‘The Wisdom of Shakespeare’, ‘Shakespeare and the After Life’ and ‘Shakespeare and the Unity of the English Race’. 2 See ‘A National Theatre’ (1912) for example: Mr. H. B. Irving (who, by the way, is having an excellent season here), writes our New Zealand correspondent, under date Wellington, February 2, is keen on the national theatre project in London. He tells me, however, that the promoters have yet a long way to go and a lot of work to do before the success of the scheme will be assured. It is hoped to build the theatre in London as a memorial to Shakespeare, in a celebration of the great dramatist’s tercentenary in 1916 (8). Gullett would also have noticed the column about ‘Australians Abroad’ in the SMH for 10 January 1912, about the international scope of London thinking about a ‘national’ theatre: The year 1916 will be the tercentenary of the death of William Shakespeare. A movement is on foot, directed by a most influential committee, to build and endow a national memorial theatre by that year. If the movement is successful three of the governors in whom the control of the theatre is vested will be the High Commissioner for Australia, the High

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Commissioner for Canada, and the Ambassador for the United States. 3 In ‘Is Shakespeare Read?’ (1912) the SMH reported: ‘The poetry of Shakespeare is a very nice thing for the educated man, but the general public wants something more of drama, burlesque, and extravaganza, than of solid and inspiring pieces.’ The Lord Mayor gave expression to this opinion of how the popular taste runs to a deputation from the council of the New South Wales Shakespeare Society, which waited upon him yesterday to seek his assistance to the movement for a memorial in Sydney to commemorate the tercentenary of Shakespeare’s death, falling in 1916 . . . The Lord Mayor: If one was intellectually disposed, there could be nothing more sublime or uplifting than the thoughts that Shakespeare had put into his works. But he considered they were not relished so much to-­day. Mr. Gullett: Booksellers will tell you that no works sell better, or are read with such general admiration, as Shakespeare’s. The Lord Mayor: I wish I could think so. He may be read by the intellectual classes, but I am talking of the great preponderance of the public. They go for the light literature instead of the ponderous. 4 The opening of the YMCA Shakespeare Hut was also reported on in the SMH for 30 August 1916 (7). 5 Carlyle had been peripherally involved in an attempt to commission a Shakespeare statue for Melbourne, for the 1864 Tercentenary. He was part of a tribunal, along with John Ruskin, to decide on a statue design commissioned by a group of Melbourne Shakespeare enthusiasts (see Stuart 1982). 6 The SMH reported (7 February 1913) that Mr O’Malley stated: ‘It looks as if “Myola” is likely to carry the day,’ was the Minister’s comment. ‘I am still in favour of Shakespeare, but I will have to bow to the will of the majority. I must say that Myola is the most euphonious.’

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It is known that the Prime Minister, Mr. Fisher, has long been in favour of naming the capital ‘Myola’, and it is known that all of the other members of the Cabinet have been of the same opinion (7). 7 By 1 March 1913, the committee’s thinking about the role of encouraging Australian literature via Shakespeare had become more detailed and concrete: The committee, moreover, seeks to do something for the advancement of Australian literature and dramatic art by setting aside a sum, the interest on which will enable a prize of, say, £100 to be given annually to the author of the best literary, or dramatic, work produced in Australia. Such a prize might be given to the author of a novel, a poem, or a play. It would be known as the ‘Shakespeare Memorial Prize’, and would, it is hoped, bring promising young writers to the front, and in time help to build up an Australian literature and drama of which we might feel proud. To Shakespeare, by virtue of this prize bearing his name, the rise of that literature and drama would be due – a lasting memorial to ‘the greatest Englishman’ (W. P. Cullen, President, W. Farmer Whyte, W. G. Layton, Joint Hon. Secretaries, ‘The Shakespeare Memorial: An Appeal to the Citizens of New South Wales’, 1913). 8 The annual Shakespeare Balls, major social events, ran until at least 1929 (Lyons 2001: 393). 9 The funds were later used to establish a ‘Shakespeare library with a first folio as its centrepiece’ (Lyons 2001: 392). 10 Lucy and Minnie Gullett ‘persuaded their reluctant sisters to commission from (Sir) Bertram Mackennal the Shakespeare memorial that their father had proposed just before he died in 1914. Costing some £10,000, the six-­figure group was installed in February 1926 on a prominent site near the Mitchell Library’ (Mitchell 1983). 11 See ‘Shakespeare. The Sydney Memorial’ (1926): Referring yesterday to an article dealing with the Shakespeare memorial statue appearing in Saturday’s ‘Herald’, Mr. W. H.

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Ifould, who was a member of the committee appointed by the Fuller Government to choose the site, said that it might be inferred from a passage in the article that the Sydney memorial, or at least the Shakespeare statue itself, was merely a replica of another work by Sir Bertram Mackennal. ‘We have no reason to think,’ said Mr. Ifould, ‘that this is the case. I have discussed the matter with Miss Gullett and Dr. Lucy Gullett, at whose expense the work was completed after the death of their father (Mr. Henry Gullett), and they intimated that they had no reason whatever to think that it is a replica. Moreover, I discussed the matter with Sir Bertram Mackennal in London, and the great sculptor always referred to the work as an original group of figures, and an original statue of Shakespeare. It would be a great pity if any suggestion became current that the statue is anything but an original one, for it is a magnificent piece of work – the finest group memorial, I believe, in Australia, and a work which not only the people of Sydney, but all Australians, should be proud of for all time. 12 In one of these studies Smart has the figure at the top of the statue, seen from behind, throwing out both his arms in a more embracing gesture than the more directive single-­armed one he decided on for the final painting. 13 As Smart himself has written: ‘I gave him [the fat man in the dark suit] one arm in the Cahill Expressway picture, because I happened to be thinking how unnerving the shape of a coat looks with one empty sleeve tucked into the pocket. You have to be very careful because as soon as you put a figure in a painting the viewer’s eye goes straight to it’ (Capon 1999: 92). 14 The sculptor of the statue of Governor Richard Bourke that stands outside the Mitchell Wing of the State Library of New Wales, and in Martens’s painting, was Edward Hodges Baily, also the sculptor of Nelson in Trafalgar Square (King 1953). 15 The expressway joins the Eastern Distributor, the gateway to Sydney’s east and south.

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Chapter 3 1 Elements of this chapter were previously published in a different form in Grant Ferguson 2014. 2 YMCA/Q11 Album of photographs of the Shakespeare Hut. Photographs by Henry T. Brice (Acc 2002/62 pt). The archive of the National Council of YMCAs (Young Men’s Christian Association) held at the Cadbury Research Library: Special Collections, University of Birmingham. 3 For a comparison of the Aldwych and Shakespeare Huts and their entertainments for Anzacs, see Grant Ferguson 2015a. 4 For example, in her autobiographical account, My Reminiscences: Social Development in the Ghandian Era and After, Renuka Ray describes the Shakespeare Hut as a ‘meeting place’ for Indian students, intellectuals and independence campaigners (Ray 1982: 40). 5 For example, The Daily Graphic (20 February 1913) article ‘Shakespeare Memorial: Professor Gollancz and the Fund’ reports various benevolent schemes proposed to commemorate the Tercentenary. 6 I borrow the phrase from Virginia Woolf’s short story, ‘Solid Objects’, which first appeared in The Athenaeum on 22 October 1920. 7 Later, as we have seen in Chapter 1, Mrs Tweedie audaciously and inaccurately credited herself with bringing about the erection of the Shakespeare Hut as a whole: ‘I also put up the re Hut behind the British Museum in memory of my son, who was killed in action, and we used to have between two and three thousand Anzacs there each day’ (‘Mrs. Alec-Tweedie Interviewed’ 1928). 8 For example, the ‘Shakespeare Memorial’ article (1913) documents these controversies and provides responses from Israel Gollancz. Copy held with Gollancz’s papers at National Theatre (NT) Archive (Shakespeare Memorial National Trust files), SMNT/7/3/1. 9 Unidentified newspaper clipping among Sir Israel Gollancz’s papers, NT Archive, SMNT1 (uncatalogued to item level) with a handwritten date of 6 February 1916.

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10 Evidenced in generally positive press but also in the archive of donation letters surviving in the NT Archive, SMNT/2/1. 11 Letter from Oswald Stoll to Israel Gollancz, 11 March 1916, NT Archive, SMNT/2/1. 12 Letter from Basil I. Yeaxlee to Israel Gollancz, 3 March 1916, NT Archive, SMNT/2/1. 13 Shakespeare Hut Opening Invitation, NT Archive, SMNT/7/2/6. Stoll was Australian, but the Australian Anzacs already had a Hut, the Aldwych Hut, in the pipeline; the majority of the soldiers who stayed at the Shakespeare Hut were New Zealanders. 14 Letter from Basil I. Yeaxlee to Israel Gollancz, 3 March 1916, NT Archive, SMNT/2/1. 15 Poster issued in early 1915 by the Parliamentary Recruiting Committee, Imperial War Museums, Art. IWM PST 5154. 16 For a more detailed examination of Lady Forbes-Robertson and the suffragette movement in relation to the Shakespeare Hut performances, see Grant Ferguson 2013. 17 Letter from Gertrude Forbes-Robertson to Edith Craig, 26 April 1917, Ellen Terry & Edith Craig Archive, National Trust, held at British Library: BL 125_1_6_Z3258_LETTER. 18 MSS Letter from Sir Johnston Forbes-Robertson to Sir Israel Gollancz, 21 December 1908. Sir Israel Gollancz Correspondence, Box 1, Folder 29, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library. 19 Programme for entertainments at the Shakespeare Hut, Ellen Terry & Edith Craig Archive, National Trust, held at British Library: BL/125/25/2/Ellen Terry Archive/ET/D439. 20 ‘The Shakespeare Celebration: Pageant of Plays at Drury Lane’ in The Observer, 16 April 1916: 13; programme for entertainments at the Shakespeare Hut, Ellen Terry & Edith Craig Archive, National Trust, held at British Library: BL/125/25/2/Ellen Terry Archive/ET/D439. 21 Elsom and Tomalin 1978 refer to the function of the Shakespeare Hut as ‘to entertain wounded troops’, which is incorrect (52). Drawing on this account in his exploration of amateur Shakespearean ductions, Michael Dobson suggests that

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‘[t]he “Shakespeare Hut” . . . mainly provided entertainment and warm meals for servicemen on leave. But to mark the tercentenary year of Shakespeare’s death, the Hut also hosted performances of extracts for the plays – which were given by amateurs’ (Dobson 2011: 92). Thus the Hut’s function as a professional performance space for an extended period of time (at least from 1916 to 1919) has been forgotten. 22 London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, ‘Timeline’, http://timeline.lshtm.ac.uk (accessed January 2012). The inaccuracy has now been corrected and the School has begun belatedly to acknowledge the prehistory of the site.

Chapter 4 Thanks to Philip Mead and Gordon McMullan for initiating this project. Thanks too to audiences in Sydney and Canberra and, in New Zealand, Hamilton, Te Awamutu, Tauranga and Dunedin. Funds from the University of Waikato facilitated archive trips to the Hocken Library, Dunedin, the Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington and to the Kippenberger Library, National Army Museum of New Zealand, Waiouru. Their resources and the invaluable support of their librarians and archivists was instrumental for completing this chapter. Special thanks to Dolores Ho at the National Army Museum and to Dan Morrow at the Waikato Museum of Art and History, who used material on the Shakespeare Hut as part of his beautiful local exhibition, For Us They Fell. 1 This was the standard route for shipping soldiers from both Australia and New Zealand. From Egypt they were sent first to Lemnos before landing at Gallipoli and then, from 1916 onwards, to England, preparatory to joining the Western Front campaigns. 2 The mosaic was in a sixth-­century CE temple in Gaza and now hangs in the Australian War Memorial Museum, Canberra. See: https://www.awm.gov.au/advanced-­search?query=shellal+mosaic/ (accessed 27 August 2017). 3 See her chapter in this book. A key part of this project has been the antipodal mining of archival resources, with diaries and

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letters held in New Zealand libraries complementing Dr Ferguson’s recovery of the vanished history of the Hut from London archives. 4 Lexicons of Early Modern English, http://leme.library.utoronto. ca (accessed 24 August 2015). 5 See the Pop-­up Globe’s website, http://www.popupglobe.co.nz/ (accessed 23 August 2017). 6 For convenience I will note archive details for each record for the first quotation only from each ms source. 7 Hall was killed in action at the Battle of Messines, Belgium in 1917. 8 By ‘tea’ here Miller seems to mean the light meal taken in the late afternoon, as it would be understood in New Zealand and England during this period. 9 The hut is also marked in official soldiers’ diaries for the war, which show those on leave key locations throughout central London. 10 New Zealanders’ accounts of their experiences in wartime Cairo, another potentially bewildering urban environment and vaster by far than any available in New Zealand, show similar anxieties about the cost of pleasure. 11 For more on London as a refuge and self-­consciously constructed ‘home’ for New Zealand soldiers, see Barnes 2015. 12 Letter to Secretary, Inwards Correspondence, Dunedin Shakespeare Club, Hocken Library, Dunedin MS- 550/010. The signature on this letter is indecipherable, but this soldier knows enough to be aware of John Manningham’s account of seeing Twelfth Night in the Middle Temple Hall, 2 February 1602. If this is not the actual first performance of the play, it is very likely that the play was then quite new. 13 Soldiers’ mail was censored, for military intelligence, but this of course would not cover leave activities in London. 14 This was the reported sum. Gordon McMullan’s chapter in this volume gives the correct figures. 15 Belich suggests a cultural energy whereby New Zealanders not only asserted their British identity but were confident that New

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Zealand would become an enhanced ‘Better Britain’ than the one they had left behind in the North. This, he writes, ‘was on the rise from the 1890s, and was already formidable, though by no means uncontested, before 1914’ (Belich 2001: 116). 16 Grey’s generosity is authoritatively described in Kerr (2006). Auckland Public Library (APL) is one of only two Australasian institutions with copies of the full set of Shakespeare Folios, the other being the State Library of New South Wales. The four, along with the 1640 Poems, were the centrepiece of a lively exhibition curated by Georgia Prince in 2016, coinciding with Shakespeare’s birthday and the Pop-­up Globe theatre which was only two hundred metres from the APL. The depth of APL’s Shakespeare holdings were evoked in an earlier exhibition for the 400th anniversary in 2009 of the publications of Shakespeare’s Sonnets: http://www.aucklandlibraries.govt.nz/ EN/Events/Events/pages/shakespeareexhibition.aspx (accessed 7 November 7 2016). 17 In 2014 Dunedin was designated a UNESCO City of Literature, the only New Zealand city to receive this honour; see Dunedin City Council, ‘Dunedin Thrilled to be UNESCO City of Literature’, 2 December 2014: http://www.dunedin.govt.nz/ your-­council/latest-­news/december–2014/dunedin-­thrilled-to-­beunesco-­city-of-­literature (accessed 25 August 2017). 18 Materials in the following two sections rework ideas first aired in the wider survey I have published as ‘Shakespeare and the Kiwi, 1916’ in Jansohn and Mehl (2015). My thanks to Christa Jansohn and Dieter Mehl for that first opportunity to place the 1916 New Zealand commemorations in an appropriate global context. Here I have thickened the archive drawn on and sought a new angle of approach. 19 Details and quotes from Minute Book 8, Parnell Shakespeare Club, Records, 1883–1938, MS 234, Auckland War Memorial Museum Library. 20 Dunedin Shakespeare Club Minute Book 1912–1919, MS– 1082/006, Hocken Library, Dunedin. 21 There have been few detailed studies of these Club records, although Evelyn Tribble (2005) very usefully analyses an earlier period of activity.

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22 In 2012 actors associated with Dunedin’s Globe Theatre recreated these evenings, with a reading where the actors dressed in ballgowns and tailcoats. 23 Debates about performing Marlowe, say, or Brecht, might well occur within theatrical and artistic circles but would not have the added cultural valency still resonating through Shakespeare. 24 Gordon McMullan’s Introduction to Oxford University Press’s 2016 reprint of this massive book details the circumstances of its production, long in the planning, and frames it as an early instance of the globalizing approach to Shakespeare that the present volume reflects further upon. For an earlier account of the Book of Homage, focusing more on its ideological underpinning than the material circumstances of its production, see Kahn (2001). That essay was first delivered as a keynote address at the Auckland meeting of the Australia and New Zealand Shakespeare Association, which first led me to examine in detail the only New Zealand-­held copy of the book, in the Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington. 25 Though the layout is curious the term aotearoa is the commonly accepted Maori term for New Zealand. On ocean voyages (by canoe or sailing ship), the first sign of approaching the land mass of New Zealand was the increasing density of cloud on the horizon. 26

If sailor tales to sailor tunes, Storm and adventure, heat and cold, If schooners, islands and maroons And buccaneers and buried gold, And all the old romance, retold Exactly in the ancient way, Can please, as me they pleased of old, The wiser youngsters of to-­day . . . (Stevenson 1952: n.p.)

27 Anzac Day, 25 April, is still a public holiday in both Australia and New Zealand, commemorating the first morning, 25 April 1915, of the disastrous attempt to take Gallipoli Peninsula. This remains the main day the First World War is recalled in Australasia, not 11 November (Armistice Day) as is the custom in Britain and the United States.

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28 Anecdotal responses struck me as being comparable to the defensive stance towards the London Globe from the National Theatre and the Royal Shakespeare Company in its first years of operation. 29 Cosplay: ‘the action or pastime of dressing up in costume, esp. as a character from anime, manga, or video games; performances involving people dressed in this way.’ Oxford English Dictionary online (accessed 19 January 2017). 30 Pop Up Globe, Auckland Season 2 Official Programme, 23 Feb–14 May 2017 (Auckland: Pop-up Globe International, 2017), 4. 31 A Midsummer Night’s Dream 2.1.176, in Greenblatt et al. (2015). 32 The site has now reverted to its former life as a downtown car park.

Chapter 5 1 In my chapter ‘Monument Shakespeare and the World Stage: Reading Australian Shakespeare After 2000’ I discuss ways in which Benedict Andrews’ War of the Roses – a conflation of Shakespeare’s first and second tetralogies for the Sydney Theatre Company in 2009 – constructs ‘Shakespeare’ as a rigid monument in order to enact a radical defacement (Flaherty 2013). 2 This and all subsequent references to Shakespeare’s plays are to Greenblatt et al. (1997). 3 For the title ‘Shakespearian Festival’ see ‘The Tercentenary. Shakespearian Festival’ (1916). For evidence of the postponement of Tercentenary celebrations to make way for Anzac Day see ‘Homage to Shakespeare’ (1916). 4 For arguments for the centrality of Ashmead-Bartlett’s accounts to the myth of Anzac see Fewster (1982). For scholarship pointing to the origins of Anzac Day in London’s commemorative initiative see Ely (1985). 5 ‘ “Britain Prepared” and other pictures at the Theatre Royal’, Barrier Miner, Broken Hill, 30 April 1916. Also, in ‘Music and

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Drama’, Brisbane Courier, 1 January 1916, a journalist weighs up the relative merits of ‘moving pictures’ and staged drama. 6 ‘Shakespeare in the Schools: Fine performance of Henry V’ (1955), title no. 120445, Cinesound Review no. 1242, National Film and Sound Archive, Acton, Australian Capital Territory (with thanks to Sean Bridgeman for his kind assistance). The segment can be viewed at http://commerce.wazeedigital.com/ license/clip/48050011_5200.do (accessed 21 October 2015). Jack Thompson played Clancy of the Overflow in the 1982 film The Man from Snowy River (based on Banjo Paterson’s famous poem) and has since gone on to have a successful international career. 7 This evokes George Rignold’s spectacular stage production of the play which, for two decades in the nineteenth century, thrilled Australian audiences with its interpolation of the scene of Henry himself re-­entering London on a real white charger. 8 AusStage database: https://www.ausstage.edu.au/pages/work/512 (accessed 9 December 2015). 9 I attended a performance at the Canberra Theatre Centre on 27 June 2014.

Afterword 1 The Battle of the Somme that would take place in the summer resulted in one million casualties. The film about it, released in the autumn, was seen by two million people (Fraser, Robertshaw and Roberts 2009). 2 Nora’s concluding chapter ‘The Era of Commemoration’ evokes the historian’s sensibility to the newly evolving exploitation of the past in the present. 3 See particularly the chapters ‘Talking About War Memorials’ and ‘The Choice of a Memorial’. 4 Launched in July 1917, HMS Shakespeare was a ‘destroyer leader’, its role to carry the flagstaff of a flotilla of destroyers. The ship was scrapped in 1936.

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5 Of the 203 entries, forty were sourced from the Bible and about the same from anonymous sources. It is not entirely clear why some entries seem to be repeated (perhaps the choices of different selectors are listed separately, or those for different commemorative purposes) but the twenty-­three from Shakespeare comprise: one each from The Tempest, Titus Andronicus, Cymbeline and Richard III; two from both Julius Caesar and Henry VIII; three from 1 Henry IV, and four each from King Richard II, Measure for Measure and King John. 6 Alongside this report of Mackail’s lecture appeared an announcement, ‘Memorials to the Missing’, inviting ex-­service architects ‘raised in any part of the British Empire’ to submit designs for the four memorials to the tens of thousands of missing proposed on the Western Front, a priority now that the cemeteries were in hand. 7 Inglis and Brazier provide a detailed account of this memorial (Inglis 1999: 298–303). See also the entry in the catalogue accompanying Edwards and Read (2007). 8 Art education and the competition systems also promulgated this tendency. In Australia particularly, it was felt that the commemoration of the war dead should be designed by Australians, and competitions were restricted to those born in Australia or British subjects resident in Australia. Australian and particularly ex-­service sculptors were encouraged. Mackennal was derided for being a long-­term absentee although the prestige of his status as a Royal Academician appears to have made up for this. 9 Mackennal also received the commission for the Edward VII memorial in Adelaide that was unveiled on 15 July 1920. All these projects were in place before war broke out. Other work that Mackennal had in hand during the war years included the statuary for Australia House in London and memorials to King George V (for India and later Canberra), and in 1914 he was awarded the commission for the Shakespeare memorial for Sydney (Edwards and Read 2007). 10 For discussion of the broadcast of Armistice Day ceremonies see Gregory (1994: 133–43). Gregory also makes the important observation that the Unknown Warrior’s lack of a name acted as

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a counterpoint to the local urge to name the dead, manifest in the production of books of remembrance (ibid.: 28). 11 During the Second World War various schemes would be established to document Britain’s historic infrastructure as the destructive capacity of aerial bombing became all too apparent – and afterwards debates would develop about the commemorative potential of the destruction itself. 12 The London streetscape also played a role in Woolf’s 1922 novel, Jacob’s Room, particularly the moment towards its conclusion when a religious procession passes down Whitehall. The ners of the marchers and the statues of statesmen ‘with fixed marble eyes’, link the mobile present with the immutable past (Woolf 1968: 164). 13 A copy of the Order of Ceremony issued for the unveiling of the memorial can be found on the website of the Adam Lindsay Gordon Commemorative Committee Inc: http:// adamlindsaygordon.org/westminsterabbey.htm (accessed 24 August 2017). 14 The French and English cast added to the celebration of ‘the rich and complex historical relationship between our two nations’ and even the choice of performance venues – Middle Temple Hall and Temple Church, London, and Périgord and Quercy, France – thickened this layering of association.

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Woman’s World: Essays for Jocelyn Harris, Volume 2, Otago Studies in English 9, 554–9, Dunedin: Department of English, University of Otago. Unknown Soldier (n.d.), Diary: Unknown Soldier-England and France-WWI, National Army Museum, Waiouru, New Zealand, Accession No. 1999.3183, MSS 131. Whitebrook, Peter (1993), William Archer: A Biography, London: Methuen. Whitworth, Geoffrey (1951), The Making of a National Theatre, London: Faber. Vidler, Anthony (1992), The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely, Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press. ‘Wanted, £25,000. Shakespeare Memorial. A Bold Objective’ (1913), Sydney Morning Herald, 4 February: 10. Waterhouse, Richard (2001), ‘High Culture and Low Culture: The Changing Role of Shakespeare, 1833–2000’, in John Golder and Richard Madeleine (eds), O Brave New World: Two Centuries of Shakespeare on the Australian Stage, 17–39, Sydney: Currency. West, Francis Leveson-Gower (n.d.), Diary Gallipoli & Western Front WWI & Post-War, Book 3, 27 Jan 1916–13 July 1916, National Army Museum, Waiouru, New Zealand, Accession No. 1993.990. Westminster Abbey (n.d), ‘People’. Available online: http://www. westminster-­abbey.org/our-­history/people/william-­shakespeare (accessed 25 August 2017). Woolf, Virginia (1968), Jacob’s Room, Harmondsworth: Penguin, in association with The Hogarth Press. Woolf, Virginia (2000), Mrs Dalloway, ed. David Bradshaw, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Woolf, Virginia (2001), ‘Solid Objects’, in David Bradshaw (ed.), The Mark on the Wall and Other Short Fiction, 54–9, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Yapp, Arthur K. (1916), ‘Introduction’, in Told in the Huts: The YMCA Gift Book, London: Jarrold. Yeaxlee, Basil (1916), letter to Israel Gollancz, National Theatre Archive (Shakespeare Memorial National Trust files), SMNT/2/1/12. ‘Y.M.C.A. Work’ (1917), Hawara and Normanby Star, 15 March: 8. Ziino, Bart (2006), A Distant Grief: Australians, War Graves and the First World War, Crawley: University of Western Australia Press.

Index

Adelphi Theatre, Sydney, 152 Agincourt, Battle of, 90, 150, 151, 156, 157, 186 à Kempis, Thomas, 178 Aldwych Hut, London, 92, 198 n.13 antipodal, 8, 9–13, 30, 33, 34, 48, 50, 60, 61, 149, 169 Anzac Day, 2, 4, 8, 26, 71, 80, 81, 151, 152, 154–7, 159, 170 Anzac Memorial, Hyde Park, Sydney, 158–60 Appadurai, Arjun, 10 Archer, William, 36, 37, 52, 54, 55, 65, 108 Arnold, Matthew, 36, 65, 178 Ashmead-Bartlett, Ellis, 154, 155, 157, 164 Auckland, 8, 10, 11, 16, 17 Australian literature, 69 Backhouse, Alfred Paxton, 66, 67 Badger, Richard, 35, 36, 37 Baldo, Jonathan, 150, 157, 171 Barbican, London, 20, 59 BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation), 20, 21 Bean, C. E. W., 154 Beauman, Sally, 53, 110 Bell, John, 24, 25, 160, 161, 163, 166, 167

Bell Shakespeare Company, 24, 25, 78 Bennett, Francis, 104 Benson, Sir Frank, 42, 55 Birdwood, William, 4 Blair, Carole, 95 Bloomsbury, 40, 48, 90, 95, 96, 101–2, 115 Booth, Allyson, 92, 113, 115 Boston Public Library, 78 Bourke, Richard, 76, 78 Bowden, H.S., 66, 69 Branagh, Kenneth, 163 Bridges-Adams, William, 54–6 British Council, 23, 24 British Library, 21 British Museum, 127 Browne, Thomas, Pseudodoxia Epidemica, 12 Burton, A.B., 179 Cahill Expressway, Sydney, 81, 82 Calvo, Clara, 15, 98, 177 Campbell, Wilfred, 43 Carey, Peter, The Fat Man in History, 82 Carlson, Marvin, 107 Carlyle, Thomas, 67, 148 Carnegie Hall, New York, 6 Cecil Hotel, London, 5 Cenotaph, London, 95, 180 Cenotaph, Sydney, 79, 155

222

index

Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel de, 19 Chaffey, Frank A., 75 Chu Chin Chow, 7 Churchill, Winston, 50 Cinesound Company, 158 civic memory, 72 Clarke, George T., 65 Clerq, René de, 43 Connerton, Paul, 94, 111, 114 Cook, Captain James, 81, 84 Cornwallis-West, Mrs George, 37, 38, 39 Craig, Edith, 89, 93, 106, 109 Cullen, William, 152 Dante Aligieri, 178 Dardanelles, 2, 5, 71, 119, 154 Dead Sea Scrolls, 119 Deamer, Dulcie, 153, 154 Deutsche Shakespeare Gesellschaft (German Shakespeare Society), 32 Dickinson, Greg, 95 Donne, John, ‘A Valediction Forbidding Mourning’, 10 Doran, Gregory, 187 Drake, Fabia, 89–91 Drury Lane Theatre, London, 42, 109 Dunedin, 8, 10, 16 Dunedin Shakespeare Club, 135 Easter, 3, 6, 8, 14, 47, 60 Easter Rising, Dublin, 14, 43, 175, 187 Edgerton, Joel, 165 Elliott, Gertrude, 6, 49, 105, 106, 109

Engler, Balz, 15 English Association of Australia, 178 Evans, Peter, 25 Farmer Whyte, William, 66, 67, 68 Film London, 22 First World War, 3, 4, 9, 13, 16, 27, 32, 34, 70, 72, 74, 79, 80, 91, 95, 101, 112, 114, 118, 119, 121, 122, 165, 176, 186, 187, 203 n.27 Fisher, Andrew, 5 Fitzpatrick, Tim, 140 Flower, Archibald, 55 Folger Shakespeare Library, 23, 24 Forbes-Robertson, Johnston, 6, 42, 49, 105, 108, 109 Foulkes, Richard, 15 Fowler, Robert, 76 Fuller, Sir George, 75 Furnivall, F. J., 31 Gallipoli, 2, 4, 70, 71, 123, 151, 154, 156, 157, 158, 164, 173, 175, 178 Galsworthy, John, 43 George V, King, 5, 42, 43 German, Edward, 7 Giddens, Anthony, 10 Gipps, Sir George, 78 ‘global Shakespeare’, 8, 9–15, 59, 139 Globe Theatre, Auckland see Pop-up Globe Glyndebourne Opera, 22 Gollancz, Sir Israel, 14, 21, 27, 29–61, 65, 66, 94, 97, 98,

index

100, 102, 108, 109, 123, 137, 192 n.20, 192 n.23 Book of Homage to Shakespeare, A, 14, 15, 33, 35, 39, 40, 43–8, 94 Gordon, Adam Lindsay, 184 Gosse, Edmund, 43 Gower, Lord Ronald, 76, 77, 176 Grafton Galleries, 177 Grafton Shakespeare Club, 131 Granville-Barker, Harley, 36, 52, 54, 65, 108 Green, Bishop Arthur, 156 Gregorian calendar, 3, 40 Gregory, Miles, 140 Grey, Sir George, 131 Gullett, Henry, 63–81, 84, 86, 148, 175, 176 Gullett, Lucy, 74 Gullett, Minnie, 74 Habicht, Werner, 15, 101 Hanlon, Alfred Charles, 136 Hannerz, Ulf, 11 Harcourt-Smith, Sir Cecil Inscriptions Suggested for War Memorials, 197 Heidegger, Martin, 50 Herford, C. H., 48 His Majesty’s Theatre, London, 4, 5, 6, 7, 42, 189 n.1 HMS Shakespeare, 204 n.4 Hoenselaars, Ton, 15 Hoff, George Rayner, 80 Hollywood, 5 Holman, W.A., 84 Holt, Helen, 7 Houses of Parliament, London, 2 Howard, John, 158

223

Hunter-Watts, Frediswyde, 152 Hyde, Douglas, 46–7 Ifould, W.H., 75 Image, Selwyn, 177 Imperial War Graves Commission, 178, 180 Irving, H.B., 193 n.2 Indian YMCA, London, 55, 91, 93, 110 Jansohn, Christa, 15 Jonson, Ben, 20 Alchemist, The, 20, 30 Julian calendar, 3, 40 Kahn, Coppélia, 15 Keating, Paul, 158 Kelly, Paul, 26 Kensington, 48 Kenyon, F. G., 33–4 Kerr, John (Governor General), 161 King’s College London, 19, 21, 22, 31, 35, 44, 94 ‘King Shakespeare’, 67, 148 Kipling, Rudyard, 178 Lafayette Theatre, New York, 6 Lambert, George Washington, 184 Lee, Sir Sidney, 97 London Philharmonic Orchestra, 22 London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, 49, 111, 191 n.15 London Shakespeare League, 35, 37, 41, 189 n.2, 192 n.20, 192 n.23

224

index

London Symphony Orchestra, 22 London Transport, 182 Lovejoy, Robi, 161 Lungo, Isidoro del, 44 Lutyens, Edwin L., 38, 95, 179, 180, 181 Lyttelton, Edith, 37, 55 Lytton, Earl of, 97 McIntosh, Hugh D., 79 MacCallum, M. W., 44 Mackennal, Bertram, 72–81, 84, 85, 86, 155, 178, 179, 182, 186 Mackail, John William, 177 McKernan, Luke, 15 Malthouse Theatre, Melbourne, 25 Martens, Anna, 5 Martens, Conrad, 85 Martin-Harvey, John, 7, 42, 189 n.1, 191 n.11 Mary, Queen, 5, 42, 43, 102–3 Meeson, Dora, 180 Mehl, Dieter, 15 Melbourne, 10, 25 Melbourne, University of, 26 Mellor, Aubrey, 161 Meyer, Sir Carl, 37 Milton, John, 64, 178 Murphy, Andrew, 15 National Archives (UK), 21 National Theatre, London, 16, 29, 30, 32, 34, 36, 37, 39, 42, 52–4, 190 n.1 New Amsterdam Theatre, New York, 6 Newbolt, Sir Henry, 178

New Shakespeare Company, 55–6, 108, 110 New South Wales Legislative Council, 174 New South Wales Public Library, 74, 75 New South Wales Shakespeare Society, 63, 65, 66, 73, 175 New Zealand National Army Museum, 117 Nimrod Theatre, Sydney, 161 Old Tote Theatre, Sydney, 161 Old Vic Theatre, London, 2, 3, 7, 15, 30, 34, 56, 60, 173 Olivier, Sir Laurence, 170 Olympics, London (2012), 18, 26 O’Malley, King, 68 Opéra Comique, Paris, 5 Ott, Brian, 95 Parramatta, 67–8 Parnell Shakespeare Club, 133, 135 Pearson, Hesketh, 6 Pierpont Morgan Library, New York, 78 Pigott, William, 80 Plaatje, Solomon, 45–7 Poel, William, 35, 37, 38, 56–8, 97, 192 n.20, 192 n.23 Pop-up Globe, 17, 123, 140–3 Prescott, Paul, 57 Raleigh, Sir Walter, 121 Ralph Roister Doister, 7 Red Cross, 6, 111, 177

index

Reeves, William Pember, 44, 123, 137–40 Revenger’s Tragedy, The, 30 Robinson, Sir Hercules, 81 Rosenthal, Daniel, 52 Ross, Sir Ronald, 43, 191 n.15 Royal Collections, 21 Royal Shakespeare Company, 16, 18, 19, 20, 21, 30, 32, 54–6, 58, 142, 162 Royal Society of Literature, 22 Ruskin, John, 194–5 Ryan, Damien, 167–70 St George’s Day, 14, 71 Samuel, Raphael, 153 Savoy, 5 Saxondom, 67 Second World War, 81, 206 n.11 Shadow King, The, 22, 25 Shakespeare, William Antony and Cleopatra, 134 As You Like It, 30, 152, 161 Comedy of Errors, The, 134 Coriolanus, 134, 135, 205 n.5 Cymbeline, 20 Hamlet, 7, 18, 20, 30, 152 Henry IV, Part 1, 7, 163, 164, 167, 186, 205 n.5 Henry IV, Part 2, 150, 163, 167 Henry V, 6, 89, 91, 109, 134, 135, 145, 146, 150–2, 156–7, 159–71, 186 Henry VI plays, 26 Henry VIII, 6, 7, 133, 205 n.5

225

Julius Caesar, 42, 205 n.5 King John, 109, 178, 205 n.5 King Lear, 20, 22, 25 Macbeth, 6, 7, 44, 101, 134 Measure for Measure, 178, 205 n.5 Merchant of Venice, The, 6, 134, 135 Merry Wives of Windsor, The, 134 Midsummer Night’s Dream, A, 7, 20 Much Ado About Nothing, 161–2 Othello, 7, 25, 26, 152 Richard II, 178, 205 n.5 Richard III, 134, 136, 161, 205 n.5 Romeo and Juliet, 7, 25, 134, 152 Taming of the Shrew, The, 134, 136 Tempest, The, 134, 142, 205 n.5 Titus Andronicus, 205 n.5 Twelfth Night, 26, 129, 133, 135, 152, 182 Two Gentlemen of Verona, 134 Shakespeare 400, 21, 190 n.8 Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, 18, 189 n.7 Shakespeare Day, Sydney, 80, 87 Shakespeare Festival, Sydney, 69, 70 Shakespeare First Folio, 2, 23 Shakespeare Hut, 6, 16, 41, 48–52, 66, 89–115, 118, 122, 123, 124, 129, 140–3, 198 n.13

226

index

Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham, 19 Shakespeare Memorial Ball, 37–8, 50 Shakespeare Memorial Committee, 35 Shakespeare Memorial National Theatre (SMNT), 33, 34, 39, 40, 42, 51–60, 64, 94, 96–8 Shakespeare Memorial Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, 32 Shakespeare Place, Sydney, 75, 76, 78, 81, 83, 84 Shakespeare Quatercentenary (2016), 17–28, 175 Shakespeare Society of New South Wales, 148 Shakespeare Tercentenary (1916), 2, 3, 6, 8, 9, 10, 13, 14, 15–17, 24, 25, 30–7, 39, 40–3, 48, 54, 56, 58–60, 64–6, 69–72, 74, 77–9, 86, 92, 94, 95, 97, 99, 101, 114, 121–3, 130, 131, 133, 136, 137, 145, 147, 149, 150, 152, 155, 159, 162, 163, 173, 175, 177, 185–7, 191 n.9, 193 n.2, 194 n.3, 194 n.5, 197 n.5, 199 n.21, 203 n.3 ‘Shakespeare’s England’ exhibition, 38–9, 50, 56, 65, 180 Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre, London, 16, 17, 18, 19, 26, 29, 30, 52, 56–9, 94

Shaw, George Bernard, 44, 55, 97 Shellal Mosaic, 118 Skeat, William Walter, 31 Smart, Jeffrey, 82–5 Smialkowska, Monika, 15 State Library of New South Wales (Mitchell Library), 149, 155, 168 Stefánsson, Jón, 44 Stevenson, Robert Louis, 138 Stoll, Oswald, 5, 50, 98, 99 Stowell, Gordon, 105 Stratford Memorial Theatre, 66 Stratford-upon-Avon, 18, 20, 21, 22, 30, 32, 46, 104, 129 Sydney, 7, 8, 10, 11, 13, 16, 147–9 Sydney Citizens’ Committee, 68, 69 Sydney Shakespeare memorial, 179 Sydney Tercentenary Memorial Fund (STMF), 66 Tagore, Rabindranath, 43 Taylor, Gary, 93, 114 Taylor, Regan, 26 Tennant, David, 20 Tennyson, Alfred Lord, 178 Terry, Ellen, 7, 49, 90, 109 Thucydides, 178 Tolstoy, Leo, 178 Tree, Sir Herbert Beerbohm, 5, 42, 152, 189 n.1 Tree, Viola, 7 Tweedie, Mrs Alec, 51, 96, 197 n.7 Tweedie, Leslie, 51, 96, 114

index

Unknown Warrior (Soldier), 158, 181, 182, 184, 186–7 Varco, John William, 80 Virgil, 178 Volska, Anna, 161 Waikato, University of, 26 Wanamaker, Sam, 56–8 Warrender, Lady Maud, 109 Waterloo Station, London, 2, 5, 7, 27 Waymouth, W. Charles, 100 Webb, Beatrice and Sidney, 44 Webster, John The White Devil, 30 The Duchess of Malfi, 30 Wellington Shakespeare Club, 131 Wellington Shakespeare Tercentenary Committee, 131

227

Westminster Abbey, London, 5 Westminster Bridge, London, 2 Whitlam, Gough, 161 Whitworth, Geoffrey, 52 Whyman, Erica, 20 Wilkie, Allan, 135, 152 Wilson, Effingham, 36 Wilson, Woodrow, 42 Witmore, Michael, 24 Woolf, Virginia, 197 n.6 Jacob’s Room, 206 Mrs Dalloway, 101–2, 187 Woolner, Thomas, 84 World Shakespeare Congress (2016), 18 World Shakespeare Festival (2012), 18, 21, 22 Yeaxlee, Basil, 41, 51, 99, 100 Yirra Yaakin Theatre, Perth, 26 YMCA, 41, 49, 50, 90, 91–3, 100, 102