The Shakespeare Hut: A Story of Performance, Memory and Identity, 1916–1923 9781474295840, 9781474295833, 9781474295864

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The Shakespeare Hut

RELATED TITLES New Places: Shakespeare and Civic Creativity edited by Paul Edmondson and Ewan Fernie Antipodal Shakespeare: Remembering and Forgetting in Britain, Australia and New Zealand, 1916–2016 edited by Gordon McMullan, Philip Mead, Ailsa Grant Ferguson, Kate Flaherty and Mark Houlahan Shakespeare’s Artists: The Painters, Sculptors, Poets and Musicians in his Plays and Poems by B. J. Sokol Playing Indoors: Staging Early Modern Drama in the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse by Will Tosh

The Shakespeare Hut A Story of Performance, Memory and Identity, 1916–1923

Ailsa Grant Ferguson

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 in Great Britain 2019 Paperback edition first published 2020 Copyright ©  Ailsa Grant Ferguson, 2019 Ailsa Grant Ferguson has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on pp. x–xiii constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design: Irene Martinez Costa Cover image: Temporary war buildings used by the YMCA, Shakespeare Hut, Gower Street. ©  IWM (Q 28740) 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. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Ferguson, Ailsa Grant, author. Title: The Shakespeare Hut: a story of performance, memory and identity, 1916-1923 / Ailsa Grant Ferguson. Description: London; New York, NY: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2019. | Series: The Arden Shakespeare | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018055733 | ISBN 9781474295840 (hardback) | ISBN 9781474295857 (ebk.) | ISBN 9781474295864 (epdf) Subjects: LCSH: Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616—Stage history—1800-1950. | Shakespeare Hut (Bloomsbury, London, England) | Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616—Stage history—England—London. | Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616—Dramatic production—History— 20th century. | World War, 1914-1918—Great Britain—Theater and the war. | Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616—Anniversaries, etc. |  Great Britain. Army. Australian and New Zealand Army Corps— Military life. | Soldiers—Recreation—Great Britain. Classification: LCC PR3099.F47 2019 | DDC 792.09421/42—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/218055733 ISBN: HB: 978-1-4742-9584-0 PB: 978-1-3501-7120-6 ePDF: 978-1-4742-9586-4 eBook: 978-1-4742-9585-7 Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

This book is dedicated to my parents, Helen and Luath Grant Ferguson, to my husband, Ian, and to my children, Milo and Eada June.

CONTENTS List of Illustrations  viii Acknowledgements  x Foreword Gordon McMullan and Philip Mead  xiv

Introduction  1 1 Prologue: The Shakespeare Memorial National Theatre events, 1910–12: Festivity, bardolatry, (re)constructing Shakespeare  19 2 ‘What Ho! For Shakespeare, when we get back to Blighty!’: Commemorating Shakespeare in wartime  61 3 Performing Englishness: The Shakespeare Hut for Anzacs  87 4 Performing femininity: Women at the Shakespeare Hut  129 5 After the war: 1919–23  167 6 Epilogue: Forgetting and ‘remembering’ the Shakespeare Hut, 1924–2016: Festivity, bardolatry and (re)constructing ‘memory’  195 Notes  223 Bibliography  253 Index  261

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 1.1  The Hon. Miss Victoria Sackville-West (portrait marked Speight, attributed to Richard Neville Speight) in Mrs George Cornwallis West (ed.), Souvenir of the Shakespeare Ball (London: Frederick Warne, 1911), plate facing p. 44  31 1.2  The Duchess of Wellington’s Quadrille Party (A Midsummer Night’s Dream) Group taken at Apsley House (photo marked Mendelssohn, attributed to Hayman Seleg Mendelssohn) in Mrs George Cornwallis West (ed.), Souvenir of the Shakespeare Ball (London: Frederick Warne, 1911), plate facing p. 14  32 1.3  ‘A Corner of Shakespeare’s England’, postcard, 1912. From the author’s private collection  47 3.1  The Shakespeare Hut Lounge, c. 1916. Reproduced by kind permission of the YMCA (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)  93 3.2  The Shakespeare Hut as seen from Gower Street, c. 1916. Reproduced by kind permission of the YMCA (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 held at the Cadbury Research Library: Special Collections, University of Birmingham)  95



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

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4.1  Women Workers at the Shakespeare Hut, c. 1916. Reproduced by kind permission of the YMCA (Photograph from Green Book 11, K/1/12/106. The archive of the National Council of YMCAs, held at the Cadbury Research Library: Special Collections, University of Birmingham)  136 4.2  A Show at the Shakespeare Hut, c. 1916. Reproduced by kind permission of the YMCA (Photograph from Green Book 11, K/1/12/105. The archive of the National Council of YMCAs, held at the Cadbury Research Library: Special Collections, University of Birmingham)  150 4.3  Fabia Drake as ‘Henry V for the Anzacs’, 1919. Photograph assumed to be by Henry T. Brice. Uncredited image in Drake’s autobiography, Blind Fortune, facing p. 33  158

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This book has been made possible by the collaboration, support, expertise and encouragement of many people and organizations. First, I would like to thank Philip Mead and Gordon McMullan, who led the Australian Research Council-funded project, ‘Monumental Shakespeare: a Transcultural Investigation of Commemoration in 20th-century Australia and England’. Their original idea, to compare the commemorations of the 1916 Tercentenary in London with those in Sydney, was both truly innovative and ambitious. I am so grateful to them for the opportunity to contribute to this wonderfully productive project, which continues to inspire new avenues for study. I would also like to thank them for writing the foreword to this book, to set it into its true context of the wider study they began and nurtured. Warmest thanks are due to Gavin Clarke, not only as a fountain of knowledge and expertise but also because he thought to dig out some fascinating architectural plans marked ‘Shakespeare Hut’ from deep in the vault of the National Theatre Archive way back in early 2011, saving them from their almost century-long oblivion. This treasure was followed by a little pile of unused invitations to the Hut’s opening celebration tucked away in another of the NT files, carrying one small-print, six-letter acronym, ‘NZYMCA’, that was to unlock the forgotten Anzac history of the Shakespeare Hut. All this is thanks to Gavin’s incredible knowledge of the archive and engagement with the project. I cannot express too strongly my gratitude to Coppé lia Kahn and Clara Calvo, not only for leading the way for others to follow with their work on the Shakespeare Tercentenary, but also for their guidance, support and mentorship. I would

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also like to thank Kate Aughterson, Michael Dobson, Deborah Philips, Emma Smith, Sarah Street and Martin White for their esteemed and invaluable wisdom and advice over many years. Special thanks are due to Ken Montgomery of the YMCA for his unwavering support for the Shakespeare Hut project from the very beginning and to Joao P. F. X. Fernandes, general secretary of the YMCA Indian Hostel, London, for giving so much time to helping me trace the Indian years of the Shakespeare Hut. I am deeply grateful to Sir Lockwood Smith (High Commissioner of New Zealand 2013–17), Sir Jerry Mateparae (High Commissioner of New Zealand), Ceilidh Dunphy and Jennifer Matuszek at the New Zealand High Commission in London. There are many archives that have provided material for this book. I would particularly like to thank Erin Lee, National Theatre Archive, for her expertise and help. I would also like to thank the staff of the Cadbury Research Library (University of Birmingham), Imperial War Museum, Women’s Library, University of Princeton Special Collections, Folger Shakespeare Library, Churchill College Archive (University of Cambridge), British Library, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, Auckland War Memorial, National Army Museum (New Zealand) and Australian War Museum. I would also like to thank Nick Walton and the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust for helping me track down some fascinating links with Stratford’s wartime past. To Naomi Paxton, I am extremely grateful for sharing her expertise and inspiration and thanks, too, to Rebecca Mordan of Scary Little Girls for her work on the Hut walk performance in 2016. Several people have shared family memories to support my research, which is a great honour and privilege. I offer particular thanks to Margaret Chipperfield, granddaughter of the Shakespeare Hut Manager, George W. W. B. Hughes MBE and to David Gollancz, grandson of Sir Israel Gollancz.

xii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would also like to thank the editorial team at the Arden Shakespeare, Bloomsbury Publishing, for their help and time to bring this book to print, particularly Margaret Bartley, Mark Dudgeon and Lara Bateman. I would also like to express specific thanks to Meraud Ferguson Hand, for her generosity in lending her editorial expertise and time at various stages of the manuscript preparation. I would like to thank the several funders which have provided the backing needed for the project: the Australian Research Council, which funded the ‘Monumental Shakespeare’ project and the subsequent extended research on the Hut; the Society for Theatre Research, for their Research Award for my work on Shakespeare Hut performances; and the University of Brighton sabbatical fund. Finally, I offer my deepest thanks to all my family for supporting my work, never appearing to tire of hearing about the Shakespeare Hut and helping me to find the time and space in which to write this book.

I am grateful to the editors and publishers of the following articles, parts of which appear in different forms or have been adapted for use in this book: ‘The Shakespeare Hut: Anzac Meets Shakespeare in London, 1916’ in Gordon McMullan and Philip Mead, with Kate Flaherty, Ailsa Grant Ferguson and Mark Houlahan (eds), Antipodal Shakespeare: Remembering and Forgetting in Britain, Australia and New Zealand, 1916–2016 (London: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2018), pp. 89–115. ‘Performing Commemoration in Wartime: Shakespeare Galas in London, 1916–19’, in Coppé lia Kahn and Clara Calvo (eds), Celebrating Shakespeare: Commemoration and Cultural Memory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), pp. 202–24. ‘Entertaining the Anzacs: Performance for Australian and New Zealand Troops on Leave in London, 1916–1919’, in

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Andrew Maunder (ed.), British Theatre and the Great War, 1914–1919: New Perspectives (London: Palgrave, 2015). ‘“When wasteful war shall statues overturn”: Forgetting the Shakespeare Hut’, Shakespeare: The Journal of the British Shakespeare Association, vol. 10, no. 3, Summer 2014. ‘Lady Forbes-Robertson’s War Work: Gertrude Elliott and the Shakespeare Hut Performances, 1916–1919’, in Gordon McMullan, Lena Cowen Orlin and Virginia Mason Vaughan (eds), Women Making Shakespeare (London: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2013).

FOREWORD When in 2010 we began work, courtesy of an Australian Research Council ‘Discovery’ grant, on a project entitled ‘Monumental Shakespeare: A Transcultural Investigation of Commemoration in Twentieth-Century Australia and England’, we knew about the existence of the Shakespeare Hut and its dual role as wartime accommodation for soldiers from New Zealand and Australia and as a site of Shakespearean commemoration, but we knew little as yet of the true significance of its brief yet remarkable history. When Ailsa Grant Ferguson joined us as research associate on the project, we could have foreseen neither the extraordinary history she would unearth, with the generous help of Gavin Clarke and others in the National Theatre Archive and elsewhere, nor the resonant and generative relationship this work would have for the Shakespeare400 celebrations in 2016. Some of the results of the project have been published in a multiply authored monograph, Antipodal Shakespeare, in which we – together with Ailsa Grant Ferguson, Kate Flaherty and Mark Houlahan – address the Shakespeare Tercentenary of 1916 from a comparative perspective, considering the history of the commemorations in Britain, Australia and New Zealand and noting the pivotal role of the Shakespeare Hut as a space with a complex range of identities and functions, local and global. In The Shakespeare Hut: A Story of Performance, Memory and Identity, Ailsa Grant Ferguson takes this research much further, offering an original and historically detailed account of a deeply significant yet bewilderingly neglected moment in the history of Shakespeare as a cultural icon. This book is a biography of a building, but it is so much more than that. Its subject, the Shakespeare Hut, emerges

FOREWORD

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as the locus of an astonishing range of cultural forces and discourses marking the contradictory moment of its inception, construction and existence. The inspiration of Israel Gollancz, the Hut was, ostensibly, a building designed as a provisional commemorative monument, a strictly temporary space of respite, a placeholder with an improvised patriotic function for wartime and war work, yet it became so much more than that. It was, in Ailsa Grant Ferguson’s words, ‘a multifunctional and idiosyncratic building, temporary, liminal’ which acquired multiple roles as ‘a nationalised space, a gendered space, a performance space and as a commemorative monument to Shakespeare’. Located in the heart of London, the Shakespeare Hut was a remarkable phenomenon, yet it has been, until very recently, almost wholly unremembered. As Grant Ferguson notes, before she began to communicate her findings, the website of the institution that now stands on the site of the Hut, the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM), stated that the space was previously nothing more than waste ground (and it has yet fully to document the prior usage of the site, which was, crucially, also the first site of the proposed National Theatre). Yet between 1916 and 1924, as this book makes abundantly clear, the Hut housed a remarkable range of people, performances and practices, and it embodied a powerful and representative set of cultural forces both retrograde and proleptic, conservative and radical, from the driving expressions of patriotism, nostalgia and wartime energy that led to its creation to the emergent forces of feminism and postcolonialism that look forward to a very different postwar future. As a site of war work, of performance and of commemoration it also stood in stark contrast to the fraught and ineffectual commemorative projects of the preceding decade: the Shakespeare Masque of 1910, the Shakespeare Ball of 1911 and the Earl’s Court Shakespeare’s England extravaganza of 1912 – events that were blithely unaware, of course, of the European and world tragedy that would begin in September 1914.

xvi FOREWORD

One of the extraordinary features of the Hut was what we have elsewhere called its ‘antipodality’, its expression of cultural forces and cultural change in both hemispheres, its de facto role as a ‘little Australasia’ in London, a place where New Zealand (overwhelmingly) and Australian troops could find a little respite from the war, where they could feel, if only momentarily and artificially, ‘at home’ and where, somewhat improbably perhaps, they could attend performances by some of the leading actors of the day – Ellen Terry, Edith Craig, Gertrude Elliot, as well as the Australian actress and playwright Inez Bensusan and the child actor Fabia Drake – of extracts from the plays of Shakespeare, the English writer most wholly co-opted for patriotic purposes during the First World War, that took place on what served, for the moment, as the stage of the nascent National Theatre. In the event, its improbably dual service as respite accommodation and performance space turned out to be by no means the limit of the Hut’s function. What Grant Ferguson makes so clear is the sheer range of uses to which the Hut was put and the remarkable range of identities it expressed at the same time or in sequence: it was, as she phrases it, ‘Shakespearean heritage space, English space, New Zealander space, performance space, feminocentric stage space, educational space, Indian space’. These identities all have stories attached to them, most of which have not previously been told – perhaps most notably, the suffragist-feminist and Indian stories – and none told with anything like the detailed knowledge that Grant Ferguson brings to bear. In the process, she makes us understand that Shakespeare’s meaning within British culture across the period of the Hut’s existence was both located and performed, not ‘timeless’, ‘universal’ or any of the other terms of the traditional transcendent discourse of the intersection of nation and genius. Through the new material she has unearthed on the performances and activities that took place within the Hut – especially on the Mummers’ Play of Christmas 1916, on the Hut’s function as a hub for suffragist activity and on the radical politics of the

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Hut in its final role as the location of the Indian YMCA – Grant Ferguson immensely enriches our understanding of the complex meanings of ‘Shakespeare’ in the late-war and immediate post-war years. Now entirely vanished from the London urbanscape, the Shakespeare Hut was nevertheless, as this book demonstrates, the largest and most complex artefact of Shakespeare Tercentenary commemoration. Ailsa Grant Ferguson’s work will thus be of obvious and considerable value to students of Shakespearean reception history; it should also inform the work of anyone addressing the cultures of Edwardian and wartime England, New Zealand and Australia; the military history of the First World War, particularly that of the YMCA respite huts and, more broadly, the culture of the troops beyond the front line; the history of theatre, and especially of the idea of ‘national theatre’ in the early twentieth century; the emergence of women’s suffrage and feminism; the transition from colonial to postcolonial not only in Australasian nations but also among expatriate Indian communities; and the work of any scholar analysing the roles of memory and commemoration in cultures across the world. Gordon McMullan and Philip Mead

Introduction

April 1919. An audience of Anzac soldiers sit in a wooden hall in London, nearly 12,000 miles from home, gazing at a simple stage. Through the curtain steps a fifteen-year-old girl, crossdressed as Henry V. She opens her mouth and begins. ‘Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more …’ 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 – if textually confused – 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 of the curtain and speak … to my Army on the floor.’1 Featuring a cast that included the illustrious Ellen Terry herself, the gala Drake describes was staged at the Shakespeare Hut, a large mock-Tudor bungalow, and associated complex, at the corner of Keppel and Gower Streets in Bloomsbury. A YMCA building dedicated to the memory of Shakespeare, the Hut aspired to be a home from home for serving New Zealand Anzacs from 1916 to 1919. It then transformed into the YMCA Indian Students’ Hostel before being demolished by spring 1924, beginning its swift descent into oblivion. But, according to Drake, on that night in 1919, the Hut’s purpose-built, integral theatre could not have been more alive, as ‘four 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’.2

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THE SHAKESPEARE HUT

The Shakespeare Hut has many functions in this book, as it did during its brief existence. As its title suggests, the book seeks to narrate the history of the Hut as a story. However, at the same time, the Hut functions as a case study and a tool through which we can read Shakespeare in terms of performance, memory, space and identity during the First World War. Its story tells us of commemoration and cultural or collective memory formation, of gender and performance, of complex and dynamic national identities. This book could be best described as a biography – a critical biography – of a building and its legacy. Focusing on the relationship between the building and its namesake, the book draws an intimate portrait of the Shakespeare Hut. Paradoxically, perhaps, the Hut is both idiosyncratically unique and a powerful case study in terms of Shakespearean commemoration and performance and their impact on the expression and construction of national identity. The book must, too, be necessarily self-reflexive. Writing, as I do, shortly after the maelstrom of commemoration represented by 2016’s Shakespeare quatercentenary and, indeed, the Hut’s centenary, I was observing, experiencing and processing these new events as they happened. This has a certain impact on reading the Shakespeare Hut as a useful example of how we ‘remember’ Shakespeare. The events of 2016 necessarily inform how I read 1916 and even 1616. The final chapter, for example, explores attempts at the ‘resurrection’ of the Shakespeare Hut in 2016 and the invocation, once again, of Shakespeare’s legacy as central to cultural identity. As I try to explore the Shakespeare Hut’s story in some useful, objective way, then, I must acknowledge here at the beginning of the story the processes that have more recently left their mark on the Hut and the new existence and identity established by stakeholders in its ‘memory’. Throughout the chapters that explore the Hut in its own time, new contexts will inevitably permeate and inform readings of the past. The Shakespeare Hut was to be ‘performed’ rather than remembered in 2016, reinvented for new ideals of heritage and new agendas

INTRODUCTION 3

for memory and commemoration. The Shakespeare and Shakespeare Hut of 2016 would function in a way as a performance of memory – how perfect a moment, then, to write this book.

Performing memory The Shakespeare Hut was both successful and awkward. While the blend of assertive English heritage and ‘war work’ function it expressed suited its moment of construction in the spring and summer of 1916, neither its physical existence nor the performances it housed were 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. The paternalistic – or, as we shall find, more often maternalistic – 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 became, so the few surviving accounts have it, a space for radical discussion of Indian independence,3 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. As Gary Taylor notes, ‘culture is not what is done, but what is passed on’4 – to which we can add ‘and not passed on’. ‘We generally

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regard forgetting as a failure,’ writes Paul Connerton. ‘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.’5 For the Shakespeare Memorial movement, the rhetoric of failure and neglecting patriotic duty is central to the fervent arguments they made for the erection of a solid memorial to Shakespeare in England. Rather than a straightforward desire for a simple, joyful celebration, very often the driving force of the movement seems to have been their horror of in some sense ‘forgetting’ Shakespeare, a notion arguably stemming from anxiety over his elusive biography, personality and body, which cannot ever fully be ‘remembered’. Adding to this is the obvious fact that, by the Hut’s time, cultural understanding of Shakespeare was so bound up with notions of Englishness that, for the English, to forget him might be to forget themselves. Alongside this anxiety to construct a solid ‘Shakespeare’ to enable the country to remember, time and again the arguments for Shakespeare memorials were supported by the notion that other countries are remembering Shakespeare better than his own England. In his contribution to a huge souvenir book produced for the Shakespeare Memorial Ball in 1911, Lord Lytton gushes his support for the erection of a monument to Shakespeare, which he analogizes as a form of worship akin to religious reverence: ‘the fact that a movement is now on foot to erect a National Memorial to Shakespeare is proof that the present generation of British men and women feel the absence of any such memorial to be a reproach to their country.’6 The Hut would eventually materialize as the only built response in London to the bardolatry that was begun in the eighteenth century, which gathered still more force in the nineteenth and that would define the debates on Shakespearean memorialization of the early twentieth century. These debates, in fact, perfectly represent the moment of fracture between Victorian monumentalism and a nascent modernist project and would soon be faced, too,

INTRODUCTION 5

with a new pragmatism that was to take hold still further with the advent of war. The Shakespeare Hut responded both to Victorian monumentalism and, contrastingly, to wartime practicalities, offering both a sanctified memorial and a pragmatic, even playful, temporariness. It occupied a liminal space between ‘timelessness’ and ‘timeliness’, in the same way, perhaps, as Shakespeare has done, at least as a cultural icon. In Connerton’s earlier work, he suggests that social memory is distinct from ‘historical reconstruction’, the latter of which, he writes, consists of ‘traces … the marks, imperceptible to the senses, which some phenomenon, in itself inaccessible, has left behind’.7 The construct we think of as ‘Shakespeare’ consists of just such traces, and the process of ‘remembering’ him cannot be in the sense that an individual is remembered as a body or a defined personality. Commemoration of the longdead, such as Shakespeare, 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, this creation of ‘memory’ is all the more significant as an agent of national identity. The basic, austere performance facilities offered by the Hut remind us that its existence was predicated on temporariness, transience and liminality. The effect of this on the relationship between memory and performance expressed by the Hut is particularly tricky to define. The ongoing imminence of the building’s destruction was, tragically, shared with its audience, most of whom were due to return to the carnage at the Front after their brief respite 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 present in the Hut’s entertainments, regardless of text or performance, by means of its unique audience, both corporeal and memorial.

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THE SHAKESPEARE HUT

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.8 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, tragically, never to return from the trenches). Performances in the Hut thus necessarily negotiated ghosts both of the Shakespearean past and of the very immediate wartime present. Furthermore, the Hut was a space in which highly regarded actors performed, yet they were not necessarily recognized by the very particular audiences to whom their creativity was directed. The audience members’ geographical origins and their cultural preferences, then, may have curtailed 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 space into an active site of commemoration – along with the proximity of violent death with which all of the audience

INTRODUCTION 7

members lived – and the Hut’s role as a locale for a particularly complex form of ghosting becomes very apparent. Indeed, 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 or her name – an obvious designation of a certain quality confirmed over time – and is likely to encourage particular audience expectations of the approach that will be taken to the performance. Indeed, before the Hut was even conceived, there was objection to the naming of the National Theatre after Shakespeare from Johnston Forbes-Robertson, who would later be deeply involved in the Shakespeare Hut’s performances. In 1908, he wrote to Professor Israel Gollancz (Shakespearean academic, Honorary Secretary of the SMNT (Shakespeare Memorial National Theatre) and future founder of the Shakespeare Hut) expressing his objections to the SMNT name for the planned theatre: I find the name clumsy. The National Theatre is the natural name, and one that in any case I feel sure the public will eventually come to call it. That the play house itself should in all its outward aspects be a noble memorial to Shakespeare is obvious, and the fact that all his plays would be given at stated times, at least once a week, would seal definitely the inward meaning of its existence, and it would come to be known, not only as the National Theatre, but as the House of Shakespeare. To name it the National Shakespeare Theatre strongly implies that only the plays of the Bard will be given.9

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Forbes-Robertson clearly saw the performance of Shakespeare, rather than the naming of a place, as the true memorial to his life and work. Similarly, in 1919, Gollancz, suggested (to general horror in the SMNT) that the New Shakespeare Company, set up using the rent payments due on the Hut in peacetime, could function as the memorial in place of a physical National Theatre until the economic and practical shadow of the war had somewhat subsided. He, too, saw the performance of Shakespeare’s texts as the most important form of commemoration. Both Forbes-Robertson and Gollancz, then, from their very different professional perspectives, held that performance itself could have an adequate, or perhaps even a superior, commemorative function in comparison with the formal naming of a physical structure. Performance becomes, in itself, memorial. The Shakespeare Hut as a building 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. The performances lived in the memories of the spectators and the practitioners for their lifetimes, many of which were cut tragically short by war, but are now lost to us in all but textual traces.

Heterotopia From time to time, this book will borrow Foucault’s infamously vexed and elusive term, ‘heterotopia’, in reading the various phenomena of the Shakespeare Hut’s space. However, the term is one where, when one uses it, one always feels the urge to follow it with ‘for want of a better word’. Foucault mooted the term in the 1960s, then set it aside, still in a rather embryonic

INTRODUCTION 9

state, revisiting it at various times, most notably returning to it in the 1980s, when his lecture was collated and translated by Jay Miskowiec into a short article, ‘Of Other Spaces’.10 The term remains useful (if still vexed in textual practice) in exploring alternate spaces where the normal rules of space and time may be subverted or altered. I will use the term as a means by which to express the Hut’s alternate spaces of identity: Shakespearean heritage space, English space, New Zealander space, performance space, feminocentric stage space, educational space, Indian space. As Foucault’s definition has it, ‘the heterotopia is capable of juxtaposing in a single real place several spaces, several sites that are in themselves incompatible.’11 I would not seek to define or to redefine heterotopia but beg leave to use it here in its most simplistic form, perhaps, as a term for a resistance to hegemonic constructions of utopia, of a place that delineates an alternate time and space. As a heterotopia, the Shakespeare Hut is a counter-space to its geographical location, encompassing commemorative, ideological and pragmatic functions. Foucault’s vague definition of heterotopia, then, is just a starting point. The term provides a label for the delineation and re-delineation of space and time within the Hut. This book does not seek to provide a defence of the usefulness of ‘heterotopia’ as a concept. Yet the term is very helpful in expressing the complex constructions and performances of identity, memory and history taking place in this idiosyncratic, crossroads place. Foucault defines heterotopia, or rather muses on it, as a term directly related to the idea of utopia: First, there are the utopias. Utopias are sites with no real place. They are sites that have a general relation of direct or inverted analogy with the real space of society. They present society itself in a perfected form, or else society turned upside down, but in any case these utopias are fundamentally unreal spaces. There are also, probably in every culture, in every civilization, real places – places that do exist and that

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THE SHAKESPEARE HUT

are formed in the very founding of society – which are something like counter-sites, a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites, all the other real sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted. Places of this kind are outside of all places, even though it may be possible to indicate their location in reality. Because these places are absolutely different from all the sites that they reflect and speak about, I shall call them, by way of a contrast to utopia, heterotopias.12 If Shakespeare is a utopia, the Shakespeare Hut is a heterotopia. It is an anachronism, disjointed from its location in space and time. It is an ‘enacted’ Birthplace, theatre, monument. Inside, though, the agenda was to create a Shakespearean haven, Shakespeare as utopia, ‘Merrie Old England’ and a time of pastoral idyll and folk cultural simplicity merged with a sense of Shakespeare as the pinnacle of human genius and complexity. The nationalized spaces that, in practice, developed within the Hut – first a New Zealand space, subsequently an Indian one – were versions of homelands that created themselves: a ‘Kia Ora’ welcome, a renaming of the space as ‘Little India’. These were ‘real sites that can be found within the culture … represented, contested, and inverted’. India becomes self-governing and outspoken; New Zealand becomes postcolonial microcosmically within the Hut’s unique space. The ‘inversions’, too, of festivity influence the otherness of the time and space occupied by the Shakespeare Hut for its users, workers, performers and managers. The disjointed, hyper-normal reality of wartime combined with a lightness of memorialization that accompanied the enactments of Shakespearean commemoration that took place there and which the building itself enacted. At a time of mass grief, loss and memorialization, ‘remembering’ Shakespeare is an alternate expression of memory, a construction without true loss or grief.

INTRODUCTION  11

Kelvin T. Knight has argued that Foucault was referring, ultimately, only to imagined or written space, which is one of the explanations Foucault himself gave, though it was of course always contradictory to his original use of the term.13 Many have appropriated ‘heterotopia’, as shamelessly, for different purposes, as I do here ‘for want of a better word’ for the alternate spaces I identify as thriving within the Shakespeare Hut. As Peter Johnson, among others, has explored, there is an element of resistance often read into the concept of heterotopias when applied to actual and imagined spaces.14 For the Shakespeare Hut, an attempted utopia of ‘Merrie Old England’ in the midst of an urban physical landscape and the desolation of mechanized total war was disrupted in practice by its users and workers’ formations of national and performative heterotopias within: a New Zealand ‘home’, a feminist Woman’s Theatre, ‘Little India’. I am also interested in exploring the relationship between heterotopia, taken in this most literal sense, and festivity. Festive moments elide with alternate spaces and the ‘Festivals that spring into life at certain points in the year’ can be termed ‘heterochronias’.15 The commemorative moment can be viewed as such but the layering of festivity and the awkward ‘heterochronia’ that took place, for example, in the Shakespeare Hut’s Christmas celebrations in 1916 (explored in Chapter 3) adds another level of separation between the inside space of the Hut and its physical presence in space and time. A commemorative space that is functional, such as the Hut, is creating a repetitive or even perpetual commemorative moment; I read this as festive. At the Shakespeare Hut, there was, within this, another inner circle of festive heterotopias, when Shakespeare’s birth/death day and Christmas were celebrated. These dates represented moments of inversion and separation from the normal functions of time and context outside the Hut’s walls. In applying the term ‘heterotopia’ to the Shakespeare Hut, then, I am using it multifunctionally, to explore the ‘idea’

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THE SHAKESPEARE HUT

of the Hut before it is built, the architecture – its ‘Tudor touches’, the nationalities of its space, the theatre within it.

A biography of a building This book approaches the Shakespeare Hut story as a narrative, a critical biography of a building that was built on a crossroads in London, and at a crossroads of political and cultural phenomena. In response to this, the book is structured both chronologically and thematically, each chapter alighting on a different aspect and moment of the Shakespeare Hut’s story and bringing it into focus. These stories are anchored to specific performances and events both preceding (and feeding into) the Hut’s inception and at the Hut itself. These moments form the dots we must join to explore the story of this unique space and its significance in how we understand Shakespeare in cultural memory, performance and the formation of national and cultural identities. Performances examined are diverse and often idiosyncratic, ranging from a pre-war Shakespeare Masque to a wartime Mummers’ Play to a cross-dressed Henry V after the Armistice. The book, ultimately, comes full circle, from a beginning in which the Shakespeare Hut’s functions, commemorative and performative, are situated in the context of Shakespearean commemoration from 1910 to 1916, it then ends with how the Hut’s (re)construction is contextualized within the bardolatry of 2016. Moments of performance are, of course, crucial in this narrative because this is a history of a performance space. However, this book focuses specifically, too, on commemorative moments as moments of festivity. It explores the Shakespeare Hut as a heterotopia both in the sense that any theatre may be one and also in its role as replaying a perpetual commemorative and festive moment for its rolling audiences, fleetingly present and always renewing themselves. These audiences were serving men and the Hut’s commemoration of Shakespeare also became a performance

INTRODUCTION  13

of English nostalgia, a space of pastoral festivity in central London, even a memorial of friends lost. The story of the Hut could start with page one, early 1916, as Professor Israel Gollancz sat in his Strand office wondering what to do with the SMNT’s embarrassingly vacant land in Bloomsbury. However, this would erase the long build up to the Shakespeare Hut as a monument not only to Shakespeare but also to a new era of commemoration and even of performance. Chapter 1 forms a ‘prologue’ or prehistory for the Hut, therefore, and explores a particular aspect of the immediately preceding years’ efforts to secure a Shakespeare Memorial National Theatre in London. The story of the National Theatre’s prehistory and inception has already been told thoroughly elsewhere.16 It is not necessary or appropriate for this book on the Shakespeare Hut, therefore, to retell the National Theatre’s prehistory in any comprehensive way. However, what it will do is to explore a few details and some very particular moments of constructed memory, nostalgia and performance in SMNT campaigns of the pre-war years that, I argue, directly fed into the Hut’s conception and its nature. These moments begin with the Shakespeare Masque, performed in 1910, followed by the Shakespeare Costume Ball at the Albert Hall (1911) and finally the ‘Shakespeare’s England’ exhibition at Earl’s Court (1912). Chapter 1 explores each of these performative (re)constructions of a Shakespearean past, their design and reception. It interrogates their entwinement with the politics of empire that would have a key influence on the Shakespeare Hut just a few short years later. Chapter 2, then, is where the Shakespeare Hut story begins in earnest. Contextualizing the Hut scheme within a broader narrative of commemorating Shakespeare in wartime, this chapter will examine the climate of Shakespearean appropriation in which the Shakespeare Hut was conceived. While there is a burgeoning field of study around Shakespeare in the First World War, it is still a relatively neglected moment in Shakespeare studies. This chapter follows a range of pathleading work in this field – such as that of Clara Calvo, Richard

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Foulkes, Werner Habicht, Ton Hoenselaars, Coppélia Kahn and Gordon McMullan – and suggests a few more examples and readings of wartime bardolatry and Shakespeareana. This chapter also introduces the performances that took place at the Hut, with a particular comparison of the Shakespeare Hut galas with the Drury Lane Tercentenary gala in 1916, establishing a performative and commemorative context for the Shakespeare Hut’s stage. Chapter 3 explores the Shakespeare Hut’s construction and performance of a version of Englishness for its primary users, New Zealand Anzacs. The Hut was constructed, from the outset, as a space for Anzacs, specifically New Zealanders, and presented as a representation of ‘Merrie Old England’, with deliberately ‘Tudor’ features to its physical design, emulating Shakespeare’s Birthplace at Stratford-upon-Avon’s architectural aesthetic. The Hut’s programme of Shakespeare-themed education and tourism provided as much a tourist ‘sight/site’ as a functional wartime building. In this context, the chapter examines the Anzacs’ perception of London and the Hut, and how the men might have experienced the ‘Shakespeareanism’ of the Hut and the ‘Englishness’ that was presented to them. The second part of the chapter focuses on one particular moment, Christmas Day, 1916, when a Mummers’ Play was performed at the Hut, complete with a New Zealander soldier as Old Father Christmas. The Mummers’ Play represents the oxymoronic pastoral idyll in central London that the Hut attempted to conjure, cementing its role in constructing that perception of a simple, rural England so much nurtured to inspire commitment from ‘Dominion’ troops. The figure of St George invoked in the conventional version of the play used at the Hut overlaps with recollections of St George in the pre-war SMNT materials right through to his use in wartime propaganda (including, of course, the frequent invocation of Henry V’s speeches, as reimagined by Shakespeare). To take this a little further, the chapter considers the relationship between the ‘Elizabethanism’ and bardolatry in which the Hut is steeped and the movement for the study of folklore and

INTRODUCTION  15

return to a ‘simple’ rustic England perceived to have existed before the Civil War and resurrected as an England worth dying for. Exploring the same chronological moment again, Chapter 4 loops back to view the wartime years of the Shakespeare Hut through a different lens. Rather than focusing on the nationalization of the space, though, this chapter will explore its gendered identity. The first part of the chapter introduces the women volunteers at the Hut and how the New Zealand YMCA sought to present an ‘acceptable’ version of womanhood to their troops within the Hut. The chapter then moves on to its core focus: the significance of the female management of the Hut’s stage. The key context for the Shakespeare Hut’s femaleled performance culture is the struggle for female suffrage before the war, in particular of the Actresses’ Franchise League (AFL). Gertrude Elliott (Lady Forbes-Robertson), a US-born star actress who was president and a founding member of the AFL, managed the Shakespeare Hut’s integral theatre throughout the war. The Hut’s resident director was fellow AFL committee member and director of the pro-suffrage agitprop touring company, the Pioneer Players, Edith Craig. Other highprofile AFL figures supported and took part in the Elliott and Craig productions, such as AFL Plays Department manager, Inez Bensusan, and Craig’s mother, Ellen Terry. Chapter 4 examines this female-led stage at the Shakespeare Hut in the context of Shakespeare’s use in the suffrage debates before the war, as well as the AFL’s project to create a ‘Women’s Theatre’ managed and staffed entirely by women. Scholarship on the AFL has generally agreed that the Woman’s Theatre plan was on hold either throughout or at least for the second half of the war; to date, no work on the AFL has mentioned its core leaders’ full-time management of the Shakespeare Hut theatre from 1916–19.17 This chapter will present the significance of this private theatre, open only to Allied troops, in the wider story of the AFL’s feminist Woman’s Theatre project. In 1919, the last of the Anzac soldiers departed from the Hut, having been staying at the Shakespeare Hut for many

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months after the Armistice. The Shakespeare Hut closed its doors for the last time on its war service. However, this was not the end of its story; for the next four years, it had a new function. Chapter 5 is formed of two distinct parts, one to examine the Hut’s function during its final years and the other to explore the development of a different Shakespearean project for which the Hut would provide the funding. The YMCA agreed, in 1919, to pay the Shakespeare Memorial National Theatre the sum of £3,000 per annum in ground rent to use the Hut as the Indian Students’ Hostel. This was the sum required to found and run a very important new venture in the story of Shakespearean production in Britain as we now know it: the New Shakespeare Company, based at Stratfordupon-Avon. This deal, brokered principally, again, by the indefatigable Israel Gollancz, gave the Hut a stay of execution and it was reborn as what was affectionately known as ‘Little India’,18 an educational and social space which was to see some of India’s most influential writers and speakers regularly visiting and provided a home in London for both male and female Indian students. It was an intellectual, dynamic space, but it lost its theatre. Its focus was now not on performance but on education and debate; its performance space was converted into a lecture hall. Meanwhile in Stratford, paid for by the Hut income, the New Shakespeare Company (NSC) was born and was to become one of the most highly respected in the world, a forerunner of the Royal Shakespeare Company we know today. The second half of this chapter examines the NSC’s foundation; in other words, it explores where Shakespeare went, when he was removed (almost) from the Shakespeare Hut. However, the Shakespeare Hut could not be sustained forever. The land, expensive and rather ill-suited to a theatre, needed to be sold, and the Hut itself was only ever designed to be temporary. In 1924 demolition was completed, and construction began on the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine building, still thriving on that spot today. The sixth, and final, chapter explores how the Shakespeare

INTRODUCTION  17

Hut would come to be forgotten in every narrative where it promised so much to be key: in the stories of Shakespearean performance, of wartime theatre, of New Zealand Anzac experience, of the AFL and the Woman’s Theatre and in the commemoration of Shakespeare, its original purpose. To bring the story right up to today, the book ends with a short reflection on the ways in which the Shakespeare Hut found itself ‘remembered’ and (re)constructed in its centenary – and Shakespeare’s quatercentenary – year, 2016. The celebrations that year, we will find, bore some striking resemblances to their equivalents in 1916. This book seeks to tell the story of the Shakespeare Hut as a building, a space and a symbol; it explores the Hut’s many functions, as a nationalized space, a gendered space, a performance space and as a commemorative monument to Shakespeare. This was a multifunctional and idiosyncratic building, temporary, liminal. Built, both literally and figuratively, at a crossroads, the Shakespeare Hut was poised at a temporary intersection of diverse agendas and at a time of massive social, cultural and political upheaval. It would be reductive to suggest a single theoretical basis for this book’s viewpoint, therefore, on the Hut, though it borrows the notion of heterotopia from Foucault. Throughout the book, a thread, however, emerges: that commemoration is festive and that the Shakespeare Hut was, at least during wartime, a space in which time and space were suspended, spliced, negotiable. At the Shakespeare Hut, it was always a holiday, always showtime, and place itself dissolved, losing wartime London to say ‘Kia Ora’ to New Zealand, watch a Mummers’ Play as if in an English village, hop on a charabanc from the mockTudor Hut straight to the ‘real’ Tudor beams of Stratford’s Birthplace or even walk in from the cold of London’s streets into a warm Indian welcome. It would hardly be helpful to suggest that any one of these functions is of primary significance for further study or that one identity is the one for which it should be most clearly ‘remembered’. Instead, this book seeks to gather the strands together of the contexts that

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THE SHAKESPEARE HUT

produced the Shakespeare Hut and of its unique outputs and achievements. Primarily, this is a book about performance: performing commemoration, performing national identity, performing gender and, of course, performing Shakespeare, at this one moment and in one very particular place, the corner of Keppel and Gower Streets, London WC1.

1 Prologue: The Shakespeare Memorial National Theatre events, 1910–12: Festivity, bardolatry, (re)constructing Shakespeare

The Shakespeare Hut is, this book argues, a useful case study in how Shakespeare was perceived, utilized and performed in the early twentieth century. However, it is also a unique point of intersection at which diverse issues meet: how Shakespeare was performed and ‘remembered’ and the role of Shakespeare in national identity, in gender politics and in how London dealt with memorialization in the mass-loss effected by the First World War. The Hut, however, did not spring up at this intersection in 1916 without precedential attempts at performing the commemoration and collective worship of Shakespeare. This prologue chapter serves to contextualize the story of the Shakespeare Hut as part of

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THE SHAKESPEARE HUT

a specific narrative of the Shakespeare Memorial National Theatre committee’s attempts to package Shakespeare for the nation. London, 1908. After decades of debate, disagreement and disorganization, an uncomfortable alliance was formed. Ever the organizer (and appeaser), Israel Gollancz, professor of literature (Shakespearean and medieval) at King’s College London and leading light in the campaign for a National Theatre and the push to commemorate Shakespeare’s Tercentenary, presided over the merging of two hitherto warring campaigns. The arguments represented what would become modernist rejection of Victorian monumentalism. The situation as it stood in 1908 was this: one group was dedicated to the creation of a National Theatre for Britain, in the vein of others in Europe (not least the Nationaltheater in Munich which had been founded a century earlier) and following the precedent of the Victorian passion for monumentalism. For this faction, the National Theatre might also be dedicated in some way to Shakespeare, the national playwright. The other group, quite separately, wished to commemorate Shakespeare, not only because of the approach of 1916 as a significant date, but also as a statement of Shakespeare’s national cultural status. This group would very much like a beautiful (and expensive) statue or monument dedicated to Shakespeare to be erected in London. The National Theatre people thought this most impractical. The monument people thought the National Theatre was a pipe dream. Israel Gollancz thought the two could combine very nicely indeed. Gollancz, by all accounts and judging from the extensive writings and private papers he left behind, was an uncommonly personable and principled man, attributes which combined with not only an impressive intellect but also an astute and pragmatic approach. We will meet Gollancz many times throughout this book and get to know him as well as we can.1 For now, it is enough to understand that bringing these

PROLOGUE  21

Shakespearean factions together was a feat that required a very impressive set of talents and certainly the best of negotiation skills. But bring them together he did and, in 1908, a new committee, elaborately (and tactfully) named the Shakespeare Memorial National Theatre committee, or SMNT, was inaugurated at a meeting at the Mansion House on 22 June 1908.2 The founding of the SMNT, though, was by no means to signal the end of disagreements among its members on what would be the most appropriate memorial to Shakespeare, nor on the viability, form, governance, location or even repertoire of a new National Theatre. Looking back as we now do, we can wonder at how it could possibly have taken fifty-five years from that meeting in 1908 to arrive at the first National Theatre Company performances, led by Sir Laurence Olivier at the Old Vic in 1963, and a further thirteen years before the National Theatre would exist as a building in its own right. Yet many factors, disagreements, changes in the geographical, social, cultural and architectural landscape of London – and most of all, two world wars – were to preserve the National Theatre for all those years as merely notional. The Shakespeare Hut, though, was to represent the flash of substance, of a real stage, a built substitute for the National Theatre, as early as 1916. Some extraordinary events were held in the committee’s name, events that performed only fragments of Shakespeare’s actual works, presenting elaborate (re)constructions and ‘Shakespeareana’. The most significant of these events are explored in this chapter, starting with the Shakespeare Masque, a purpose-written piece designed to bemoan the lack of the National Theatre, performed in 1910. This slightly lower profile event marked the start of a series of escalating ambitions in the SMNT’s schemes to raise money and engage hearts and minds in their particular branding of Shakespearean homage. The Masque was followed by the ostentatious Shakespeare Costume Ball at the Albert Hall in 1911 and, on an even more enormous scale, the huge Shakespeare’s England exhibition at

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Earl’s Court in 1912. Given the association of Shakespeare’s name and ‘spirit’, these SMNT fundraising events and documents become commemorations of Shakespeare in their own right, a function that is amplified by the eventual failure of the scheme to produce the tangible memorial for which they were ostensibly raising money. All three events tell us a great deal of what ‘Shakespeare’ was to mean for the SMNT and how the construction of Shakespeare’s England represented by the Shakespeare Hut was anticipated by the preceding years. In the context, more broadly, of this book’s exploration of Shakespearean commemoration at this time (and beyond) to be festive in nature and, further, the idea that the Shakespeare Hut functioned as a heterotopic space, the Masque, Ball and exhibition are crucial precursors, similarly linking Shakespearean memorialization to festivity, costuming and carnival, while creating a heterotopic temporal and experiential alternative to the realities of late-Edwardian London. The three events also offer context for some of the core issues to be explored in relation to the Shakespeare Hut’s functions and significance. First, the Edwardian age and the subsequent wartime upheavals created a moment of crisis between a spectacular Victorian Shakespeare and new ideas of performance, text and meaning in what were then rather avant-garde minimalist approaches to Shakespearean performance. Second, these events foreshadow the major cultural intersection on which the Hut stood: issues of Shakespeare and race, empire and national identity and the question of women’s suffrage. Finally, but most clearly, these events reveal the preoccupation with material construction – and idea of reconstruction – that was central to the SMNT project both in its awkward marriage of Shakespeare Memorial campaign with National Theatre campaign and in its activities during the 1910s. This manifests a more pervading agenda of (re)constructing Shakespeare for each new generation, which often has less to do with performance approaches and more to do with how we ‘remember’ him in commemorations, artefacts and buildings.

PROLOGUE  23

I.  The Shakespeare Masque, 1910 (London and Kent, followed by amateur regional tour) 1 July 1910. The heavens have just opened over Regent’s Park. Stars of the stage and society ladies in Shakespearean costumes ‘scamper for shelter’3 while a stoic Falstaff attempts to deliver his few lines over the roar of rain. This is the sad outcome of an ambitious attempt to raise awareness of the campaign for a Shakespeare Memorial National Theatre by means of a curious little play, A Masque: Setting forth the true honouring of our rare and precious poet William Shakespeare. The Masque, a short piece inspired by (but scarcely faithful to) early modern court masques, was written for the SMNT by stalwart campaigner for a National Theatre Edith Balfour Lyttelton and reviewed as an ‘adroit combination of earnest pleading for a Shakespeare Theatre with neat and often amusing opportunities for Shakespeare’s leading characters to appear and quote Shakespeare to her purpose’.4 Harnessing Shakespeare’s reputation and most popular characters rather than actually performing the plays was characteristic of virtually all the SMNT attempts to raise money and support for their scheme. While their rhetoric was often embellished with remarks on the greatness of the drama, more often the focus was on the national shame in which everyone partook: that there was neither a National Theatre (when others were springing up across Europe) nor monument to Shakespeare. The Masque takes the form of a conversation between Fame, Tragedy, Comedy and a Poet, joined by characters from Shakespeare’s plays and actors of the past, such as Garrick and Siddons. The characters speak only their own lines, fragmented and reconstructed into a discussion of the memorialization (or lack of it) of their creator. It was not published per se, but existed in a pamphlet, unaccredited to a publisher or even the author, Edith Lyttelton, in its three performances, from 30 June to 2 July 1910, the first two at Regent’s Park and the final

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THE SHAKESPEARE HUT

performance at Knole House in Kent. The Masque begins with a most verbose prologue, in mock-antique style: You are to imagine this sylvan glade the abode of the great Goddess of Fame. A messenger from the earth appears; he is called the Poet, for only the thought of a poet could enter these realms. He has found no fitting monument to Shakespeare in the land, and comes hither in all haste to ask the Goddess for her help. The August Dame meets him, and when she learns the truth, straightway calls for Tragedy and Comedy, and bids them summon up the creatures of Shakespeare’s genius, to confer with them and with the Poet, on this matter.5 The stage is thus set for a conversation between Shakespeare’s characters and these muses, which only gets more elaborate as it continues. It is difficult to imagine that this Masque was not a little tongue-in-cheek, given its florid and extravagant style, though perhaps this is wishful thinking. The whole short play moves between decontextualized Shakespearean quotations and this pseudo early modern (cum classical) style. The Masque insists, as did all of the SMNT campaigning, that Shakespeare’s lack of a memorial is inconceivable and a source of national shame. When Tragedy suggests to Fame that Shakespeare’s characters be summoned to advise, Fame assumes they must be found in some memorial building: fame Call them hither from the marble palace England hath surely builded for their home. poet No home is theirs, and no abiding place, Where his great characters, from age to age, Can live, and speak, and charm each age anew.6 There are two obvious problems with this ‘party line’ taken here and throughout the SMNT’s early campaigns: the Stratford theatre and the less obvious problem of Shakespeare worship that ignores the actual texts themselves. First, there is a practical and deliberate omission: they appear publicly

PROLOGUE  25

to ignore the existence of the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon, erected in 1879 (destroyed by fire in 1926 and replaced by what is now known as the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in 1932). The theatre at Stratford was, of course, specifically named as a ‘Memorial’ and erected in Shakespeare’s birthplace town, yet, as the Masque extract above exemplifies, it was largely ignored in the SMNT’s public discourse. The Masque hammers this message home many times. A particularly brazen example seems to deny the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre entirely: fame My Shakespeare needs no monument of stone. His mind speaks still, his creatures live and move. poet True, my august lady, his creatures live, yet for the most part they lie unseen, unheard. They sleep and are unknown, for they have no stage on which to show forth their pageant of life. There should be built a noble Playhouse in the name of the master, where the shadows might dwell, and speak his honeyed words to the listening world. fame Does no such stage exist within the realm? poet None. From time to time some player, who loves the master better than his purse, gives breath to these his children.7 True, the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre was not a National Theatre; it was not, in any case, run along those lines. However, this is neither here nor there in the claims regularly made by the SMNT and its representatives that England had, to its shame, erected no monument or theatre memorial to Shakespeare. Here, the clear statement is that Shakespeare’s characters have ‘no stage’ and no ‘noble playhouse’. The exaggerated pessimism at Shakespeare’s neglect, the claim that only ‘from time to time’ is Shakespeare’s work performed, rather ignores the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre’s endeavours at Stratford and seems only to be considering London rather than the nation as a whole.

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The SMNT discourse is always national, as exemplified in the Masque’s prologue, in which the ‘Poet’ ‘f[inds] no fitting monument to Shakespeare in the land’.8 While it is true that London lacked both a National Theatre and any principal monument to Shakespeare, the landscape of London seems to have become, for the SMNT, metonymical for England. It is no surprise, then, that when Israel Gollancz finally found a way to unite London and Stratford in creating the New Shakespeare Company in 1919, the Shakespeareans of Stratford were rather reticent, to say the least, as Chapter 5 will show. Gordon McMullan argues that it was ‘a key achievement of Gollancz … to effect a shift in the geography of Shakespearean commemoration away from rural Stratford-upon-Avon and towards cosmopolitan London’.9 Indeed, Gollancz himself, too, used the word ‘cosmopolitan’10 as a core positive feature of the capital’s culture. McMullan argues convincingly that the city’s cultural diversity was a very different environment in which to ‘remember’ Shakespeare than the rural idyll of Stratford.11 To an extent, Gollancz also achieved a new collaborative relationship between Stratford and London, as well as bringing Stratford to London via the Shakespeare Hut’s mock-Tudor beams. As Chapter 5 of this book will explore, it was Gollancz that brokered the difficult deal to found the New Shakespeare Company together and to base it in Stratford. Regardless of what was to come, however, it would appear from all SMNT public discourse of the pre-war years that Stratford was erased from the memorialization of Shakespeare, despite, as McMullan also notes, being the site on which bardolatry had well and truly begun and continued since Garrick’s Jubilee of 1769.12 Lynne Walhout Hinojosa similarly identifies the competition between London and Stratford for ownership of Shakespeare, characterizing it as an imperial project: While part of London’s inspiration in the 1900s and 1910s for raising awareness of Shakespeare’s London affiliations was its competition with Stratford, most Shakespeare-related

PROLOGUE  27

activity at this time had England and the British Empire as a whole in mind. Restoring Shakespeare to London would make the imperial, political, and economic center of the Empire also the culture centre. It would unite the Englishspeaking world in looking to London as home of the world’s greatest cultural and spiritual hero.13 The Shakespeare Hut itself did not identify itself as part of London, arguably, as much as it did part of a ‘Merrie Old England’ exemplified by Stratford’s surviving Tudor architecture and Shakespeare tourist trade. Indeed, as Chapter 3 will explore, the Hut treated its Anzac users to ‘traditional’ English pastimes such as a Mummers’ Play and even took regular sightseeing parties of soldiers up to Stratford.14 While, in 1916, the commemorations of the Tercentenary would be more noticeable in Stratford, away from feared Zeppelin raids and the coalface of wartime privation, in London the Hut itself was more a reconstructed Stratford than it was representative, for the Anzacs, of anything like the London outside its walls. Gollancz’s Book of Homage to Shakespeare, the only other solid object to emerge as a Tercentenary memorial, belonged to the world, or at least that was Gollancz’s stated intention, and not to London in any way. Even the location of its publisher, Oxford University Press, situated the book in some sense literally closer to Stratford than to the capital. The SMNT’s historic denial, then, of Stratford succeeded only in alienating Stratford practitioners and scholars but they never successfully relocated the ‘Shakespeare Trade’ to London, nor did they truly threaten what Barbara Hodgdon terms ‘Stratford’s Empire of Shakespeare’.15 However, returning to the exchange between Fame and the Poet, there is a second, rather more abstract, problem with the Masque’s approach to the (claimed) lack of memorial to Shakespeare, beyond its denial of Stratford’s role. That is, it represents a wider tendency in the SMNT discourse: erasing Shakespeare’s own rejection of memorial beyond the text. In his ‘verse touting the First Folio’ as Hodgdon describes it,16

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Jonson famously claims Shakespeare’s immortality to be ‘not of an age, but of all time’.17 These words are represented in every way in the SMNT’s preoccupation, in most of their propaganda, with Shakespeare’s immortality, superlativeness and timeless superiority. Yet Jonson’s earlier lines are conveniently (as usual) ignored: Thou art a monument, without a tomb And art alive still, while thy book doth live And we have wits to read, or praise to give. The Folio was, then, a monument to Shakespeare in itself. As Coppélia Khan and Clara Calvo put it, ‘The mode of memorialisation [Folio editors Heminge and Condell] chose evokes Shakespeare not as a friend but rather as an author: they kept the man alive by preserving his writings.’18 Jonson’s poem also enhanced the commercial venture by invoking the fairly recent death of its author, and his posthumous immortality, as a selling point. Shakespeare’s sonnets, too, express a confidence in the monumental status of words and of his own textual posterity. This was not, of course, unique to Shakespeare; many poets of the era similarly expressed ideas of the timelessness of the text. However, Shakespeare, it must be acknowledged, showed particular confidence in the preservation of his words: ‘Not marble, nor the gilded monuments / Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme’ (Sonnet 55 l.1–2) or, ‘When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st, / So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see, / So long lives this, and this gives life to thee’ (Sonnet 18 l.12–14). These are hardly obscurities in Shakespeare’s work. Some of the most quoted of Shakespeare’s sonnets make clear the idea of text as the most reliable of monuments, as possessing the greatest longevity; in fact, they broadly disparage the monumental memorial as transient by comparison. Oddly, the idea of Shakespeare’s texts as monumental crops up often in the SMNT discourse, such as in Lord Lytton’s article for the Souvenir to the Shakespeare Ball:

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‘What good can you do Shakespeare,’ say these critics, ‘by erecting a monument to his memory? Are not his own works a sufficient memorial?’ Such criticism shows a misunderstanding of the main purpose. … It is undertaken not in the interests of Shakespeare, but in the interests of his countrymen, and the students and admirers of his works. People do not build cathedrals and churches to the majesty of God, but as an expression of their own religious fervour. … Where mankind is stirred by feelings of veneration it needs some method of giving outward expression to those feelings.19 Here, as can frequently be found in the SMNT’s rhetoric before the war, there is an elision of Shakespearean devotion and true faith, an un-humorous bardolatry that does not see the cynicism that Shaw originally expressed in coining the word. Bardolatry itself, even before it had a name, had long become what Michael Dobson calls ‘the authorcult of Shakespeare’, functioning as a ‘national religion’.20 Homage must be, monumentally, paid to Shakespeare as a matter of humanity and patriotic duty. In these instances, the idea of Shakespeare as needing no memorial – or of his texts standing as memorials in themselves or even quoting from such texts, as I have done here, to show Shakespeare’s own exploration of text as monument – is always countered by a justification for building a monument anyway. This is exemplified, of course, in the Masque, too. Fame’s comment, ‘My Shakespeare needs no monument of stone. / His mind speaks still, his creatures live and move’, is addressed by the Poet, ‘True, my august lady, his creatures live, yet for the most part they lie unseen, unheard’ because they do not have a theatre (except that they do, in Stratford). Elsewhere in relation to the SMNT enterprise, the same pattern emerges of pre-empting the clear counterargument to either stone monument or monumental theatre: that it is simply unnecessary to monumentalize Shakespeare, who is himself a monolith.

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However, the early-seventeenth-century notion of text as memorial in itself, its treatment of words as in some sense monumental, would, perhaps ironically, have been best honoured by one of Gollancz’s later and least popular ideas (as well, of course, as his Book of Homage to Shakespeare, a memorial volume produced in 1916 and explored in more detail later).21 Gollancz mooted the idea of making the first true national Shakespeare company, the New Shakespeare Company (founded in 1919, to which I will return in Chapter  5) a memorial and National Theatre in itself. His argument was exactly that the plays themselves are a memorial to Shakespeare and it is the performance of them and not the space in which they are performed that is the true memorial to Shakespeare. His idealism on this point was immediately and roundly rejected by the SMNT and its collaborators as, at best, inappropriate and, at worst, nonsensical.22 Shakespeare’s texts and his plays in performance were, then, not to be seen as memorials in themselves, as Shakespeare and Jonson saw them; no, there must be a building. There simply must be marble and gilded monuments. The Victorian obsession with monument and memorial had bled into the Edwardian age. It bore, in fact, little relation to how text and performance was viewed in Shakespeare’s own time, yet that age was frequently invoked as the new ‘golden age’ of English achievement and social order – but I shall return to this a little later. For now, it is enough to contemplate the extreme selectivity of the bardolatry exhibited by the movement to memorialize Shakespeare in the early twentieth century and which became inextricable from the National Theatre movement at that time. This obsession with ‘solid objects’23 was to be problematized by the war (as I shall explore in more detail in the next chapter) and ultimately, by time of the Shakespeare Hut’s later years, deconstructed and rejected by burgeoning modernism. The bardolatry of the Masque was not only performed in London in the pouring rain, but it also appeared both as an attempt to drum up national support for the SMNT cause

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and, contrastingly, as a high society event. On 2 July 1910, the Masque finished its short initial run (also in the pouring rain) with a performances at Knole House, Kent, family home of Vita Sackville-West, who was a close friend of Edith Craig and Ellen Terry, as well as in the social circle of many central SMNT supporters. An eighteen-year-old Vita played Portia in the Masque, cross-dressed as the ‘doctor’. Vita was to transgress gendered dress and archetypal behaviours at various times in her life. Figure 1.1 shows her at the Shakespeare Ball in 1911, the subject of the next section, dressed entirely incongruously compared with the other fine ladies (see for example Figure 1.2) on the occasion, in androgynous costume. Indeed, her fluid gender identity was to be the inspiration for Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, the original manuscript of which is still held

FIGURE 1.1 Vita Sackville-West at the Shakespeare Ball, 1911. The Hon. Miss Victoria Sackville-West (portrait marked Speight, attributed to Richard Neville Speight) in Cornwallis West (1911), plate facing p. 44.

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FIGURE 1.2 The Duchess of Wellington’s Quadrille Party (A Midsummer Night’s Dream). Group taken at Apsley House, photo marked Mendelssohn, attributed to Hayman Seleg Mendelssohn, in Souvenir, facing p. 14.

at Knole, with the inscription ‘Vita from Virginia’ in Woolf’s hand.24 Vita’s costume for her part was none other than Ellen Terry’s own famous Portia costume, the red doctor’s gown and hat.25 This was among Terry’s most iconic parts and costumes, worn to deliver the ‘quality of mercy’ speech that became one of her most famous star turns and which she reprised at the Shakespeare Hut in 1917.26 The costume represents Portia’s cross-dressing, which differs in function fundamentally from Shakespeare’s other most well-loved cross-dressed female characters, Viola and Rosalind. Their situations present their male attire as protection for these exiled or displaced women; this cross-dressing functions in the drama as source of comedic misunderstandings, innuendos and mishaps. Portia, by contrast, dons her doctor’s attire in order to occupy the male privilege as public speaker, as expert and adjudicator (4.1). Despite introducing her scheme to Nerissa as one in which she shall become merely a ‘bragging youth’ (3.4.71), Portia in fact takes charge of the legal proceedings. Ellen Terry publicly stated that she saw her Portia as a symbol of reform and in

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particular as representing the cause of women’s suffrage27 (to which I will return in the next chapter). A key argument in the suffrage debate was the fact that women had little choice in the creation and upholding of laws which directly affected them. Portia’s ‘Doctor’ represents a female interjection in the male sphere of legal proceedings, which lent itself extremely well to the suffragist cause. The Masque also starred some leading suffragists, such as Ellen Terry herself and Lillah McCarthy, and, although Mrs Cornwallis West aka Lady Randolph Churchill took part, it was not, like the events of 1911 and 1912, managed by her personally. The influence of Lady Churchill and the SMNT Ladies Committee, which was to upscale the events both in ambition and cost, was yet to be felt. A different kind of female influence was here: a play written by a woman and starring many outspoken feminists foreshadows the female-led stage of the Shakespeare Hut, to be explored in more detail in Chapter  4. Vita’s teenaged Shakespearean cross-dressing – or semi-cross-dressing as Portia-as-Doctor – particularly anticipates the teenaged girl, Fabia Drake, as Henry V that at least three times trod the Hut’s stage to mark his birthday celebration at the Shakespeare Hut. The Masque, originally conceived for the Regent’s Park and Knole performances, was granted a short second life in a small tour later in 1910. As part of a multiple bill including a new short play by George Bernard Shaw, The Dark Lady of the Sonnets, the tour took in various regional theatres in the north of England, in an attempt to drum up support for the SMNT scheme from further afield. The tour used amateur actors, not the stars of the Regent’s Park and Knole events, but it was met with reasonably positive reviews. Shaw’s play was a less shameless piece of propaganda than the Masque, but it came around to the same point and purpose: to call for support for a National Theatre for the country. After a general tussle between Shakespeare, the Dark Lady and Queen Elizabeth in disguise, Shakespeare eventually comes to his point and asks the Queen for a National Theatre. For some of the performances,

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Shaw also wrote a preface in the form of a curious short story, ‘A Dressing Room Secret’, which was then published as part of the Souvenir of the Shakespeare Ball the following year. This story sends up the whole debate on Shakespeare as a monument by imagining a bust of Shakespeare that begins chatting away to actors in the dressing room, before sneezing himself to pieces: ‘A fearful explosion followed. Then the bust laying fragments on the floor. It never spoke again.’28 Despite the eventual touring version stretching its ‘moment’ a little longer, the Masque of Shakespeare was festive, even borrowing a festive, yet elite, mode of early modern drama, the court masque and setting itself in a magical other world. The 2  July 1910 performance at Knole formed part of a ‘Shakespeare Costume Ball’ at the great house, anticipating the enormous Shakespeare Ball at the Albert Hall the following year. Costuming and ‘role playing’ a Shakespearean ideal featured in all three events of the SMNT’s pre-war years. A utopian idea of some Elizabethan ‘Golden Age’ more generally was distilled in a bardolatry that presented Shakespeare as the greatest Englishman as well as the greatest of poets. Buying a ticket to these so-called fundraising events was buying into the fantasy, the festive moment created around ‘remembering’ Shakespeare and, particularly in the case of the Ball and exhibition, literally buying entrance into a Shakespearean heterotopia. The Shakespeare Hut would adapt this to an austere, wartime purpose but retain elements of the heterotopic and festive practices of the preceding years to very different ends.

II.  The Shakespeare Ball 20 June 1911. Ticker tape printed with quotations from Shakespeare flutters down into the Albert Hall auditorium, which has been transformed into a ‘Florentine garden’, filled with some 4,000 costumed revellers.29 The Shakespeare Ball was organized by leading light of the SMNT Ladies Committee Mrs Cornwallis West (Lady Randolph Churchill)30 and designed

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by the extraordinarily successful architect (and set designer) Edwin Lutyens. It was an extravaganza of bardolatry, merged with a celebration of the Coronation of King George V as an accompanying affirmation of English society culture and British imperial power. Ticket prices started at a hefty thirty shillings each,31 which would work out at an equivalent of roughly £140–150 in today’s money, so no mean amount. In addition to this basic cost were the availability of boxes and other luxuries, ‘many visiting millionaires … had purchased boxes at prices approaching 200 guineas’,32 making this very much a night out for the upper echelons of society rather than being in any way accessible for the average Londoner at the time. Designed, supposedly, as a fundraiser for the SMNT, the Ball brought in, or so claimed the organizers, £10,000 for the cause.33 However, the opulent costumes, jewels and paraphernalia displayed by its attendees makes something of a mockery of its fundraising purpose. In fact, considering all those ‘visiting millionaires’ and their 200 guinea boxes and the fact that there were 4,000, mostly very wealthy, revellers – ‘it would be impossible to reckon up the sum of money represented by the costumes collectively’34– £10,000 is actually a rather meagre profit. The Ball was not only a social event in which the costumes brought the theme to the venue. The auditorium of the Albert Hall was, by all accounts, ‘transformed out of recognition’35 into an Italian-style garden setting by the idiosyncratic star architect, Lutyens, who was already in high demand to build the homes of all the most fashionable and wealthy of Edwardian high society and had also, indeed, much experience in theatre design – designing, for example, the sets for J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan.36 Lutyens was also widely known for his elaborate, folly-like designs, which spared no expense. The Shakespeare Ball was the first of his designs for the SMNT, to be followed by the enormous Shakespeare’s England exhibition (1912), the subject of the next section in this chapter. However, beyond this, he also designed what was supposed to be the National Theatre to be erected on the Bloomsbury site that became instead,

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the site of the Shakespeare Hut. Lutyens, of course, did not design the Shakespeare Hut; the architectural design of what was a glorified YMCA prefab Hut would certainly have been beneath his notice. However, his Shakespearean ‘reconstructions’ represented in both the Ball and the exhibition must have influenced the ‘Tudor’ style of the Hut and, conversely, reflected the nostalgic, material focus of the SMNT’s Shakespeare project. Shakespeare could be ‘remembered’ only by material (re)construction of an imagined Elizabethan world, presented always as a golden age of English culture and political domination. Approaching this extraordinary affair, it is difficult to extrapolate the event itself on 20 June 1911 distinctly from the commemorative volume that accompanied it. The Souvenir of the Shakespeare Ball was an enormous vellum-covered book; in this material sense, at least, it anticipated Gollancz’s Book of Homage to Shakespeare to come in 1916.37 This impressive tome is filled with photographic and illustrative plates and pieces of writing from a collection of eminent contributors, including the likes of G. K. Chesterton, Gollancz himself and George Bernard Shaw, whose contribution was the aforementioned short story, ‘A Dressing Room Secret’. The Souvenir is as extravagant and opulent as the Ball itself; adorned with colour plates, it enjoys expensive two-colour printing even for the texts and measures an enormous size (a foot by nearly a foot and half). This book was as unobtainable for the average citizen’s budget as the Ball itself. It was also a massive financial failure. It made ‘but a poor showing’, according to a despondent letter from its publisher, Frederick Warne to George Heyer (of the SMNT committee); ‘we are naturally much disappointed at the poor result’.38 Nevertheless, the Souvenir is a rich resource via which to explore how the SMNT presented Shakespeare and their campaign to commemorate or, perhaps more accurately, reframe his reputation for the new twentieth century. Once again, it was far too expensive to be an efficient moneymaker; but while it was less than lucrative for the SMNT, it provides a wealth of interest for the belated reader. The book,

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in keeping with the perpetual misjudgement of the society elite largely steering the SMNT, was unaffordable, extravagant and financially unsuccessful. Only the earnest wartime cause of the Shakespeare Hut was to save the SMNT from a reputation, fed by the extravagance of the Ball and its Souvenir, of elitism, wasting of funds and procrastination that was started by the events of the 1910s. The Ball constructed an idea of Shakespeare associated with wealth, elitism and aesthetic beauty. Guests seemed to have vied for the most elaborate, impressive – and expensive – costumes, but there is no hint of irony in the extravagance displayed at what purported to be a fundraising event. Journalist H. Hamilton Fife, writing in the Ball’s Souvenir volume, describes the spectacle with shameless admiration for the affluence on display, both in the event’s design and particularly in the costumes of the Ball goers: Real satins and ermines, real silks and brocades, real gold and silver embroideries, real lace of the finest periods, were cunningly employed to set off the beauty of the fairest women in England. They made the Albert Hall glow with rich colour; they lent the scene a beauty which defies description. And among the sheen of wonderful stuffs there was the sparkle of jewels, real jewels, priceless heirlooms, glittering in the hair of the fair possessor, rising and falling on their bosoms, clasping them with glittering girdles, or flashing from Elizabethan ‘stomachers’ of a value beyond belief.39 This effusive description characterizes the total lack of tact displayed in the SMNT’s so-called fundraising activities. While there is nothing unusual about social elites staging wildly extravagant charity events, for this practice to be paired with the SMNT’s rhetoric of creating a National Theatre for all in the country and with the continued apparent lack of funds in the SMNT coffers to bring this to realization was just deemed inappropriate. The display of wealth at the Shakespeare Ball only served to alienate the public from the cause, not bring them on board. Meanwhile, the feminine spectacle of the

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Ball, organized by the SMNT Ladies’ Committee and here highlighted with the description of ‘the fairest women in England’, represented only women of rank and means. Hamilton Fife’s article also invokes a key preoccupation shared by not only the Masque, the Ball and the Shakespeare’s England exhibition but also the Shakespeare Hut to come – constructing ‘authenticity’: For splendour, for beauty, for perfection of harmonious colouring, for brilliance of general effect, nothing to compare with it has been seen in our time. For a few all-toobrief hours the magnificence of Tudor England was revived. Here were no tawdry stage costumes, no mere imitations of reality. Here was the real thing.40 All the events examined here were performances of commemoration and constructions of ‘Shakespeare’. All three claimed authenticity to ‘Shakespeare’s England’: the inaccessible intellectual and social elitism of recreating a court masque was merged with festive costuming and role play when the Masque was taken to the great Knole House and merged with a costume ball attended by the great and the good. The 4,000-strong attendance of the Shakespeare Ball the following year was an enormous, mass act of festive costuming, yet denial of artifice, as Hamilton Fife’s account exemplifies. The Shakespeare’s England exhibition the following year would be the pinnacle of this craze for reconstructing a Shakespearean ‘Golden Age’. On that occasion, Earl’s Court would be ‘transformed’ to a past time, constructing a sanitized version of ‘Shakespeare’s England’, representing the pomp and glory of the joust, the intellectual achievements of Shakespeare’s drama and all the fun of an Edwardian fair to boot. The immense irony of Hamilton Fife’s representation of the Ball, ‘Here were no tawdry stage costumes, no mere imitations of reality. Here was the real thing,’ in what was supposed to be a celebration of Shakespeare’s drama is amusingly ironic. However, it is also indicative of the SMNT’s paradoxical drive to deliver

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‘authentic’ Shakespeare while shaping the man and the texts to specific, imperial values. Moreover, the battle for ‘authentic’ Shakespeare in the theatre was raging in parallel to the SMNT campaign. The Edwardian theatre was at the crossroads, choosing between the spectacles of the late Victorian Age and the minimal production values of the avant-garde, such as Edward Gordon Craig and the ‘original practices’ exponent William Poel. This battle was not simply aesthetic; it was a battle to claim authenticity. G. K. Chesterton explains the conflict in the Ball’s Souvenir book, with the caveat that ‘they both, in my very mild opinion, suffer from the same fault – the fault of taking the whole question too seriously. There was more of the clown, more of the buffoon in Shakespeare than either of these artistic theories will admit.’41 Chesterton goes on to describe the two opposing schools of thought, usually at the time represented in the often-bitter differences between Herbert Tree and William Poel, on polar opposite sides of the debate: The first school … from its own point of view claims to give the scene as Shakespeare imagined it. The second (also from its own point of view) professes only to give the scene as Shakespeare expected to see it. The first seeks to have scenery in which the jocund day does actually manage (or make an attempt) to stand tip-toe on the misty mountain tops. The second suggests that it would be vastly better to have a quiet back-cloth that would really permit those lines to be listened to as the real evening’s entertainment.42 Chesterton’s humorous take on the battle for Shakespearean authenticity concludes that the ‘pedantry’ of trying to estimate the historical reality of characters that did not exist ‘dies … on the real appearance of learning’. His argument, then, is that the first school fails when it ‘tries to find out what was the contemporary pattern of dagger which Macbeth saw when it wasn’t there. It seeks to be certain what exact cut of beard Hamlet thought that an imaginary enemy might hypothetically tweak.’43 Chesterton sends up the very discourse of authenticity

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that is un-ironically entered into elsewhere in the volume and which would be core to the Shakespeare’s England exhibition the following year. Chesterton situates what he presents as a nonsense of pseudo-accuracy as ‘engulfed by the British Museum’, the Hut’s proximity to which would be used as a key selling point of its value in 1916, as contemporary fliers and posters for the Hut show. His piece is entitled ‘The Shakespeare Ball, by one who was not there’ and perhaps this is why he fails to see that the Ball is not a joyful rejection of spectacular Shakespeare ‘pedantry’ but seems conversely to have been an extreme manifestation of it – or perhaps its death throes. The Shakespeare exhibition would, in 1912, take the spectacular set-making to its final extreme, ‘reconstructing’ a Globe Theatre that Poel rejected as totally inaccurate. The four hard years of wartime austerity that would begin in 1914, however, would put the nail in the coffin of the ostentatious spectacular school of Shakespearean production and scorch the earth in preparation for minimalist production practices. The Shakespeare Hut opened its doors in the middle of the conflict, providing an austere wartime stage on which there was no room for spectacle or pedantry. The Ball presented a rather conservative idea of Shakespearean authenticity but was certainly not a spectacle for its own sake. Doubling as a Coronation event, it placed Shakespeare as the exemplar of Englishness, ‘through whom the glory of the English name gains its greatest lustre’.44 Shakespeare is positioned at the head of a microcosmic British Empire, with hundreds of dignitaries from the ‘Dominions’ in attendance to celebrate the great English poet alongside the great and the good of English high society of the time: There were Indian princes, maharajahs and sultans – gorgeous representatives of all the civilisations in the world. The self-governing Dominions of the Empire were represented by their Prime Ministers and leading statesmen. … There were also princes from Persia, China, Egypt, Japan, Turkey, Siam, and Montenegro.45

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The ticket prices kept the event exclusive and unattainable for most but established an opportunity to reaffirm British imperial culture via a show of celebration and unity at the highest levels during the Coronation year. Attire at the Ball also included expressions of imperial obliviousness to racial identity; the elaborate costumes shown off, for instance, in the Duchess of Wellington’s Quadrille Party feature a range of national parodies (Figure 1.2), taken with the backdrop of the interior of Apsley House, popularly known as ‘Number One, London’. Shakespeare, as we will see continue into the conception and activities of the Shakespeare Hut, was used as a symbol of empire. Yet the Hut would challenge the exclusivity and detachedness of the Ball and its era of ostentatious self-celebration, to be replaced by a very different, wartime view of patriotism and even imperialism. Before the Hut, though, the idea of the ‘civilizations’ of the world represented in the Ball would be starkly contrasted, more darkly, in the SMNT’s attempt at a more populist event, Shakespeare’s England exhibition, the following year, within which the Igorot people of the Philippines were displayed in a ‘village’ to be gazed upon as a human zoo, to which I shall return later. In every imperial impulse and piece of rhetoric bandied by the SMNT’s campaign, Shakespeare and England become blurred; England’s political empire elides Shakespeare’s cultural empire until the two are almost impossible to extrapolate. As Hinojosa has succinctly identified, the whole idea of the National Theatre was infused with cultural nationalism: First, any rebirth or renascence of the drama should be of national concern, not only for the sake of reputation but also in terms of national (and for some racial) health and solidarity. Second, the Elizabethan Age is elevated against modernity as the model period of national culture to which the present should typologically and allegorically return. And third, Shakespeare is the ultimate English dramatist and the highest form of literary drama, the ideal type

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whose restoration as antitype in the present would inspire intelligent and right action.46 Indeed, Gollancz’s lengthy ‘Epilogue’ to the Ball Souvenir, appears to exemplify a rather naïve cultural imperialism, where Shakespeare and England are interchangeable. However, on closer examination, his words exemplify his contradictory ideas of idyllic world harmony versus a perceived public need for some reassurance of enduring imperial power. He writes: The Shakespeare Memorial, primarily the tribute of his fellow-Englishmen, will surely prove to be, as was foretold when first devised, a ‘world tribute’ to his genius. The Shakespeare Ball, graced by the stately presence of the world’s regality, by the noblest and fairest of English kin ‘beyond the seas’, rightly symbolized the universal homage to Shakespeare, evinced the true inwardness of the movement furthered by it, and foreshadowed, it is hoped, Shakespeare’s Tercentenary Coronation, when those who have worked will see the consummation of their efforts in the foundation of a Shakespeare Memorial Theatre, to serve the purposes of a great National Theatre, and to advance the interests of drama nationally, imperially, and internationally.47 Gollancz’s discourse hardly threatens the imperial status quo here, yet his efforts to present all the Shakespearean hoopla of the 1910s – and, he thought, to come later in the decade – as a ‘world tribute’ can be read in various ways. Anticipatory echoes of his 1916 Book of Homage are certainly clear. Opinions, over the years, have been surprisingly few on Gollancz’s influence at this time but have tended to present him as an imperialist, conservative voice.48 Coppélia Kahn, referring to the Homage, argues its ‘very purpose is to assert the continuity of a single national identity, “England,” from the medieval past to the imperial present, by invoking Shakespeare’;49 this can easily be applied back to the Ball and its Souvenir. Yet, while,

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in the Homage, ‘the empire writes back’,50 in many of the contributions, questioning and unpicking imperial power from within the volume, the Souvenir (and the exhibition to follow in 1912) offer no such dialogic opportunity. These events and the accompanying book fix that ‘single … “England”’, defined by and united, both culturally and racially, under Shakespeare, with emphatic and unanswered clarity. There is no voice from ‘beyond the seas’ in the Souvenir. Yet, as Gordon McMullan has argued, as SMNT Honorary Secretary, Israel Gollancz himself, while often taking the strategic lead in the SMNT, does not seem exactly to have shared the nationalist, imperial values presented by the high society events and fundraising of the SMNT more generally. ‘Gollancz’s impact’, writes McMullan, ‘was more progressive and culturally complex than has been recognised.’51 For all his apparently imperial discourse, Gollancz’s words stray into an ‘international’ or even global approach, using very often words such as ‘world’ rather than, or at least in addition to, ‘empire’ in his statements on the SMNT scheme. ‘Transcending all divisions of race, nationality, and speech, so Shakespeare himself,’ he writes ‘links together all peoples of the world as the world-poet.’52 McMullan’s argument on Gollancz’s role in the beginning of what we now understand as ‘global’ Shakespeare, too, is convincing, even when we come face-to-face with the epilogue’s ostensible language of imperial celebration. In a climate of Coronation fever (harnessed in Gollancz’s anticipation of Shakespeare’s ‘Tercentenary Coronation’) that reasserted English imperial power, Gollancz’s use of the language of inclusive internationalism, while far more oblique than we twenty-first-century readers would like to see, distances him from a standard contemporary discourse of English racial supremacy. He celebrates the Coronation as a time of reasserting empire, it would seem, yet his language creates a slightly different message. While he uses the common rhetoric of Shakespeare as ‘the spirit of England at its best’, there is also a sense, conveyed throughout the statement, of Shakespeare as the source of national pride but not a reigning monarch

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over other cultures. Rather, Gollancz presents Shakespeare as a unifying voice, lauding London as becoming ‘a world-city, cosmopolitan in the best sense of the word, harmonizing all races and nationalities’, which sounds wonderful, until he adds that they are united in ‘reverent acclaim of Britain’s “Royal throne of kings – this sceptered isle, this earth of majesty”’, which sets him back again. He then powers forward once more into inclusivity, ‘transcending all divisions of race, nationality and speech, so Shakespeare himself, – even in a more potent way – links together all peoples of the world’, before setting himself back on the course of cultural imperialism ‘through whom speaks the spirit of England at its best, and through whom the glory of the English name gains its greatest lustre’. Gollancz’s somewhat unusually inclusive language – ‘transcending … race’, ‘harmonizing all races’ – is interspersed within the bluster of imperialist rhetoric characteristic of an Edwardian England in a constant state of anxiety at losing its imperial grip. For Israel Gollancz, the true empire is Shakespeare’s. His ‘Coronation’ will come, Gollancz suggests, in 1916 and it will unite the world. Ultimately, Gollancz’s imperialism is idealistic, a Shakespearean utopia that sidesteps the unpalatable brutality of the colonial project. Israel Gollancz has the duty of closing the Souvenir with the end of his ‘Epilogue’, and thus having the ‘last word’ on the Shakespeare Ball: ‘Cry – God for England! Shakespeare! And King George!’. The words he chooses are unequivocal, yet more evidence of the elision of Shakespeare with England and a call to reaffirmation of English national and imperial power and pride via the SMNT scheme. The next year would bring a manifestation of this agenda in the construction of ‘Shakespeare’s England’ in early-twentieth-century London. We will leave the Ball now then, with the Lady Churchill’s message to us, the belated reader of the Ball Souvenir: When future generations, in turning the pages of this book, feel that sense of melancholy which so often besets the mind when recalling vanished glories, let us hope they will be able

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to say that, although the Ball is a phantasy of the past, and the beautiful women and gallant men who participated in it – shadows all – its splendid memories are fitly enshrined in the Monument to England’s greatest poet – the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre.53 Its memories, though, were lost. By the time Olivier led the first National Theatre productions at the Old Vic in 1963, or the postmodern minimalism of the National Theatre building took shape on the bank of the Thames in 1976, no one could have associated it with the pageant of the Masque, the spectacle of the Ball or an exhibition in 1912 that now can form no part of the National Theatre’s mission or material presence.

III.  Shakespeare’s England, Earl’s Court, 1912 11 May 1912. A 3,000-strong Imperial Choir and two orchestras perform a ‘Grand inaugural Empire Concert’, surrounded by pseudo-Tudor buildings, ‘replica’ Globe and Fortune Theatres, a reconstructed Plymouth Harbour (complete with full-scale copy of Drake’s flagship, Revenge), a circus, plenty of souvenir shops and even a giant state-of-theart mechanical water chute. This concert, a palpable statement of imperial pride and pomp, was to mark the beginning of ‘Shakespeare’s England’, a colossal, six-month installation at Earl’s Court. The exhibition provides something of a window into the politics of Englishness in an England unaware that it was on the brink of war. Shakespeare’s England attempted to create an immersive experience in which visitors would enter a different time and a microcosmic space, representing something of Stratford, London and even Plymouth within is bounds. The exhibition itself – as any ‘immersive’ entertainment space can be viewed – functioned as a temporal as well as spatial heterotopia, ‘the heterotopia of the festival’,54 the museum and the theatre all

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in one. Even within this whole alternate reality, Shakespeare’s England incorporated several smaller heterotopias: theatre, ship, museum, fairground. These are all named as key examples in Foucault’s presentation of heterotopia and all are here in one complex counter-reality.55 Clashing incongruous spaces, concepts and temporalities – a mechanical water chute, a modern circus and a village of Filipino Igorot people shared the space with ‘Elizabethan’ streets and theatres – this is a hive of heterotopias all held together under the paternalistic eye of a paragon of nationhood; this is ‘Shakespeare’s England’. The exhibition was enormous in scale and expense. There were numerous stalls and attractions, both purporting to reconstruction of ‘Shakespeare’s Age’ and boasting allmodern excitements. Anticipating, though, what shall be the core issues to be untangled in the Shakespeare Hut’s conception, significance and role in how we read the Shakespeare of the early twentieth century, there are several aspects of the exhibition that are of particular significance: the idea of (re)constructing Shakespeare qua England materially; performance and reconstruction; the relationship between Shakespeare and the politics of female suffrage in the immediate pre-war and wartime moments; and the troubling relationship between Shakespeare and concepts of race and class in the period. All these issues come together both in the exhibition and in the Shakespeare Hut itself. It is essential to establish an understanding of the exhibition as precursor to these aspects of the Hut’s story, which would begin in earnest some four years later but is, in part, anticipated in Earl’s Court in 1912. ‘Shakespeare’s England’ was ostensibly designed to be a fundraising event for filling the SMNT coffers. Like the Ball the previous year, it was led by Lady Churchill and designed by Edwin Lutyens. The ambition and scope of the exhibition is truly astonishing. Lasting some six months, the exhibition was an absolute extravaganza. Its sheer scale, in terms of the built attractions, was staggering: two ‘reconstructed’ theatres in the form of scaled-down (though functional) Fortune and

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Globe Theatres, whole streets of ‘Tudor’ buildings and its reconstructed ship, the Revenge, floating on a central lake, were joined by huge fairground rides, such as a giant mechanical water chute, areas for dining and even a ‘reconstruction’ of the Mermaid Tavern. Lutyens’s architecture was detailed, producing a village-sized mock-Tudor folly complex, eliding stage set and built environment, as can be seen in surviving postcards produced for the event (Figure 1.3). Meanwhile, the entertainments ran all day, from morning until late at night, varying from Shakespearean extracts at the theatres to jousting and more modern shows: circuses, sideshows and curiosities. The billing was one of festivity – even the ‘Lord of Misrule’ would be there56 – escapism and a package of Shakespeareana, general nostalgia and self-congratulation on the greatness of English and imperial heritage. The ‘Shakespeare Trade’57 took over Earl’s Court. Souvenir shops sold Shakespeareana, so the visitor could take home a little piece of Shakespeare’s England to suit his or her budget.

FIGURE 1.3 ‘A Corner of Shakespeare’s England’, postcard, 1912. From the author’s private collection.

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‘The Master of the Revels’ was Patrick Kirwan, who planned the performances for the theatres at the exhibitions as well as all the entertainments across the site. Kirwan would return to his role as ‘Master of the Revels’ on Christmas Day at the Shakespeare Hut in 1916, an occasion to which I shall return in Chapter 3. His papers detailing plans for all the exhibition’s entertainments (including the scheduled attractions within ‘Bartholemew’s Fair’, the retail and amusement park of Shakespeare’s England) survive in Lady Churchill’s papers and describe the souvenir trade and spectacles visitors met on entering. On Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, the ‘Lord Mayor and Aldermen’ watch over wrestling matches and ‘baskets of live rabbits are then emptied among the crowd’.58 Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays in May, you would be treated to a maypole procession, led by Robin Hood and his Merry Men, who have somehow drifted into Tudor England, it would seem. From June onwards, however, on those days you would instead find the fair opened by the ‘Lord of Misrule’ according to Philip Stubbs’s description. The fair is, throughout the year, infiltrated by characters from Jonson’s (spelt ‘Johnson’ in the learned report) Bartholemew Fair, from the (always enviable) part of ‘Fine, Oily, Fat, Pigwoman’ to all eight constables of the watch. Once you had had your fill of these entertainments, you could move through the retail stalls, and choose which piece of Shakespeare to take home: In the booths are sold Elizabethan books, music pipes, tobacco, gloves (the scented gloves as introduced by Sir Thomas Gresham), handkerchiefs, Elizabethan fans, reproductions of rough glass ware of the period and of the pewter ware. Then there is … the stall for the sale of roast pig, there is a stall for the sale or hire of hobby horses, a booth is given up to the sale of Elizabethan cloths and stuffs, one for the sale of dolls in Elizabethan costume, a ginger bread stall, a stall for the sale of models of the Globe Theatre, one for the sale of horn books, one for postcards,

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one for models of the galleon, and one for the sale of Elizabethan games and playing cards.59 The range of cheap to elaborate souvenirs was, presumably, to attract sales from the wide range of visitors expected, due to the relatively cheap one-shilling entrance fee. A whole stall entirely dedicated to the ‘sale of models of the Globe Theatre’, represents the beginning of the mass-produced modernity to take over after the First World War. The cornucopia of Shakespeareana for sale at Earl’s Court foreshadows the ‘microuniverse of Bardic consumer culture’60 Barbara Hodgdon found in her journey through 1990s Stratford-on-Avon’s souvenir shops. While Hodgdon reads the Shakespeareana for sale in postmodern-era Stratford as nostalgia for a British imperial past now lost, ‘sustaining the cultural memory of Britain’s empire in what is perhaps one of the few remaining vestiges of that nation’s past colonial power’,61 the souvenirs at Shakespeare’s England are sold at an earlier stage of the process. In 1912, Shakespeare might still save the empire, or so we might infer from the SMNT’s hyperbolic rhetoric and Gollancz’s dreams of Shakespeare’s ‘Tercentenary Coronation’ to come in 1916.62 The cheap souvenir stalls also fed into the marketing rhetoric of inclusivity, that the SMNT events in some way brought everyone (or, at least, the ‘everyone’ of the ‘English speaking world’) together in mutual celebration of Shakespeare. Yet it was clear that elitism pervaded all access and content. Of the three events, Shakespeare’s England was arguably the most genuine, if misguided, attempt to engage the wider public’s participation, with an entrance fee of just a shilling. In a letter to Edith Lyttelton (author, of course, of the Masque), Lady Churchill writes of her intention that the exhibition must be, in contrast to the Ball, accessible to the average person on the street: The proposed Ex. [sic] is along entirely different lines from the Ball – it caters for the public at popular prices, + no

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favours asked. … The tradesman who hires his shop close in to advertize [sic] and sell - + the man who pays 1/ to come in expects to get his shilling’s worth – neither, I imagine will be influenced by the fact that it is for the benefit of the National Theatre. The high prices paid for boxes + tickets at the Ball were more in the nature of donations.63 However, in practice, while the one-shilling entry did stand, there were still many events out of reach for most Londoners, such as a £100 box at the jousting, that segregated the haves from the have-nots quite clearly. It was the place to visit for the great and the good; Queen Alexandra visited at least twice, the King himself attended64 and also a young Winston Churchill was photographed surveying the scene on board the reconstructed Revenge ship. Royal visits were rather plentiful in fact; the royal children visited for a tour and were allowed backstage at the circus to see the ‘glitter and the glamour’.65 For all the talk of a Shakespeare for ‘everyone’ and a true National Theatre, there was always a very evident class divide between the SMNT and the public they purported to serve with their ideals. There was quite clearly a general lack of engagement with, or understanding of, the tastes and needs of the wider public in the planning of the SMNT events. The exhibition was incredibly expensive and had high hopes of takings – though the projection of very much profit is hard to justify; this makes it hard to believe it was ever seen primarily as a fundraiser. Lady Churchill had extravagant plans and ideas for the exhibit and shows of opulence as well as heritage. In a letter dated 20 January 1912, George Bernard Shaw advises caution on the insurances been pushed upon her by bankers, despite his usual tendency to avoid business matters, because ‘financial counsel from me is a ghastly absurdity’. However, Shaw also puts to Lady Churchill the financial realities of her scheme to stage a jousting tournament at Earl’s Court: ‘The tournaments of the Middle Ages were so expensive that they ruined everyone who jousted in

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them: in fact sceptics say that the Crusades were really flights of the knights from their creditors.’66 Despite Shaw’s warnings, however, Lady Churchill pressed on with the jousting event, which was as extravagant – and expensive – as one might expect, with some seats and boxes selling for three figure sums. This was of course a far cry from ‘the man who pays 1/ to come in’67 and fed the notion that the whole event remained a display of privilege rather than the democratizing celebration of shared heritage Lady Churchill seemed to imagine it would be. Writing to Lady Churchill in July, it is reasonable to assume that the big event ‘last night’ about which a friend, ‘Mary’, writes might be that very joust. ‘It was a brilliant success + I only feel mortified to think the idiotic public did not make more of it,’ she complains. ‘It is terribly disappointing but I think all sorts of rumours got around that no one could see except in the £10.0.0 places.’68 The public were clearly not keen to part with their money to be fobbed off in cheap seats without a view while the rich enjoyed themselves, which is not in the least ‘idiotic’ nor, indeed, is it surprising. The hierarchy of seating at events within the exhibition seems frequently to have undermined any purported attempt at inclusivity. Lady Churchill’s own assumption that the average one-shilling ticket holder would not ‘be influenced by the fact that it is for the benefit of the National Theatre’ is telling in this context; if there was no perception of the cause as worthy, the SMNT project smacks more of an elite imposing their limited idea of democratizing theatre – and Shakespeare in particular – than it does of real desire for public accessibility to the drama. The SMNT’s exhibition ideas were out of touch and it did not go unnoticed. An article in the Daily Herald anticipating the exhibition expresses cynicism over the selectivity of the ‘Shakespeare’s England’ to be presented, and therefore its authenticity: We are shortly to have Shakespeare’s England on show at Earl’s Court, and for the price of a small silver coin we

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Englishmen of a later age will be able to see what was like, in the judgment of the organisers of the show, that Merrie England which beat the Armada, broke the power of the monasteries, and crippled for ever the Craftsmen’s Guilds. … We shall see many fine ladies and gentlemen and citizens in their Sunday best, shall have a model of the Globe Theatre wonderfully exact. … But the English craftsmen of Shakespeare’s time you will hardly see, and the poor of England will come on as ‘rabble’.69 The writer identifies here the social cleansing of history represented by Elizabethanism focusing on the ‘great and the good’, a myth of English supremacy represented by the Armada and age of colonial conquest. The working or trading class visitors to the exhibition, Lady Churchill’s anticipated ‘tradesman … + the man who pays 1/ to come in’ are not represented by equivalents in the nation’s past with any sense of pride. The ‘craftsmen’ are unseen, the writer notes, while the ‘poor of England will come on as a “rabble”’, presenting them as entertainment ‘com[ing] on’ only in character as an amusing mass for the enjoyment of the observing upper class. While the great and the good can seek their forebears in representations of the Elizabethan Court and its environs, most average Londoners will not see themselves mirrored in any meaningful way in the exhibition, or at least, not in a way that values the backs on which ‘Shakespeare’s England’, both real and reconstructed, was built. The Daily Herald article continues bitterly to describe an anticipated splendour for the well-to-do and somewhat patronizing ‘low brow’ entertainments for the working-class visitors: There will be elaborate fancy dress balls for our fine gentry, and there will be the usual carnival delights of switchback and whirligig for the man of the street and his best girl. But the great opportunity presented to the organisers of showing what was like the social life of the workers … has

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been thrown clean away. And ‘Shakespeare’s England’! It has an ironical echo. He was a poor player who made some money out of theatrical management.70 The ‘elaborate fancy dress balls’ may refer to the 1911 Shakespeare Ball, to which, of course, no one short of cash could have gained admittance. The division of class between ‘elaborate’ refined occasions and the ‘usual carnival delights’ for the hoi polloi came to characterize the events linked to the drive for a National Theatre and, in themselves, undermined the cause by distancing the nation from this so-called ‘national’ need. The idea of Shakespeare as ‘high’ culture could never quite be escaped in the SMNT’s discourse and presentation at events. Public opinion steadily moved against the scheme as a quixotic pursuit by a small elite. It would take the war, and Israel Gollancz’s brainchild of a Shakespeare memorial in the form of a soldiers’ hut, not only to bring public opinion back on side, but also finally to begin to merge ideas of ‘high’ and ‘popular’ drama on a Shakespeare Memorial National Theatre stage. Class is not the only divide that fractured the illusion of shared heritage at Shakespeare’s England. Its disturbing ‘human zoo’ attraction and the battle for female suffrage both shattered the idyll. In her article on the 1912 exhibition, Marion F. O’Connor mentions the fact that the exhibition included a ‘human zoo’ village, occupied by members of the Igorot people from the Philippines. O’Connor refers to them in relation to their rivalling the Elizabethan role-players of the event for status as ‘exotic beings’. She writes: Any astonishment at the habiliments and habits of the Philippino [sic] village in the Western Gardens went some way to secure an impression of accuracy and accessibility in the Olde English village on the other side of the tracks. For the Earl’s Court Elizabethans – the sailors climbing up the riggings of the Revenge, the groundlings rollicking around the pit of the Globe – were not solely exotic spectacles.

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They were also on display as objects of popular-audience identification.71 O’Connor reads the role of the Igorot village as a foil to the Elizabethan re-enactors, to secure ‘audience identification’ with them by contrast to the otherness of the Igorot people. It is certainly one function of the ‘exotic’ to reinforce national identity, here, by juxtaposition with ‘difference’. Indeed, this occupation of a space within Shakespeare’s England has further significance. Any ‘attraction’ within the site becomes part of the heterotopic alternate world and, here, this world is a (re)constructed English past, which measured and marketed itself via its claims of authenticity, while incorporating the fun of the fair – and the ‘exotic’ attractions of a village within a village. The Igorot village is the most disturbing end of a large spectrum of carnival and fairground delights; the Daily Herald’s scornful prediction of the ‘usual carnival delights of switchback and whirligig for the man of the street and his best girl’ was certainly accurate. Clashing with the event’s core attraction of authenticity, the village, the circus and the enormous mechanical water chute were designed to be the major draws to the public and were pushed in the press and souvenir postcards. The idea comes through, clearly, that Shakespeare alone – and historical ‘reconstruction’ more generally – would not draw enough ordinary citizens into this extravagant fair. The 1912 exhibition, therefore, became a bricolage of modern innovations and (re)constructing Shakespeare. Yet there is more to the inner Igorot village within the faux Stratfordian streets at Earl’s Court; the display of the Igorot people is crucial to the brand of national identity being peddled at Shakespeare’s England. This is not only the contrast of cultures via which to establish ‘identification’ with England’s own past. By inserting the Igorot village and its associated marketing (already well-known as it had toured the United States and Europe), the exhibition is contrasting what is presented as ‘savage’ as a very specific contrast to what

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is presented as ‘civilization’ in English cultural history, and it elides past English colonial success with the present American colonial project. The Igorot village attraction transcribes onto the exhibition space of ‘the past’ the patriarchal colonial discourse of the innate childishness or lack of sophistication in ‘native’ cultures to locate them as ‘backward’ as a justification for an onward march of colonial subjection. Further, it exemplifies the patriarchal imperial dominance of England by appropriating that lovable patriarch, the father ‘genius’ Shakespeare. The Igorot village was one of two of its particular kind touring during the period, though the ‘human zoo’ tour was en vogue, especially in the United States generally in the early twentieth century. The village brought to Shakespeare’s England was almost certainly that of the entrepreneur Schneidgewind and was a popular attraction among visitors. An article in the Daily Herald, ‘Curious Natives to Be Seen at Work at Earl’s Court’, clearly articulates the attitude to the Igorot people to be found at the exhibition, while aligning the English visitor in sympathy with the white American colonial project: ‘The Americans call these natives familiarly their “Brown Brothers” and they are making efforts to civilise them.’72 The playful faux equality of the phrase ‘brown brothers’ infantilizes the Igorot people and presents the Americans as benevolent in their ‘efforts to civilise them’. As Shari M. Hundorf explains, ‘The US government customarily employed familial rhetoric … to account for colonial incursions in the Pacific … eclips[ing] the brutality of US military campaigns that cost half a million Filipino lives.’73 At the time of the exhibition, US military campaigns still continued in the Philippines (though officially victory had been declared back in 1903). While these Igorot people, then, were toured around Europe and America lauded for attempting to ‘civilize’ its ‘brown brothers’, in fact the United States had ‘fought a brutal campaign of mass slaughter, torture and “scorched earth” policies’ in these people’s homeland.74 With many dignitaries, including the King, Queen and Royal Princes, attending the exhibition, the inclusion

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of the Igorot village secures complicity for Shakespeare and his England with the American colonial impulse as part of a wider presentation of English, or least Anglo-Saxon, racial superiority that was woven into the language of bardolatry and even the SMNT campaign itself. Meanwhile, the Daily Herald article on the Igorot people goes on to describe their appearance and behaviour with voyeuristic relish, always implying a risqué element to the spectacle. Tantalizing potential visitors with the titillations and fascinations of the scantily clad people in ‘gaily striped loincloths’, it describes how ‘a primitive loom is leisurely manipulated by two almond-eyed Igorrotte [sic] girls’ while ‘a newly married couple are spending the Philippine equivalent to a honeymoon’.75 The language both infantilizes and sexualizes the Igorot people; their lifestyle and traditions are presented as sub-civilized, visceral and childlike, yet erotic and titillating. The description, though, makes no mention of any of the other attractions available at the exhibition, so failing to situate them in the Shakespearean, English – ‘respectable’ – space of the broader event. The description fits into the habit of viewing Igorot village ‘attractions’ which, as Robert W. Rydell puts it, ‘stemmed less from pre-industrial longings than from a powerful mixture of white supremacist sexual stereotypes and voyeurism’.76 The Igorot ‘exhibit’ as part of a constructed ‘past’ provides a tacit justification of their function as providing some connection with the past, though of course this is troubling enough. However, as Rydell argues, the idea of a nostalgic fascination with a ‘simpler’ existence being the core attraction is less likely than fetishization. The socially and sexually restrictive context of 1912 London and ‘Shakespeare’s England’ alike are disrupted by the Igorot people’s ‘loincloths’ and ‘almond eyes’. However, the Igorot traditions and customs are presented as a foil to a ‘superior’ English heritage and culture, exemplified by the beautiful Revenge galleon, Lutyen’s incredible architectural creations and, above all, the proclaimed genius of Shakespeare.

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Beyond class divides and racial inequalities, another battle was raging in Shakespeare’s England. Within this mock-Tudor world, there was a women’s suffrage campaign stall and an anti-suffrage stall vying for a voice within this Shakespearean heterotopia. ‘The Antis’, writes one suffragist, ‘have invaded “Old England”’.77 The ‘Antis’ somehow secured a stall at the exhibition before the suffragists had noticed this possibility for campaigning. The latter found themselves unrepresented at the Shakespeare event and mobilized quickly to fundraise and negotiate their way into the exhibition. It was ‘difficult … to get the management to agree to having a suffrage stall’ in Shakespeare’s England and it was only agreed ‘after a great deal of discussion as to exactly what we might and might not do, and we ended by making a legal undertaking that our representatives would remain inside the stall’.78 However, the suffrage stall was at last secured, run by the London Society for Women’s Suffrage, and existed for sixteen weeks from June until October 1912. It was well worth the trouble; in that time, 4,300 ‘Friends of Women’s Suffrage Cards’ were signed and some 40,000 leaflets distributed.79 Meanwhile, the ‘Antis’ had booked ‘a small house for advertising their society in the Exhibition’.80 They reported that it ‘had been secured at the Shakespeare Festival at Earl’s Court for propaganda purposes’ and was ‘most successful, as in three weeks 400 new members had joined and upwards of 6,000 signatures been obtained to the petition against women’s suffrage’.81 Writing to volunteer Mrs S. E. Parkyn, a representative of the London Society for Women’s Suffrage thanks her for her help at the stall; ‘I must say’, she writes, ‘that the Anti-Suffragists sound most pernicious there and it will be a pleasure as well as a duty to keep them in check.’82 The battle for Shakespeare’s England was on. However, the suffragists were there on sufferance, it would seem. The pro-suffrage campaigners were strictly forbidden from straying from their stall to distribute leaflets. Suffragist volunteer Mrs Parkyn was caught outside these bounds; she

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received a sharp reprimand from a more senior suffragist in the organization and was mortified: It was entirely my fault and the fault of the Antis! I am so sorry, for Miss Hendy warned me. I was talking to a lady from the Anti stall who tried to talk me down (they are trying all over the place) and a clergyman went by and I went halfway across the bridge to give him some leaflets. I am so eager that people should see our splendid literature – but I am sorry again. … I have heard from several sources that the Antis are wild because we have a stall in the Exhibition so we certainly must not be ejected.83 The presence of the suffragists is so contentious in this exhibit of ‘Englishness’, a site both of heritage tourism and bardolatry, that they have to be legally bound to stay inside their stall, while the Antis, as we see from Mrs Parkyn’s explanation, ‘are … all over the place’; they are clearly free to roam. Mrs Parkyn’s crime is merely handing leaflets to a clergyman, but this is enough potentially to bar the suffragists entirely from the exhibition. When Miss A. M. Hendy (who had ‘warned’ Mrs Parkyn to stay inside the stall) writes to Miss Robinson, both members for the London Society, we discover the influence of Johnston Forbes-Robertson, a member of the SMNT committee and a director of the exhibition. Ms Hendy is concerned that the exhibition organizers are threatening to withdraw the transferable tickets for the stall volunteers to enter the exhibition but has ‘no doubt Forbes-Robertson could arrange it all right. … He told me the other day that if he had been in England the “Antis” would never have had their stall. He was very pleased that ours was there.’84 Clearly, ForbesRobertson was not happy that the Antis are represented and was not party to the negotiations for the legal restrictions on the suffragists. A vocal suffragist himself and, of course, married to the president of the Actresses’ Franchise League (AFL), Forbes-Robertson (known as the reformer Hamlet and soon

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to be manager of the Shakespeare Hut entertainments) was the suffragists’ strongest ally in their fight for Shakespeare’s England. Four years later, he would be their ally, too, on the Shakespeare Hut stage.

Foucault’s third principle of heterotopia defines it as a space in which several incongruous realities meet and coexist, using performance space as his first exemplar: The heterotopia is capable of juxtaposing in a single real place several spaces, several sites that are in themselves incompatible. Thus it is that the theatre brings onto the rectangle of the stage, one after the other, a whole series of places that are foreign to one another.85 The Masque dressed up the argument for a Shakespeare Memorial National Theatre in the fancy dress clothes of a Jonsonian masque and literal fancy dress of an upper-class house party; the Shakespeare Ball took this into the spectacular mode, with 4,000 well-to-do revellers in a transformed Albert Hall. Shakespeare’s England exemplified this idea so literally as to become a parody of itself. Ending with the exhibition’s spectacular – and financially pointless – attempt to garner popular support, the SMNT had reached the precipice and could take these extreme events no further. Moreover, the public – or at least the popular press – were growing restless. Where was the money going? There were no signs of a theatre or any sort of monument, yet these high-profile events were clearly turning over some serious sums of money. By 1914, there was nothing for it – the SMNT had to buy some land and start building. They rushed into the purchase of a piece of land at the heart of the burgeoning intellectual centre of London, buying an entirely impractical (in terms of building a theatre) and very expensive square of green on the corner of Keppel and Gower Street. The Bloomsbury National Theatre would

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never be built, but the urge to (re)construct Tudor London, to create a Shakespearean heterotopic space, to perform on a National Theatre stage would all be reincarnated in a most unexpected way. In the darkness of war, the land lay vacant and turned to wilderness until, in spring 1916, construction began on a new mock-Tudor memorial to Shakespeare: the Shakespeare Hut.

2 ‘What Ho! For Shakespeare, when we get back to Blighty!’:1 Commemorating Shakespeare in wartime

‘Perhaps only a soldier can best pay worthy honour to Shakespeare now. Perhaps the truest way of celebrating his fame is not so much by remembrance as by decision, and by decision converted into deeds,’ declares a writer in The Times on 22  April 1916, under the heading ‘Once More unto the Breach’.2 Celebrations for Shakespeare’s Tercentenary in 1916 in London were barely to resemble those planned and discussed before the outbreak of war. Proposals for commemorating Shakespeare would be completely reassessed in a wartime context; the new plans needed to be frugal and patriotic, selective and pertinent, ‘a very simple observance of the Tercentenary in a manner consonant with the mood of the nation under present conditions’.3 At the end of the last chapter, we left the Shakespeare Memorial National Theatre committee at the Shakespeare’s England exhibition, after which an uneventful

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few years led to increasing speculation about where funds were going. A hasty purchase of land in 1914 was sadly ill-timed: just months later, war was declared. This chapter will set the Hut scheme in the context of how Shakespeare featured in the First World War, how he was, as Clara Calvo puts it, ‘draft[ed] into the war effort’,4 and how he could be commemorated and performed in wartime. The Shakespeare Hut soon took on a life of its own, with input from the separate influence of its management by the YMCA. Its theatre, managed by radical and innovative women, finally achieved the fusion of ‘high’ and ‘low’ modes of drama and performance that the SMNT had never before seen to be possible but which characterized the Hut’s success and influence.

Enlisting Shakespeare Werner Habicht identifies the use of Shakespeare as a ‘cultural weapon’ against Germany during the First World War as a distinct change from the nationalistic ‘hero-worship’ demonstrated in the 1864 celebrations of Shakespeare’s birth Tercentenary.5 The patriotic imperialism expressed in the SMNT’s pre-war events, as Chapter 1 examines, very much resembled the Victorian bardolatry of their preceding years, but wartime austerity would bring alteration to the ways Shakespeare could be ‘remembered’. Germany had also preempted (and therefore taken the shine off) the Tercentenary by celebrating the 350th anniversary of Shakespeare’s birth in 1914,6 two years before Britain was due to mark Shakespeare’s ‘big year’ (much, indeed, as continental Europe would observe 2014’s 450th birth anniversary and largely ignore 2016, leaving that to the British). The war brought change: not a more or a less nationalistic use of Shakespeare but a shift, as Habicht argues, to a weaponized bard deployed by both England and Germany: The national poet of England needed an immaculate halo, which patriotic publications of 1916 strove to provide,



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relentlessly quoting passages such as John of Gaunt’s ‘this sceptered isle’ speech from Richard II. The Germans retaliated in what became a war of pamphlets and newspaper articles mainly by reviving slogans that asserted their special closeness to Shakespeare. … And after Germany’s military victory a peace treaty would insist on annexing Shakespeare definitively.7 Germany and Britain battled for Shakespeare like a piece of contested land, as Habicht explains, resulting in a shameless tug-of-war over ownership as much of the man as of the texts. This was not simply a vindictive attack on England’s treasured national poet, however; the discourse over Shakespeare’s true home was more to do with racial, rather than national, identity, in which Shakespeare’s genius was an ‘Anglo-Saxon’ trait. The German argument was that England had left so far behind its new ‘Golden Age’ of Shakespeare that modern Germany bore it far greater resemblance and, in that sense, Shakespeare was more German than English. ‘German attacks’, writes Habicht, ‘were mainly directed against contemporary Englishmen, who were no longer worthy of Shakespeare.’8 This sought to undermine English cultural ownership by harnessing the very arguments of pre-War bardolatry displayed by the SMNT and others: that Shakespeare represented a great moment of English cultural achievement but that a lack of a memorial showed a worrying forgetfulness of that perceived past supremacy. This led, perhaps, to the odd logic of the German argument taking hold more easily and a brutal defence had to be made. In a speech at the Mansion House Tercentenary observance ceremony on 2 May 1916, Martin Harvey clearly still felt able to bring up the SMNT plan and drum up support, using the rivalry with Germany over Shakespeare as rhetorical ammunition: He asked confidently for support from members of a club whose foundation was earnest of their interest in preserving

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our glorious heritage – a heritage sung by no singer of such inspiring note as our Shakespeare – our Shakespeare, not the Germans’ (Cheers).9 This affirmation of ownership – ‘our Shakespeare’ and rather petulant ‘not the Germans’’ – reveals the nature of the shift in imperative, from a pre-war need purely for national selfcelebration to one driven by war, in which an attack was being mounted to take ‘our Shakespeare’ from the British. I use ‘British’ now not interchangeably with ‘English’ but specifically because wartime had brought with it a discourse of British unity and, more importantly, British imperial unity, against a common foe. As Shakespearean anthologist and clergyman, Rev Frederick Askew writes: England produced Shakespeare simply because England WAS England – and Britons ever Britons. Shakespeare stands out in history as the embodiment of our British ideals and character. … Shakespeare is our nation’s most noble heritage.10 Where ‘England’s greatest poet’11 had been invoked by the SMNT before the outbreak of war, it is marked that ‘Britain’ replaces ‘England’ frequently in wartime rhetoric. Text fragment anthologies, such as Askew’s A Shakespearean War Calendar,12 quoted here, and Shakespeare Tercentenary Souvenir: England’s Thoughts in Shakespeare’s Words13 exemplify the fragmentation of Shakespeare to build a suitable wartime version of the Shakespearean text via deconstruction, de- and re-contextualization, and manipulation. Askew quietly justifies the inauthenticity of some of the textual fragments he has created: ‘a few of the quotations have been slightly altered to give them a more pertinent reference to the events of today.’14 A particularly extreme example is Francis Colmer’s anthology (of sorts), Shakespeare in Time of War, which stitches together hundreds of Shakespearean fragments into



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new poems and speeches, all organized under topical subtitles, such as ‘Imperious Caesar’, ‘Pomp and Circumstance’, ‘The Foe’ and so on.15 The extensive Preface to the book quickly locks on to the subject of the lack of memorial and of celebration for the Tercentenary but appears to argue that England’s neglect of its national poet is as much to blame as the war itself. Colmer hopes for a gloriously cultured future in which a memorial can be raised due to the public’s genuine urge to pay homage to their bard. He then goes on to wax lyrical on Shakespeare’s nationalism, patriotism and representation of the nation’s most glorious age (though the book is in fact published from the United States, not England). ‘At this crisis of her fate,’ he writes, ‘when the accents of patriotism and selfinterest are so strangely intermingled, and when the fires of her old chivalry require to be blown to a white heat, how sorely does the country need the sound of a ringing voice that shall speak with the tongue of her children of old.’16 This ‘ringing voice’, with a ‘rallying cry and cheering note’17 of course, is Shakespeare’s, a statement argued purely by virtue of the fact that ‘Milton and Tennyson are not national poets in the full sense of the word’.18 We may feel the urge, now, to mock the hyperbole of Colmer’s language of nationalism and Shakespeare worship, yet it would not have stood out as excessive in the context of the earlier SMNT discourse noted in Chapter 1, nor of the utilization of Shakespeare as that ‘cultural weapon’ Habicht identifies. ‘There is only one poet who has identified himself deeply with the nationality of our race’ continues Colmer, who has made himself the mouthpiece to interpret it in every mood and aspiration, who is himself, indeed, the typical Englishman. Our one and only national poet is national, not merely in an insular, but, one might almost say, in an imperial sense. In nearly all his plays, however foreign the subject, there show forth ever and anon traces of that fervent love for his native land which amounted to the very adoration of her earth and all that stood or grew on it.19

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Colmer deploys Shakespeare as ‘typical Englishman’, shifting subtly from the atypical but aspirational genius of Shakespeare, the ideal Englishman, invoked, for instance, by Israel Gollancz in the Shakespeare Ball Souvenir quoted in Chapter 1: ‘the spirit of England at its best’.20 Colmer’s ‘imperial sense’ is crucial to how bardolatry was stepped up from Gollancz’s ideal of Shakespeare ‘transcending all divisions of race, nationality and speech’21 to an insistent, weaponized cultural capital, one in which Shakespeare’s power is racialized, rather than nationalized. Often, the deployment of Shakespeare’s power meant the works being taken apart, right down to the tiniest of fragments, before reanimating them as new texts, or cultural objects that were entirely new wholes, bearing little relation to the texts and contexts from which they came. Colmer’s Frankenstein’s monster Shakespeare, pieced together from parts but no longer recognizable, was characteristic. As Colmer himself explains, I have attempted … to gather together from the plays such fragments as seemed most pertinent to the present time, and have endeavoured to arrange them so that as far as possible the sense should be continuous. In the section entitled ‘Alarums and Excursions’ I have aimed at grouping the extracts in such a way that, read as a whole, they may present the continuous progress of a battle.22 So Colmer has rearranged Shakespeare’s words to make them ‘pertinent’ just as Askew admits, rather than seeing them as ‘universally’ applicable or timeless in themselves. He has, in this example, created the ‘progress of a battle’, almost literally making a weapon, or at least a wartime narrative, from Shakespeare’s texts. The effect is rather bizarre, at times, as Colmer’s project requires some fairly implausible interpretations and the willingness to play fast and loose with sense and context. For instance, Colmer’s poem (it is hard to know exactly what mode to assign to it), ‘The Onset’, manages to draw on a staggering array of different plays. The following



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short extract gives a flavour of the merciless splicing and decontextualizing that constitutes Colmer’s project: Do you hear aught, sir, of a battle toward? Most sure and vulgar, every one hears that, Which can distinguish sound. Now they are clapper-clawing one another. And like a jolly troop of huntsmen, come Our lusty English, all with purpled hands, Dyed in the dying slaughter of their foes.23 The entire poem, even at only twenty-five lines long, manages to be patched together from some eight different plays: King Lear, Troilus and Cressida, Cymbeline, Othello, Love’s Labour’s Lost, Henry VI, Henry V and King John. Shakespeare in Time of War contains well over 200 such odes, to such specific subjects as individual politicians, military leaders and even actors. Colmer’s piecemeal Shakespeare was overt in restructuring the texts to fit the current situation, but the texts were there rather than just ‘the man’. The total deconstruction and reassembling of Shakespeare’s texts here is so extreme as to lose any real sense of the textual context of any given fragment. Comparing Colmer’s book to, say, the Souvenir, or even Gollancz’s Book of Homage to Shakespeare, all these books worship but rarely, if ever, quote Shakespeare in any detail. They pay homage to the myth, rather than presenting the texts themselves. The use of fragments of text was to take over from the straight worship of Shakespeare during the war. The claims of authenticity of costume, set design or even buildings, gave way at a time of wartime austerity and nationalism to the use of Shakespearean words as lending authenticity to the British imperial and war projects. However, the fragmenting and tweaking of Shakespeare created the opportunity to reconstruct those fragments into a new whole. The fragments become so muddled in these contexts, as ‘The Onset’ demonstrates, as to

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lose their synecdochic value in representing the textual or even cultural sources. Instead, ‘Shakespeare’ becomes metonymic for ‘England’, ‘Britain’, ‘Empire’. This is the context in which the Shakespeare Hut was built, in that Tercentenary year, for ‘Dominion’ soldiers from ‘beyond the seas’, presenting the Shakespeare name, ‘look’ (a prefab Birthplace) and fragmented pieces of play texts on a stage that never saw a complete play performed. Fragmented Shakespeare was also used as another kind of ‘cultural weapon’ internally: as part of the battle for recruitment. Authorities in England 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 rouse patriotic spirit high enough to generate volunteers for the Front. An early poster makes a clear declaration, in patriotic blue and red text: ‘Stand not upon the order of your going, / But go at once! Enlist Now!’24, taking the line (Macbeth, 3.4.117–18) so far out of context, of course, as to endow it with an entirely different meaning by adding the emphatic exclamation mark and an enlistment imperative to Lady Macbeth’s lines. Yet, in so doing, this fragment of text becomes a powerful synecdoche not for Macbeth but for Shakespeare. It embodies, in him, a duty to an English heritage, ancestors and way of life. Shakespeare tells you to go, so go you must. Yet, critically, the fragmentation of Shakespeare’s work has tended to be viewed as forming a definitive aspect of modernist treatments of his texts after the First World War. Julia Briggs has articulated, The modernist project of demythologising Shakespeare has continued to the present day with occasional pauses or backlashes, moments when a more dignified or a more patriotic version was called for. Oppressed by ancestral voices (among which Shakespeare’s was the most pervasive), modernism had to confront the too-familiar words it had inherited.25



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Critical views of Shakespeare’s relationship to the modernist project post First World War centre on a notion of deconstruction, on the act of fragmenting Shakespeare representing either a conversation or a struggle (Bloom’s ‘anxiety of influence’26) with that ancestral Shakespearean voice. Yet the deconstruction and fragmentation of Shakespeare’s texts was the pervasive treatment of Shakespeare during both world wars and also began in the preliminary Tercentenary commemoration debates, especially after the turn of the century. The Shakespeare inherited by modernists, woven, for example, into Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway or Eliot’s The Wasteland, was already widely fragmented. The version of Shakespeare experienced by wartime audiences, especially those in military service, was more often than not fragmented and reconstructed into a suitable ‘whole’ for wartime consumption. While Briggs characterizes those postmodernist lapses of the more interrogative ‘demythologizing’ of Shakespeare as ‘moments when a more dignified or a more patriotic version was called for’, one of these moments came before the emergence of some of the most definitive modernist appropriations of Shakespeare. 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 walking in a square’.27 As Melba Cuddy-Keane puts it, ‘for Septimus, the ideal of beauty becomes wedded to an ideally abstract ideal of England,’28 and Shakespeare was England at this time. When Virginia Woolf writes of Septimus’s imperative to go to war, ‘to save an England which consisted almost entirely of Shakespeare’s plays’,29 though, she is not writing as figuratively as one might assume. Young men just like Septimus might quite literally have been led by Shakespeare into war, following the fragmented instruction on

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the recruitment poster to ‘go at once’. The Shakespeare Hut took its place in this context and among the residential squares of Bloomsbury, where Miss Isabel Pole might have walked in her green dress. The Hut brought with it, too, the Shakespeare Memorial National Theatre committee’s pre-war attempts to (re)construct ‘Shakespeare’s England’ in London.

The founding and realization of the Shakespeare Hut Such was the strange and powerful maelstrom of a new, militarized, imperial bardolatry during which the Tercentenary would fall. The year 1916 would be a turning point in the war for the British public. The Military Service Act of January 1916 brought compulsory conscription.30 No more would Shakespeare be needed on recruitment posters to rouse the conscience of potential volunteer soldiers. From now on, he would instead be used to bolster morale and to justify the forced enlistment of thousands of young men and increasingly catastrophic loss of life. Shakespeare must now give Britain something even more convincing to fight for. In these unique circumstances, how best to mark the Tercentenary in wartime conditions was debated and agreed by a new Tercentenary Committee, whose leading light, Sir George Alexander (acting star and, later in 1916, member of the Shakespeare Hut Committee), was to organize the agreed event: a lavish gala performance at Drury Lane on 2 May 1916.31 Meanwhile, Gollancz would moot a very different and unprecedented scheme. On the land in Bloomsbury bought for the erection of a new National Theatre, there would instead be constructed a temporary memorial to Shakespeare in the form of a mockTudor style YMCA hut for active soldiers on leave from the Front. It was to be called the Shakespeare Hut. So it is we find Israel Gollancz, still Honorary Secretary to the SMNT (he would retain this role until his death in 1930),



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professor of English literature at King’s College, London, in his office at the heart of wartime London, right on the Strand. Gollancz was not going to allow the war to erase Shakespeare’s Tercentenary but neither did he take lightly the new and specific needs any Shakespeare commemoration must meet. There was no appetite for mass public celebration; yet, at the same time, sober commemoration in this landscape of loss and mass grief was going to be difficult to handle with tact. Gollancz set about marking the Tercentenary neither with a stone monument nor with a theatre (per se) but nevertheless with two solid objects: A Book of Homage to Shakespeare,32 an opulent vellum limited edition book of contributions from across the world (Germany and Austria excepted, of course) and the Shakespeare Hut, a respite ‘home’ for soldiers on leave from the Front or recuperating after injuries. Clara Calvo has characterized one of Shakespeare’s key guises in 1916 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’;33 this is the Shakespeare Gollancz presented with his new idea. The Shakespeare Hut would allow Shakespeare’s name to be tied to national pride and to pragmatic urges to contribute to the war effort. This mode of memorialization was to do much to save the notion of Shakespearean commemoration from its growing perception as the superfluous pursuit of the rich (Lords Bryce and Lytton), the scholarly (Sidney Lee and Gollancz) and the downright eccentric (William Poel and George Bernard Shaw). As Chapter 1 explored, the pre-war SMNT events (the Shakespeare Masque, Shakespeare Costume Ball and Shakespeare’s England exhibition) reflected spectacular theatrical fashions of the late Victorian and Edwardian eras and their associated lavish production values. Soon, as much contemporary newspaper coverage reveals, there was increasing dissatisfaction with the SMNT. The movement was accused of secretiveness, of hiding its financial affairs, and suspicions started to arise that money was not being used to any real effect, while expensive

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events were instead simply entertaining the well-to-do. While Gollancz and others regularly publicly refuted these claims, by the outbreak of war the scheme was looking increasingly unlikely to come to fruition. A newspaper clipping found in Gollancz’s papers, dated 6 February 1916, notes wryly 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!34 Clearly the notion of commemorating Shakespeare by way of a statue or ‘shrine’ was, at this time, becoming almost laughable. By the outbreak of war, and increasingly between 1914 and 1916, these schemes were viewed by many press commentators as an unacceptable, even distasteful, extravagance. The Shakespeare Hut’s noble, benevolent purpose and modest cost would turn around the SMNT’s reputation. Yet many in the SMNT were unsure about this redirection of funds: Mr G. Bernard Shaw felt very strongly that they had no right to touch for this purpose the funds that had been subscribed for the foundation of the National Theatre. … He would … prefer that it should be raised by subscription and he thought it would be quite possible to get £1,000 by this means without drawing on their funds in any way whatever. Mr William Poel and Mrs Lyttelton were both opposed to the idea of taking any money from their funds for the Hut, and Mr Martin Harvey in a letter suggested that each



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member of the committee should contribute five guineas. Eventually it was decided that the committee should endeavour to raise £1,000 independently for the purpose of providing a hut, to be called the Shakespeare Hut.35 Thus, having secured the basic approval, if not the practical support, of his SMNT colleagues, Gollancz set out on his project to fund and effect a Shakespeare Hut for soldiers. In contrast to the preceding years of limited achievement in fundraising for a National Theatre, there was a comparatively low capital cost required to get the Hut up and running. Nevertheless, there was still a need to raise substantial funds quickly to get the project off the ground. Since many in the SMNT movement at large may not have approved of its central funds being used for this purpose (rather than for an actual National Theatre) and the YMCA did not have the means to put up the whole cost, Gollancz undertook a rapid fundraising campaign. The money was raised in a matter of mere months, via Gollancz’s enthusiastic ‘crowdfunding’ approach, and boosted by the enthusiasm of one major donor. 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 ‘your patriotic and humane scheme, so fully in consonance with the patriotism and humanity of Shakespeare’.36 These words reflect Shakespeare’s new wartime function, characterizing Calvo’s ‘Shakespeare the patriot, Shakespeare the soldier, who did his bit for the war effort’.37 Indeed, the Hut proved a popular cause with the general public38 and thus began to unite those who had previously been at odds over the commemorations, in particular easing tensions between the academic, aristocratic and practitioner lobbies that together comprised the SMNT movement.

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There were already fairly numerous YMCA huts across London (as well as many in the provinces and at the Front) when Gollancz had his brainwave in early 1916. Built to provide respite to soldiers on leave, these large, semitemporary structures were the closest thing to home many soldiers would see during their service. The huts all included dormitories and some comforts and entertainments, but the Shakespeare Hut was the largest, grandest hut the YMCA had ever built. It was also unprecedented as the only hut to be named as a memorial. Where Gollancz got the notion of involving the YMCA in his plans for the Bloomsbury site in the first place is not categorically clear, because no letter or paper from Gollancz himself survives detailing the seed or rationale for the idea. However, he did have previous links with the organization. An anonymous piece in the YMCA magazine, YM, in April 1916, assumes that Gollancz’s idea for the collaboration came from seeing the YMCA’s work ‘from the inside’: Perhaps it was a daring proposal that Dr Gollancz made to his committee. Probably nothing was more unexpected – except the immediate response made by the Shakespearian authorities and enthusiasts all over the country. Doubtless it was what the Professor saw of our work from the inside, when he had sat for a few weeks on our Education Committee, that inspired the idea.39 The YM writer identifies the incongruity, the ‘daring’ nature of Gollancz’s approach to his SMNT colleagues, in suggesting that they team up with an apparently unlikely partner in the YMCA. However, this piece shows confidence that the positive benefits of their work must have ‘inspired’ Gollancz’s notion of teaming up to create a solution for the unused Bloomsbury land. The YMCA was, unsurprisingly, extremely 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



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blend of patriotism, commemoration and practicality that the Hut would come to represent: 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.40 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’ and the usual designation of England as belonging to Shakespeare, ‘his England’ to be represented in the benevolent plans for the Hut. 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 combining this wartime practicality with a memorial to a historical figure with no military experience – even to one of the most famous Englishmen in history – is unusual, especially since, as Allyson Booth has noted, ‘architectural memorialisation of the dead and missing [had been] kept distinct from the design of architecture that would be used and inhabited by the living’.41 In the sense that the Hut was not technically memorializing lost soldiers, this distinction might be insignificant. However, to complicate the significance of naming in the story of the Hut still further, 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. Later, Mrs

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Tweedie audaciously credited herself with bringing about the erection of the Shakespeare Hut as a whole: ‘I also put up the Shakespeare 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.’42 Thus, one room in the Hut, at least, represents two layers of memorial. Mrs Tweedie’s very personal, individual dedication, the Leslie Tweedie Memorial Lounge (as it was known), is spliced together with an act of collective memorial, of impersonal worship of the bard, which does not express grief or loss per se but has quite a different cultural function. Yet, not only did the Hut divide its commemorative function between Shakespeare and a recently lost soldier, but it also acquired a commemorative function in the minds both of those who stayed there, and their relatives back in New Zealand and Australia, representing not only Shakespeare’s name but also the ghosts and memories of the men who stayed there, just for a few nights, before being killed in battle. The Hut opened on Friday, 11 August 1916. 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 around 350 female volunteers. Over one twelve-month period, nearly half a million meals were served and over 95,000 beds were let.43 Shakespeare was kept central to the Hut in a range of ways, including regular performances and readings of Shakespeare’s work and a special emphasis on education for the young men, which was to include a Shakespearean element in the ‘curriculum’. The Hut thus not only altered the mode of commemoration being adopted for Shakespeare’s Tercentenary, but also altered the very Shakespeare being ‘remembered’. This is a Shakespeare not for the interest groups involved in fundraising for the Memorial National Theatre but for the ‘man on the street’, the conscript and the war hero. Unlike the failed attempt to bring the public on board in the Shakespeare’s England exhibition of 1912, the Shakespeare Hut was a popular cause, it was wartime benevolence not selfindulgence.



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During the course of the war, Shakespeare soon became not the recruiter but the morale booster, the rehabilitator, the comforter of the shell shocked44 and the protector of the young men we were sending into hell in the name of the empire. He was also the thank-you of the nation to soldiers disabled by their injuries, in the form of a commemorative (of both Shakespeare and Kitchener, who was killed in 1916) Complete Works presented by the ‘Kitchener Souvenir Committee’ to disabled soldiers by the ‘League of Empire’.45 It was these more benevolently intended, less overbearing wartime incarnations of ‘Shakespeare the patriot’ among which the Shakespeare Hut was located. 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’.46 The Shakespeare Hut’s multifunctionality 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 multifunctional 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 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.47 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’, as Chapter 3 will examine in more detail.

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The Shakespeare Hut’s name bore a great deal, of course, of its commemorative function. The naming of a place delineates place out of space: ‘a place that is bordered, specified, and locatable by being named is seen as different from open, undifferentiated, undesignated space’.48 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,49 all of which would be brought brutally into focus for those passing by this expensive, unused site. The theatre site was a geographical space that smacked of impracticality and excess 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. Gollancz, in a letter to Sir Arthur Yapp of the YMCA, notes that Shakespeare’s name now has a new meaning to soldiers on the front lines: ‘I was touched at hearing the other day that some of our friends at the front cheer one another on with “What ho! For Shakespeare when we get back to Blighty!” where the reference is not to the poet, but their happy rendezvous – the Shakespeare Hut.’50 The Hut that was built to commemorate Shakespeare has enacted a reversal – by the last days of the war, ‘Shakespeare’ for the soldiers is not the poet himself, it has become a metonym for this building, for a home, a place where they will happily meet if they make it back to ‘Blighty’.



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Performing commemoration in wartime: The Hut galas in context The Shakespeare Hut, though, was not a memorial only in name or in the designation of place. Its memorial function was expressed through its Shakespearean performance culture. Its stage never hosted a complete play; rather, it merged and transgressed popular and ‘high’ forms, presenting revues, extracts and homages. In the context of wartime necessity, the gala revue format, selecting as it could the smallest of textual fragments or the stylized ‘Shakespeares’ expressed in sketches, extracts, songs and pageants, was surely bound to flourish. The Shakespeare Hut’s galas, held every year on an April Saturday evening as close as possible to Shakespeare’s birthday/death day were complemented throughout the year with a wide range of Shakespearean fragments and other performances and entertainments. Meanwhile, more mainstream and high-profile wartime homages were performed in Shakespeare’s Tercentenary year. On 2 May 1916, a flamboyant, yet tactfully inexpensive, Shakespeare Tercentenary commemorative gala, ‘A Tribute to the Genius of Shakespeare’, took place to mark the Tercentenary at Drury Lane, while over in Bloomsbury the Shakespeare Hut was being built. In its own purpose-built performance space, the Hut was to hold its own, more modest, gala commemorations, for audiences of servicemen, annually from 1917 to 1919. The Drury Lane gala offers a context for the Shakespeare Hut galas, providing an example of the style of commemorative performance that took place during the war. A recursive pattern of commemoration emerges in both, in which commemoration reflects commemoration and public memory of Shakespeare interacts with both public and private memories of war and its losses. In the Drury Lane gala and the Shakespeare Hut productions, too, can be found varying attitudes to cultural value and the treatment of Shakespeare on stage in wartime. Legitimate and popular modes are

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transgressed, gender roles are challenged and the two cases present a contrast between the disappearing spectacle of lateVictorian and Edwardian Shakespeare at Drury Lane and the new, minimalist style represented, through both necessity and design, at the Hut. To commemorate the commemoration, as it were, a lavish souvenir programme for the Drury Lane gala was produced, in the form of a large, opulent hardback book featuring sixty diverse illustrations. Sir George Alexander’s51 annotated copy of this volume52 provides an insight into this performance both as a moment in theatre history and for its own commemorative purposes. In the pages of his copy, Alexander undertook the completion of all the missing lists of performers and volunteers involved in this huge production, an omission for which the printed copy carries an earnest apology; subsequent, cheaper copies include some of Alexander’s additional comments and lists. The copy also contains handwritten Shakespearean quotations and an inscription expressing Alexander’s thoughts on war losses and Shakespeare in wartime. By contrast to the Drury Lane tome, programmes for the Hut galas were ephemeral. Nevertheless, a few rare copies do still survive and, through these simple one-sheet programmes, we can learn much about the Shakespeare Hut performances.53 The Shakespeare Hut’s modest annual Shakespeare galas configured Shakespearean fragments into a production which would ostensibly build morale, showcase the war work of theatrical superstars (such as Ellen Terry, Martin Harvey, Johnston Forbes-Robertson and his wife, Gertrude Elliott) and revive, each year, the Tercentenary ‘spirit’ that the Hut was built to represent. It would also become a stage on which modes and expectations of Shakespearean transmission were quietly transgressed. In the case of the Hut, the delineation of the whole building as a manifest commemoration of Shakespeare leads to a range of impacts on its performance function. On the most literal level, a Shakespearean bias is abundantly clear in the Hut’s general weekly programme of entertainments



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and concept of ‘recreative education’.54 Hut entertainments were often in the form of skits, songs and sketches, speeches, talks and turns. These fragmentary presentations of Shakespeare play with the role of memory in how the audience experiences these most famous words, characters and plots. In the case of these fragments of Shakespeare, Marvin Carlson’s hypothesis of a ‘ghosting’ process is helpful in theorizing the process of recognition that may have affected Shakespearean transmission and reception at the Hut and, to a certain extent, in the pageant and songs of Drury Lane. Carlson writes: 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.55 Where Shakespearean fragments are performed, the reiteration of a potentially familiar text is subverted from its usual course into one where the memory of the audience might reconstruct the ‘whole’ text around each synecdochic fragment, or associate each fragment with an external context (such as a recruitment poster or morale-boosting postcard) and/or receive the entire production as a new text, a sum of its parts. For example, in the 1917 annual Shakespeare Hut gala, scenes from King John featured star actor Russell Thorndike as the king,56 and several other members of this cast had performed in the extremely successful Old Vic production of the same year (1917). The Hut’s Anzac audience are unlikely to have seen this production, though it is certainly not impossible, and they may well have known, or been told on the night, of its being a huge hit. However, regardless of this, Faulconbridge’s rousingly patriotic, if historically inaccurate, lines ‘England never did nor never shall / Lie at the proud

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foot of a conqueror’ (5.3.112–13) and ‘Nought shall make us rue, / If England to itself to rest but true’ (5.3.117–18) would very likely have been familiar, as both were used prolifically in morale-boosting and patriotic materials such as postcards and memorial plaques.57 Such quotations being, therefore, the only text of the play known to many in the Hut’s audience, assumptions of the play’s ‘message’ on war and patriotism are likely to be not ‘remembered’ but entirely constructed from the smallest of fragments. In Thorndyke’s Old Vic production, too, audiences were apt to find wartime allusions in the text and performance. As Gordon Williams writes, spectators at the Old Vic King John ‘thought the line about “Austria’s head” to be a topical interpolation … Faulconbridge’s final speech … “brought the house down”, and the lines were inscribed over the proscenium arch for the remainder of the war’.58 However, at the Hut, the ‘ghost’ of King John that shadows the Hut’s fragments, must also have been affected by the Hut’s particularly limited demographic of young soldiers.59 This process mirrors, too, the recursive process of commemoration in these memorial performances, in which Shakespearean commemorative purposes might be infinitely reflexive in a wartime context of pervasive loss. Both the Drury Lane gala and the Shakespeare Hut gala nights were purported to function as commemorations of Shakespeare. Yet neither could possibly offer such a ‘celebration’ in wartime without tacitly functioning as war commemorations, patriotic expressions or in other senses becoming part of the British wartime performance – and commemorative – landscape. This new environment was troubled by opposing notions of the validity of theatre in times of conspicuous austerity, especially in the capital. The Entertainment Tax (1916) suddenly added up to 50 per cent to the price of tickets to theatre and cinema events, and an increasingly vocal puritanical rhetoric on the frivolity of theatre in wartime began to take hold. In this context, notions of a clear contrast between entertainment and ‘higher’ cultural value began to blur. So-called legitimate theatre struggled to cater for the wartime need for escapism,



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while popular performance and cinema was criticized for its lack of respect for the austere times.60 In examining the textual choices and editorial interventions of the two very different venues’ presentations of Shakespeare as ‘gala’, to varying extents a transgression of the boundary between legitimate and popular theatres of the early twentieth century begins to emerge. The Shakespeare Hut performance culture shows an equivocally multi-modal, democratic approach to directing Shakespeare for a wartime audience. The Drury Lane performance, though, was far less accessible, comprising a ‘complete’ performance of Julius Caesar with a programme of music and Shakespearean pageantry reminiscent of the pre-war SMNT fundraising years. Plans for the staging of the pageant are described in The Observer on 16 April 1916: All the characters will enter the stage at the top of a great staircase. They will walk downstairs and group themselves at the foot. … Celebrated artists will be seen in the various groups, notably Miss Mary Anderson as Hermione, the part she played in her production of The Winter’s Tale at the Lyceum many years ago, and Miss Ellen Terry as Portia.61 This is similar to the pageant presented by socialites at the extravagant Shakespeare Costume Ball in 1911, and must rely on costume and dumbshow to present Shakespeare. Devoid of text, these representations are pure spectacle and their stars remind the audience of those old days at the height of Victorian spectacular Shakespeare. Embedded as it had become in high class social entertainments, as exemplified by the Shakespeare Ball, the pageant is less modally transgressive than that of a variety revue (as in the Shakespeare Hut variety format) in the transmission of Shakespeare in the early-twentiethcentury period. The Shakespeare revues at the Shakespeare Hut overlapped clearly with more popular theatrical modes, most obviously music hall, at least in so far as being characterized by short

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pieces or sketches in succession with a mixture of music and theatrical representation. Perhaps this was paradigmatic of Shakespeare’s vexed position in performance modes and practices as either legitimate or populist during wartime and even before. In late-Victorian and Edwardian critical debates on the relationship between popular performance, especially music hall, and ‘legitimate’ and/or classical theatre, Shakespeare’s weight is thrown around a great deal. Exponents of the validity of music hall as a timeless, populist expression, such as Elizabeth Robins Pennell in the late nineteenth century, argued against notions of the form as lacking the cultural significance of ‘classical’ theatre. Pennell’s notion of ‘variety’ performance as an ancient popular desire62 leads to the argument for music hall – and broader variety entertainments – as itself a legitimate form of cultural expression not to be demoted ‘below’ the classical or legitimate. The merging of Shakespeare and variety at the Shakespeare Hut moves further into a transgression of the legitimate and the popular than does the pageant of the Drury Lane gala. The Hut’s audience of servicemen, at a time when ‘public preference was for bright and informal entertainment’,63 was perhaps perceived as requiring a popularized Shakespeare, which provided a compromise between lighter amusement and a perceived need for ‘quality’ entertainment for the troops.64 Essentially, both the commemorative galas and the smaller productions at the Hut alike respond to the debate on Shakespeare’s popularism at a time when the austerity and patriotism brought by the war collide with aficionados’ need to commemorate Shakespeare. While the pre-war Shakespeare memorial debates had contained a great deal of rhetoric positing Shakespeare as ‘of the people’, the ill-conceived extravagance of the pre-war SMNT events, explored in detail in Chapter 1, had done substantial reputational damage. With the onset of war, the need to present Shakespeare as a popular as well as a culturally ‘elite’ figure was necessary for his use by recruitment agencies of the government as much as for the Tercentenary memorial exponents. The idea of



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commemoration through performance produced, at Drury Lane in 1916 and at the Shakespeare Hut for the next three years, very different results. While the Drury Lane gala was, in many ways, a last hurrah for the spectacular Shakespeare of the pre-war decades, the limitations of the performance facilities at the Shakespeare Hut gave rise to a stripped-down Shakespeare that bridged the gap between the avant-garde and the austere, the ‘original’ and the modern. Nevertheless, these galas, commemorating as they did a civilian in wartime, both produced a recursive commemorative effect, whereby the act of ‘remembering’ Shakespeare reflects the wartime environment of commemoration and loss in which the events took place. Infinitely reflexive, these acts of public remembrance beget each other and become inextricable. Drury Lane’s spectacle and the Shakespeare Hut’s modesty both aspired to represent a version of Shakespeare that honoured a nation’s ‘memory’ of a figure bound so tightly to English national identity as to have become almost synonymous with England. In wartime especially, this would inevitably lead to any commemoration of the man and his work becoming as much an expression of national identity. Yet the Anzac troops we are about to meet in Chapter 3 or the suffragists who dominated the creative direction at the Hut, who we shall meet in Chapter 4, provide a glimpse of changes to come in the redefinition of what it meant to be English and ‘remembering’ Shakespeare. The Shakespeare Hut was a site of wartime de- and re-constructions of Shakespeare, an intersection, even amalgamation, of the performance and the commemoration of Shakespeare as an expression of wartime patriotism and commemoration.

3 Performing Englishness: The Shakespeare Hut for Anzacs

‘A Fit Theme for Shakespeare’, proclaims the caption to the cover photograph for the YMCA’s YM magazine April 1916 special issue. The image, though, does not depict the performance of a play, a parade or a gala; it shows the first Anzac Day march winding through the streets of London on 25 April: ‘Anzacs on their way to Westminster’.1 The Shakespeare Hut merged national identities, paradoxically, at a key moment of their broader divergence. The Shakespeare Hut was English on the outside, New Zealander on the inside. Its mock-Tudor beams recall Stratford’s iconic Birthplace but, on entering, the Māori greeting ‘Kia Ora’ is emblazoned above the roaring English fireplace. Here is a gift to Anzacs from England that seeks to create a little England within its walls. Yet this is an ‘England’ without any of the messiness of the real nation at war outside, here is the ‘heterotopia … of compensation’ which ‘create[s] a space that is other, another real space, as perfect, as meticulous, as well arranged as ours is messy, ill constructed, and jumbled’.2 A ‘meticulous’ performance of Englishness, represented by Shakespeare, though, was soon merged with another heterotopia, a New Zealand space within. Kia Ora! Welcome to the Shakespeare Hut.

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Shakespeare and Anzac This monument to Shakespeare, albeit a temporary one, became, simultaneously, at least as potent a symbol of New Zealand culture and identity. As such, it can be seen as a unique microcosmic representation of a broader intersection of imperial and Antipodean identities during the war. We must not see the Shakespeare Hut’s Anzac connection as entirely isolated or obscure. While the Hut paired Shakespeare and Anzac in London, over in Australia the celebrations of Shakespeare’s Tercentenary were merging Shakespeare and Anzac in surprising ways. The Sydney ‘Historic Shakespeare Tercentenary Matinee’ (3 May 1916) in aid of the Anzac Day Fund featured Shakespearean extracts and living tableaux which physically ‘entwined’ Shakespeare, Britannia and Anzac. Meanwhile, staging of Shakespearean extracts and performances in the Shakespeare Hut in London may have summoned some of the same associations in the minds of the Anzac spectators there. While the notion of Shakespeare as representing an English ‘race’ is notably absent in contemporary writing (both press and autobiographical) about the Shakespeare Hut, in contrast, this eugenic undertone is pervasive in the rhetoric of the Shakespeare/ Anzac events in Sydney, far from the English ‘motherland’ of the British Empire. At the Sydney New Adelphi Theatre ‘Historic Shakespeare Tercentenary Matinee’, the uncanny intersection of Anzac and Shakespeare commemorations was played out in sharp focus, most notably via the event’s finale, Dulcie Deamer (a Sydney poet but a New Zealander by birth) reading her poem written for the occasion, ‘The Pen and the Sword’.3 The poem is shamelessly jingoistic from the first stanza: Shakespeare! No sun shall ever set on thine undying day – Thou art the soul of England – in her crown the gem of purest ray. The soul of England! Yes, her soul indeed,



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Speaking clear-voiced down the long centuries, The birth-right of all men of British breed, From pole to pole, and on the seven seas, Where’er the British flag, unconquered, undefiled, floats on the taintless breeze.4 This poem, too, typifies the rhetoric of race, of English culture, being exemplified in Shakespeare, as a ‘birthright’ for colonial Australians and New Zealanders, men of ‘British breed’. A sense of an English motherland was a rationale for enlisting and was an important idea to maintain in colonial or ‘Dominion’ troops. However, that imperial identity, especially after Gallipoli and Passchendaele, was at risk of fracture. A new ‘Anzac’ identity was forming. The Shakespeare Hut opened just months after that first Anzac march through London that was ‘a theme fit for Shakespeare’. Later in the poem, Deamer entirely elides Shakespeare and Anzac, involving him in the bravery of fighting men: ‘Spirit of Genius that shall never die, / In all our hero-deeds thou hast thy share, / Trafalgar, Waterloo, Gallipoli’. By adding Gallipoli to the great English victories of the past, Deamer erases the disastrous fumbles of British command that led to the needless extent of the casualties at Gallipoli, as Philip Mead has argued.5 This effects an elision of Shakespeare and Anzac, while re-eliding Antipodean and English heritage and identity (despite asserting the Anzac identity, ‘When Anzac’s deathless heights showed all the world what sons of England’s sons could do and dare’). In fact, Anzac is here subsumed into Englishness. Albeit that Anzac is represented as the dizzying heights of English military prowess, nevertheless, Deamer does not separate Anzac from English identity. Like all the rhetoric asserting England as a racial motherland for New Zealanders and Australians during the war, Deamer ignores Māori and Aboriginal Anzacs entirely, appropriating Shakespeare once again for the imperial project. The Sydney event as a whole became a performance of Anzac merged inextricably with the performance of both ‘Englishness’ (Anzacs as ‘sons of England’s sons’) and empire (‘from Pole to

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Pole and on the seven seas’). Philip Mead has drawn attention to this poem’s naked exploitation in the rhetoric of race and in the new discourse of Anzac and Antipodean identity, in which the ‘patriotic rhetoric of Englishness … is familiar enough’.6 Back in London, the definition of Antipodean ‘home’ peddled by the YMCA in describing its Anzac Huts, the Shakespeare Hut and the large Aldwych Hut for Australians, was dualistic; both the homeland of their birth and the broader, racialized ‘home’ of England herself. The Shakespeare Hut’s function of establishing an England with which Dominion troops could feel a sense of identity also merged with a sense that the Shakespeare Hut could be used to establish a distinctive Anzac space. Thus, while the Deamer poem demonstrates how the Shakespeare–Anzac connection could present Shakespeare as a paragon of an English ‘race’ to which all white imperial Dominions belonged, a different process was at work in London. At the Shakespeare Hut, an alternative association of Shakespeare and Anzac served to appropriate one of the most prized symbols of English cultural dominance as a symbol for a new Anzac identity, which began to edge free from imperial dominance.

An English Hut for Anzacs The Hut was earmarked from the outset for New Zealand Anzacs,7 possibly due to major donor Oswald Stoll’s8 Antipodean roots, becoming known as ‘the club for New Zealand soldiers in London during the 1914–18 war’.9 The Shakespeare Hut was extremely popular, as the previous chapter shows, with hundreds, often thousands, of men staying there every week and the number of beds let annually nearing 100,000.10 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



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Shakespeare as the mark of English national heritage and as a ‘gift’ to – or ‘birthright’ of – these Dominion soldiers.11 There was definitely no question of racial segregation between Māori and New Zealander European/Pākehā12 soldiers at the Hut, reflecting the more advanced attitudes to racial difference and colonial histories in New Zealand by comparison to England at the time. Antipodal newspaper reports often mention Māori soldiers at the Hut as a matter of course. For example, a little anecdote in The Dominion tells of ‘a couple of New Zealanders’ who tipped the Shakespeare Hut waitresses, as they didn’t know these were volunteers. Later the article mentions in passing that the soldiers were Māoris, but this racial designation seems to carry no significance for the writer, who gives it as one example of many in which New Zealanders tipped the Hut waitresses while under this misapprehension due to their desire to be polite and follow English customs. This presents New Zealanders, both Māori and Pākehā, as polite and respectful, part of the frequent narrative that the New Zealanders were extremely well-behaved abroad (whether or not this was always borne out in reality) as well as specifically foreign to England.13 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: 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 Māori 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.14 The fact that the Queen herself served tea to the soldiers was also pointed out in the English papers; clearly this was a

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symbolic gesture of humility in the face of military sacrifice but also part of the frequent festive inversions of the Hut’s space. The New Zealand report specifically highlights, too, the Queen’s conversation with a Māori 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 Māori soldier, as well as the social inversion represented by the Queen serving tea herself, all represent the Shakespeare Hut in the press as a place where New Zealanders would be given very special treatment in return for their loyalty. At the Hut, their homeland would be officially respected both in and of itself and as a key component of empire. For the New Zealanders in the Hut, both Māori and Pākehā, it would seem, this was a New Zealand, God’s Own Country’ space, not an English one. The Hut’s idiosyncratic design, too, 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 (Figure 3.2 and front cover), consists principally of substantial Georgian terraced properties – confounds the notion of its representing a recognizable ‘England’ in any convincing sense. It 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. However, unlike Deamer’s whitewashed version of Anzac, the Shakespeare Hut was a space in which a New Zealand Anzac identity flourished among all soldiers, beyond ethnic divides. Images of the Lounge in promotional materials



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FIGURE 3.1 The Shakespeare Hut Lounge, photograph. Album of Photographs of the Shakespeare Hut, © YMCA, reproduced with thanks to the Cadbury Research Library. Photographs by Henry T. Brice. The Archive of the National Council of YMCAs (Young Men’s Christian Association) held at the Cadbury Research Library: Special Collections, University of Birmingham. TMCA/Q11 Acc 2002/62 pt.

before the Hut’s opening clearly show no sign above the fireplace; yet, in images taken once the Hut is in use, there is a huge ‘Kia Ora’ sign (Figure 3.1). This alteration suggests that this was either painted by the soldiers themselves, requested, or judged to be appropriate by the NZYMCA. Whichever the truth may have been, the choice of welcome, to identify the Hut as ‘home’ was not English – or Shakespearean – nor even some generic welcome to New Zealand, but a Māori greeting, re-designating the space as New Zealander not English. In the YMCA’s guide booklet for New Zealand servicemen arriving in London, Blighty, there are two images to tempt them to the Hut, ‘where most of the New Zealanders on leave are to be found’;15 one shows the mock-Tudor exterior, surrounded by trees in full leaf, the other, on the same page, shows the lounge

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with its ‘Kia Ora’ sign, full of comforts and Anzac friends (Figure 3.1).16 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 W. Charles Waymouth and was to be the grandest YMCA hut ever built. The extensive external beams were a deliberate design feature, intended to produce a mock-Tudor style, signposting the Hut’s link to Shakespeare and ‘his England’. In a letter to Gollancz as early as March 1916, the YMCA’s Basil Yeaxlee is already proud of Waymouth’s concept, pointing out that ‘he has provided in the elevation for Tudor touches’.17 Indeed, as soon as the Hut scheme was made public, the idea of the Shakespeare Hut as an architectural homage to Shakespeare’s age was becoming firmly entrenched, with newspapers frequently pointing out its ‘Elizabethan style’.18 As we can see from surviving photographs of the Hut (see Figure 3.2 and front cover), mock-Tudor beams adorned all the external walls. Waymouth’s deliberate attempt at ‘Elizabethan style’ renders the Shakespeare Hut a stage set of the past, rather than just a functional, immediate space such as was provided by the other YMCA buildings. In this way, it presented its transient Anzac residents with a unique package of English ‘heritage’. Further, the Hut, by virtue of its very design as a space for Dominion soldiers to experience ‘Merrie Old England’, explicitly situates Shakespeare as central to the motherland myth. Its commemorative function becomes more than a monument to Shakespeare, closer to a monument to a particular notion of Englishness. The overall effect is quite unique and comes together as a quasi-reconstruction, just four years after the ‘reconstructed’ Tudor buildings of the Shakespeare’s England exhibition. While the evidence verifies that the ‘Tudor touches’ were deliberate, no mention is given of any specific building that provided inspiration, the Shakespeare Hut looks startlingly like Shakespeare’s Birthplace, a place of pilgrimage in Stratford-upon-Avon since its purchase ‘for the nation’ in the mid-nineteenth century. The external



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FIGURE 3.2 The Shakespeare Hut Exterior, photograph. Album of Photographs of the Shakespeare Hut c. 1916, ©YMCA, reproduced with thanks to the Cadbury Research Library. Photographs by Henry T. Brice. The Archive of the National Council of YMCAs (Young Men’s Christian Association) held at the Cadbury Research Library: Special Collections, University of Birmingham. TMCA/Q11 Acc 2002/62 pt.

chimney, the pattern of the beams (with symmetrical diagonal decorative pieces), the multiple gables and leaded windows all pay homage to the Birthplace’s iconic image (see front cover and Figure 3.2). Julia Thomas, who has made an extensive study of the Birthplace myth, notes in particular the building’s imperial significance: The myth of this building contributed to the ‘myth’ of Shakespeare: its location in the heart of England conveniently confirmed Shakespeare’s role as a national poet, while its status as a burgeoning tourist site, which attracted visitors from around the globe, provided proof of Shakespeare’s universal (and imperial) appeal.19

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The Stratfordian image of the Hut established a direct connection between this Shakespearean construction in London through the English countryside to Shakespeare’s own home town, separating him from the urban reality of wartime London. Shakespeare is located instead in the pastoral idyll of England’s green and pleasant land, that motherland presented as under threat from the modern militarism of the enemy and in need of defence. Outside, then, the Shakespeare Hut presented an anachronistic appearance. Its ‘Tudor’ beams were brand new and painted black, its chimneys bright and clean. Modelled on Stratford’s famous Tudor architecture, here is ‘Shakespeare’s England’ in London once again, but this time tailored for a very specific purpose. However, if we think of the Shakespeare Hut as a heterotopia, or a space in which reality is left behind, a liminal space not quite part of ‘real’ life, there are two layers to this. One is a pastoral, historical (or rather nostalgic) heterotopic space: England’s Golden Age and most beautiful idyllic image placed incongruously in central London. This is not only evident in the architecture; a pastoral idyll was often performed within its walls for its Anzac soldiers, enjoying, in their brief respite, the tourist treatment. The second heterotopia, however, is a New Zealander one. Rhetoric in the New Zealand press consistently referred to the Hut as a home from home, a New Zealand space in London. This means that, entering the building, we find the burgeoning Anzac identity aligned with ‘God’s Own Country’ back home, yet situated within the English motherland or British Empire. The Hut’s design was an assertion of a very positive, touristic presentation, or rather performance, of Englishness for the Anzac men. Soldiers staying at the Shakespeare Hut were also given the opportunity to be driven in sightseeing parties to Stratford and taken to the Birthplace, an experience that can be found described in a few surviving first-hand accounts. As Mark Houlahan has noted, Harry Hall, a New Zealander, writes of such a trip to Stratford, where he ‘had lunch in the town and then went over to the house of Shakespeare’s birth place and



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then to the village church where Shakespeare is I think … went about a mile out of town and went over to Anne Hattaway’s [sic] cottage’.20 Hall follows the standard tour, still very similar by the time Barbara Hodgdon undertook her critical tour through 1990s Stratford for The Shakespeare Trade, ‘beginning in the town … one proceeds from the Birthplace to Nash’s House and New Place and then to Hall’s Croft; leaving town, the bus stops at Anne Hathaway’s Cottage’.21 Shakespeare’s ‘map[ping]’ onto Stratford, then, stays relatively unchanged over time, ever since the Birthplace was bought and recognized as a national heritage site by the Shakespeare Birthday Society (the precursor of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust). This tour – and the Birthday procession that takes place annually (even in wartime) – is not really concerned with theatre but rather enacts a pilgrimage to the places that represent the birth, marriage and death of Shakespeare the man (or saint), as Hodgdon observes.22 However, another New Zealand Anzac, Francis Bennett, writes in more reflective detail of his experiences at Stratford, having arrived for leave in England and found that ‘leave in London for O/Rs invariably meant booking in at the Shakespeare Hut’.23 He specifically describes being taken to Stratford 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.’24 Bennett establishes immediately that, for him, this would be a significant journey, ‘a pilgrimage’, which he explains as due to his lifelong interest in Shakespeare. He writes of his awakening to a love of poetry and, in particular, Shakespeare, led by his inspirational English teacher, Mr Rockel, who ‘loved English poetry and … easily taught me to love it too. … Out in a back paddock I would stand on a hillside and with dramatic gestures deliver Mark Anthony’s oration to the mildly surprised sheep.’25 With great humour, Bennett establishes his boyhood enthusiasm for Shakespeare. His story also sets the roots of his love of Shakespeare back in rural New Zealand.

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Bennett’s trip to Stratford is given significant space in his wartime recollections, and provides a useful perspective on the attitude of Stratford to its Anzac visitors. Bennett describes several of his comrades answering the Shakespeare questions put to them by their scholarly guide, though he singles himself out as a particular fan. Bennett describes the soldiers’ escort at Stratford as a ‘scholar’ rather than a tourist guide and recounts with some nostalgia his encounters with this aged Shakespearean: At Stratford we were taken in charge by an elderly whitehaired Shakespeare scholar who was more interested in the poet than the sights … He obviously expected no high academic standard in colonial troops, but he served them well, putting himself pleasantly at their service. At the same time he was a subtle examiner, studying our faces, asking questions, probing for those who knew some Shakespeare. Several did but no one else in our little group of a dozen had sat under Mr Rockel in the fourth form. My interest must have been obvious. At his request, I finished some of his quotations. Thereafter I became his protégé. He took me into another room and showed me some precious folios.26 The scholar’s apparent expectation of ‘no high academic standard in colonial troops’ is a wry remark, revealing his sense that he and his fellow New Zealanders were seen as very much foreign and treated with a certain patronizing awareness of their status as ‘colonials’ as opposed to strictly British men. However, Bennett does not appear to have been seriously offended – rather amused, in fact – by this and enjoys a return to schooldays as this academic’s ‘protégé’.27 Bennett seems pleased with the scholar’s interest in him but is quick to state that the material interest of the ‘precious folios’ did not hold much significance, for ‘though I was a Shakespeare enthusiast I was no Shakespeare scholar and I understood little of this’.28 In fact, just as Hodgdon points out regarding much more modern tours,29 the text and drama of Shakespeare is



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often of less interest to the Stratford tourist, who instead seeks to make a connection with the poet’s life and the spaces in which he physically resided. This focus on the dwelling place, rather than the texts or drama, of Shakespeare is borne out by the incident that is much more important to Bennett, in which he encounters the famous ‘birth room’ window: Later, we were 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. I noticed that a nearby name was that of Walter Scott. At the time I thought little of it – a signature such as might go in an autograph book. But the mystery of how it got there has deepened with time and greater knowledge. It is an honour usually reserved for the famous, the only qualification being merit. 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.30 Bennett ponders whether the ‘white-haired Shakespeare scholar’ saw presenting Bennett with the opportunity to add his name to the famous window as a means by which to honour New Zealand’s contribution to the war effort. It only strikes him in hindsight the significance of the act, ‘the mystery of how [the signature] got there’. At the Hut, Shakespeare was presented to the New Zealanders as representing the ‘best’ of England, and the Hut became a heterotopian space in which Englishness and Anzac identities were asserted, performed and even negotiated. Bennett’s charabanc sightseeing trip to Stratford forms a part of that project but extends the ‘Old England’ into the ‘real world’ of Stratford’s famous Tudor architecture and all the way to the Shakespeare Birthplace, where Bennett left his Anzac mark on the window pane. Bennett clearly interprets the honour as

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being accorded not due to his status as the scholar’s ‘protégé’ of the day but as a representative of the Anzac force that was helping to win the war; the ‘New Zealanders had captured the walled town of Le Quesnoy’, a famous Anzac victory, in which the French town, under occupation since 1914, was freed on 4 November 1918, just a matter of days before the Armistice.31 This places Bennett’s visit in late 1918, though he does not mention that it was after peace had been achieved, so perhaps the trip really was in that last few days of war. Bennett asserts the legitimacy of his anecdote, that it is not mere memory but material evidence, ‘the signature was made and is still there as a recent investigation (and photo) has verified’.32 The window itself is still on display at the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, with images of the panes reproduced so that visitors can decipher the numerous celebrities who made their mark there over many years. In one corner pane, near (as Bennett mentions) to Sir Walter Scott’s signature, does appear to be the name ‘Bennett’ legible among the others.33 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. Specifically, this is a Shakespeare Hut resident New Zealander’s name among the ‘great and good’ of British history, all contributing to a developing relic of Shakespeare. While the famous window is now in its own museum space, its fascination, as the site of so many physical marks of legendary writers, actors and other celebrities, remains the same. The signatures verify and sanctify the ‘pilgrimage’; the Stratford tourist – here, the Anzac fresh from fighting in an imperial cause – is following not only on the trail of Shakespeare but also in the hallowed footsteps of a canon of mythmakers in themselves. Legitimizing each new visitor’s pilgrimage, the autographed window is also an assertion of ownership, what Nicola Watson calls ‘the sanctioned practice of graffiti’.34 This was not seen as an act of vandalism; on the contrary, it was a statement of bardolatry, a statement of future generations’ ownership of Shakespeare via his domestic space and an assertion of identity as part of



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Shakespeare’s England. This is the narrative in the context of which Bennett was invited to add his name and, as an older man reflecting back, he saw this as an act of national gratitude to New Zealand, an invitation to make New Zealand’s mark on Englishness, as opposed to New Zealand being expected to remain ‘English’. Though he does acknowledge the sightseeing trips to Stratford and other Shakespearean moments related to the Shakespeare Hut, Mark Houlahan has argued that the soldiers’ general lack of engagement with Shakespeare confounded the intentions and expectations of the Hut founders.35 However, there is in fact little evidence that engaging New Zealanders with Shakespeare was the core ‘intent’ at all. The building symbolized Englishness via Shakespeare and yes, Shakespearean activities were core to its entertainments. However, the ‘intent’ was to harness ‘the patriotism and humanity of Shakespeare’36 to present a positive impression of Britain to its Dominion soldiers, rather than specifically to convert them into Shakespeare aficionados. In fact, as this chapter will show later on, some performances of Englishness were not of Shakespeare at all, but rather of a more general sense of English pastoral folk culture, such as the Mummers’ Play, or somewhat parental benevolence, such as providing each soldier with a present from Father Christmas under a Christmas tree. As an extensive article on the Shakespeare Hut in the Graphic shows, soldiers were encouraged to see the Shakespeare Hut as ‘home, not school’,37 and there was little intent to push the Shakespearean agenda on soldiers but rather to entertain them with it and to provide Shakespeare as a benevolent representative of paternalistic national identity, perhaps imperialism, and the Hut as the domestic, maternal counterpart, providing ‘home’. Gollancz’s inspiration for the Shakespeare Hut, as Chapter 1 explains, is not entirely clear from the surviving evidence. However, his serving on the YMCA Education Committee is argued to be the key factor by the YMCA itself as we have seen.38 George W. W. B. Hughes, the Hut’s NZYMCA Manager writes

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about working with an academic on the Education Committee, too, which therefore is very likely to have been Gollancz. Here, though, Bennett shows how the excursion for the troops is not simply to help them while away the time or even just to see the sights, but rather to be educated in Shakespeare as part of a wider project of establishing the ‘colonial’ troops as clearly ‘English’ in their loyalties and identities. The YM magazine’s piece covering the announcement of the Shakespeare Hut plan clearly has this idea in mind: We purpose making of [the Shakespeare Hut] something that will remind men not only of what Shakespeare has been to England, but of what the spirit that was in him will make of her as each man finds anew his place in lifelong service of the State. Soldiers passing through the city on their way to and from the front will find in the Shakespeare Hut rest, food, good comradeship, and the reminder that they fight for Shakespeare’s England.39 This many-layered heterotopia elides a little bit of New Zealand and a little bit of Stratford – and a theatre, and men away at war. It is outside of normality, a unique space. That lengthy description in the Graphic briefly mentioned earlier was written by Margaret Chute and published in 1916. It playfully dubs the Shakespeare Hut ‘the Eighteenpenny Hotel’ and provides a vivid (if openly biased) description of what we might have experienced on entering the Hut. This is a moment to pause this interpretation of the space and simply to indulge in the sights and sounds of the Hut in its heyday: Teatime on Saturday, the busiest day in the week. Once inside the swing doors, an insistent hum of voices, tramp of booted feet and cheerful rattle of crockery and cutlery. On the left, inside the main door, row upon row of tables, each laid temptingly and bearing a jar of bronze chrysanthemums. On the right, many comfortable chairs scattered about, but chiefly assembled in a triple ring round



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the huge open fire, in its old-fashioned red-brick grate, that roars and crackles joyfully with the Navy – represented by two grinning seaman – as stokers-in-chief. … Close to the fire and its toasting crowd a table bears a hefty gramophone, which is chortling forth some joyous song, watched by an Australian with a wary eye and a swift hand. Not ten yards away a grand piano is surrounded by a mob listening to the good old home-tunes strummed by somebody who is obviously determined to drown the ‘infernal machine’ in the near distance or perish in the attempt. Smoke is everywhere; noise, of the liveliest kind, predominates, but who cares? The Eighteenpenny Hotel owes the greater part of its charm to the fact it is home, not school.40 This is only part of a full page-long description of the Hut, extolling its virtues at every turn and always stressing the ‘joyous’ homeliness of its interior atmosphere. The Graphic was a British paper and the description explains what is inside the Hut with the tone of revealing the secret glory inside to those who might pass by and be curious about this idiosyncratic building. It is scarcely necessary to point out the overstated positivity with which Chute presents the inside of the Hut and its contrast to a cold world outside. There are several other descriptions of the Shakespeare Hut and its advantages to be found in New Zealand newspapers throughout the war, particularly through YMCA press releases, from which we can read how the Hut was marketed to the general public in the resident Anzacs’ home country. These, too, echo the sentiments found in the Graphic’s homely, ‘cosy’ description of a fun and welcoming space. Chute clearly aims to present the Hut as a home from home for New Zealanders, in which they can find a little bit of their own country away from the bustle of London. Even after the war was over, these articles are still prevalent. The Shakespeare Hut [is] the centre of social life for the Dominion troops … the ‘boys’ are looked after at the

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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.41 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. Here, the Shakespeare becomes a surrogate domestic space; it is ‘home’. Back in New Zealand, a film of life at the Hut (now sadly no longer extant), Diggers in Blighty, showed ‘the Shakespeare Hut, a veritable Mecca of the Digger while in London’ and toured the country to show those back home how wellcared-for their brothers, sons, fathers, husbands were over in old Blighty.42 Similarly, an anonymous writer in the Evening Post, with the pseudonym ‘Triangle’ showing their YMCA affiliation,43 provides a detailed description of the welcome to be found at the Shakespeare Hut with even more particular reference to its New Zealand identity. The article, entitled ‘Shakespeare YMCA Hut: Making the Home Atmosphere’, like Chute’s Graphic piece, begins with a cold London outside, to create maximum contrast with the warm and homely interior: It is an autumn day, bleak, cold, dreary – the greyest of grey English days – one such as New Zealanders at home seldom experience. Muffled in their great coats, approach a group of New Zealand soldiers just arrived from one of the convalescent camps. We know them by their erect, manly bearing, their cheery self-confidence, as they enquire: ‘And this is the New Zealand YM hut, sir? Well! It it’s “some”



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hut outside, at anyrate [sic]. Why! I have seen nothing so inviting since reaching Waterloo station’. ‘Good old New Zealand! Shake hands. It’s good to welcome you. Come inside!’44 The cold, dreary English weather, pointed out as so unknown to New Zealanders, highlights their foreignness in the capital, where nothing has seemed so ‘inviting’ since they arrived. The YMCA, as the next chapter will explore, focused upon keeping the men safe from the perils and temptations, as they perceived them, on the streets of London. Their articles reflect this in marketing the Shakespeare Hut as the only safe and cosy place to be for these boys from the Antipodes. An article by ‘Triangle’ goes on to give a lengthy and detailed account of (what is presented as) a typical arrival of New Zealanders new to the capital: They enter, and view with interest the cosy surroundings. ‘Look, Will, fires, by Jove! That looks good at anyrate [sic].’ With expressions of delight at the homelike appearance of the hut, they make their way in a long queue to the bookingdesk. ... ‘Hello, New Zealand, good luck to you. Remember Tauherenikan?’ … ‘What Mr. _________. Well, I am glad to see you. … What times we had in those days, good old New Zealand.’ And so on, repeated ad lib, as the New Zealand soldiers recognize each their friends from France, from Hornchurch, from Sling, and various other camps.45 This article is dated October 1917, by which time the Shakespeare Hut was well known in New Zealand, cropping up very regularly in New Zealand papers throughout the remainder of the war. The specific and frequent references to New Zealand place names, New Zealand Anzac locations (Hornchurch was a base near Romford, Essex) and frequent association of the word ‘home’ with both New Zealand and the Hut deliberately build a clear image of a nationalized space. ‘Good old New Zealand! Wonder whether we’ll ever

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return,’ one soldier is heard to say, ‘And so we meet friend after friend, all keen on hearing the latest from home.’ Triangle identifies himself as a New Zealander around halfway into his piece: ‘What an experience it is for us who have left New Zealand to serve New Zealand’s sons here in the Homeland and France.’ The frequent repetition of this idea of ‘home’ left behind portrays a very specific identity, a foreign one to the London found outside the Hut. Nevertheless, the writer returns to the imperial notion, referring to Britain as ‘the Homeland’, despite a little New Zealand inside the Hut that is clearly foreign to the culture – and weather – outside, still holding onto the imperial message of Britain as the ‘Homeland’ for which these men fight. However, Triangle soon reasserts the New Zealanders as happiest within the New Zealand home of the Hut, protected from the rather dreary Britain outside: Yes, it is a grey day outside, but in the hut we are as happy as sandboys, talking over old times, and discussing what is in store for us in the days ahead, and just at this point, the gramophone sings ‘The Little Grey Home in the West’. We sit and listen quietly until the last note dies away. We sigh as our thoughts revert to our own homes and dear ones. Then the piano has a turn, and one of the ladies with a fine contralto voice sings ‘The Long, Long Trail’. Everything to-day seems to remind us of home – it has been a long, long trail, and the end is not yet, but we look forward to the return.46 The New Zealanders are ‘happy’ inside the Shakespeare Hut for a few minutes, until they are brought by the sentimental songs back to their homesickness, a state frequently reiterated in this article, less jovial in tone than the Graphic piece. The outside of the Hut, in both these pieces, is barely referenced (other than it being ‘some hut!’); these, as other press descriptions after the initial flurry of opening excitement in 1916, give no reference to the Hut’s ‘Tudor touches’47 or ‘Elizabethan



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style’48. They do not mention Shakespeare himself, as if the name was now annexed to the Hut, with all commemorative significance or Shakespeare-themed entertainments (which we know there were) not part of the myth of a New Zealand heterotopia found within. Shakespeare’s name becomes only a shortened nickname for the Hut itself. In presenting the place as New Zealander, the Englishness of its exterior design is less significant than the real ‘home’ found within. One account, published in various forms in local newspapers across New Zealand, describes the Shakespeare Hut and the YMCA work in London. The writer begins with his journey through England: We came to London through country that was aglow with the touch of early Spring – fields that a fortnight earlier had been under snow were ankle deep in grass, the matchless English trees were donning their summer leafage, the winding lanes were made picturesque by budding hedges and primroses by the million, and the fruit trees blossomed massively in token of a bountiful yield. Truly a country worth fighting for.49 This hyperbolic description of England’s ‘bounty’ needs no explanation. The superlative nature of England’s physical beauty was a trope invoked time and again in propaganda and enlistment materials, especially in the Dominion and Allied countries. The fertility and timeless seasonal change described here shows hope for the future, ‘a bountiful yield’, and it is with this passage that the reader is primed to hear of the wonderful English welcome at the Shakespeare Hut. ‘From Waterloo station we were piloted by a YMCA officer through the mysteries of the wonderful tube system,’ he continues, ‘to the Shakespeare Hut. … The New Zealanders are very proud of their London Headquarters.’50 Moving into a description of the happy pursuits of the men, the next section, ‘Memories of Home’ gives a mention to the Hut’s comforts, conveniences and, especially, its women workers. ‘There is something about the

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Hut’, he writes, ‘that cannot be described in writing. It is like the difference between a grand house without the atmosphere of a home and a place which however plainly furnished has yet the homely touch.’ It is, apparently, the ‘vivacious Englishwomen’, in their ‘rose-tinted overalls and close-fitting black silk caps,’51 who provide this magical homeliness to which I will return in Chapter 4. The Shakespeare Hut is presented as a pastoral, nostalgic alternative world in which to forget London’s modernity but also, we must assume, to help forget the annihilated countryside of the front lines. The destruction of the pastoral idyll and with it the safety, jollity and festivity of the Arcadian myth was entirely obliterated at the Somme and again at Passchendaele. The Hut assertively (re)creates pastoral ‘jollity’ within a mock-Tudor building and its leafy garden. The rhetoric surrounding the Hut is filled with pastoral cliché and ‘old English’ nostalgia, a trope found often in Anzac autobiographical accounts of their leave in England (albeit that those that were published and survived are hard to verify as independent of UK government propaganda). As Chapter 1 examined, in the context of Shakespeare as war propaganda, we might understand the Shakespeare Hut, too, simply as a propaganda object, yet this would 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, Israel 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).



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In addition, then, to their obvious purpose as pragmatic shelters, the key function of YMCA huts was to provide what the organization perceived to be a healthy environment, both physically and morally speaking. As we have seen, 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, ‘hundreds of New Zealand sons have been kept straight by the fine accommodation at our hut’.52 The YMCA’s wholesome image was directed to all Allied soldiers during the war, but in relation to Dominion 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 a welcoming and attractive pastoral heritage. Rather than simply tying the Shakespeare Hut to the patriotic Shakespeare who called young men to war through stark quotations on recruitment posters, as Chapter 2 explored, the Shakespeare of the Hut was benevolent and familial.

The Mummers’ Play, Christmas Day, 1916 ‘If Shakespeare had made his way to Keppel Street any time between noon and ten,’ writes theatre critic S. R. Littlewood, ‘he would have found the big hall decked just as Olivia’s kitchen would have been, and filled with as jolly a crowd of fellows as ever “waked the night-owl with a catch” in the days of Sir Toby and Sir Andrew – perhaps a good deal jollier!’53 Christmas 1916 was an elaborate and enthusiastic celebration for the Anzacs at the Hut. No fear was there here of a Christmas

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excluded from the officers’ mess, freezing on the front lines. Those New Zealanders fortunate to have their leave weeks fall over Christmas and those recovering from injury who found themselves in London had a very different Christmas Day, one worthy, apparently, of Shakespeare himself. The highlight of this festive day was the performance of a Mummers’ Play, representing a ‘true’ early modern Christmas, invoking, as ever, Shakespeare as the benevolent patron saint of the Hut’s users. Once again, performance in the Hut is festive, merging commemoration with a festivity that separates the inside of the Hut from the outside in time, place and space. Christmas 1916 is the easiest of times to view the Hut as definitive heterotopia, an alternative reality of time and place inside the Hut’s walls. The outside mock-Tudor blocks out the twentiethcentury wartime London, the inside says ‘Kia Ora’ to a little corner of New Zealand. Meanwhile, the performances inside the Hut establish an English festive moment; be it the humour of the music hall or a perpetual gala of bardolatry, this is a space in which it is always showtime. Christmas and Shakespeare’s anniversary in April were annual moments when this heterotopic, dual nationality, anachronistic building fully fledged into a space of total festivity and separated itself still further from the reality of wartime. The rest of this chapter will focus on one particular Christmas, in the Hut’s inaugural and Shakespeare’s Tercentenary year of 1916, when a Mummers’ Play was organized for and performed by the troops at the Hut. English pastoral festivities – or, at least, a version presented by folklore aficionados of the early twentieth century – presented the Anzacs staying at the Hut with Shakespeare’s Christmas, complete with performance, dance and games. However, the Mummers’ Play also functioned as an acknowledgement of war, a way to reconstruct the traumatic experience instead as festive, humorous and antique. St George must fight the Turkish Knight at the Shakespeare Hut, the year after the disastrous Gallipoli landings. The story of how the Mummers’ Play came to be performed at the Hut, in what would appear to be the first recorded



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performance of it in London, is fairly clear. In a letter dated 13 November 1916, S. R. Littlewood, drama critic for the Daily Chronicle and a founding member of the Critics’ Circle, wrote to Israel Gollancz with an unusual idea: It has struck me on my way home that it would be an excellent idea for the Shakespeare Hut to have the old ‘Mummers Play’ produced there at Christmas time. It is just what would amuse the soldiers – especially the fight between St George and ‘the Slasher’ – and it is a [story] that Shakespeare must have seen as a boy, whether or not my belief is true that it may have helped to suggest the clowns play in the Dream.54 Littlewood identifies the Mummers’ Play as specifically appropriate for the soldiers due to the Slasher archetype and the figure of St George (to which I shall return later). This is the first reason for his proposal. However, he then goes on to suggest that its appropriateness is also due to the assumption that Shakespeare ‘must have seen’ the Mummers’ Play ‘as a boy’, presenting it as another way to access an authentic Shakespeare for the Hut’s users and solidify the Shakespeare Hut’s homage to the national poet by attempting to recreate or relive his experiences. Shakespeare’s manifestation at the Hut is vexed. Both absent and present, he is hard to pin down, even when the soldiers, as we have seen, are transported to the Birthplace and the grave to occupy Shakespeare’s footsteps, to see and visit places delineated as authentically Shakespearean spaces. The Hut itself lacks this Shakespearean special authenticity; its site has no geographical marker of Shakespeare. It does not stand where he once stood, but rather where his memorial would (or so the SMNT thought) one day stand. Therefore, if its authenticity as a Shakespearean monument was to be established, its activities must accomplish this without the benefit of mystical spaces once occupied by the man himself. This must be a pragmatic construction of Shakespearean space and its performances were the key.

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That Shakespeare in fact saw a Mummers’ Play in a form we now recognize is rather unlikely. In fact, there are no texts of mumming plays themselves until the eighteenth century, though the traditions of ‘mumming’ can be traced back at least to the late medieval period. Scholars continue to debate how far what we now identify as Mummers’ or mumming plays resemble the performances and practices of the late medieval and early modern age from which they were once assumed to hail. However, here, in exploring the Mummers’ Play at the Shakespeare Hut, what matters is to what point scholarship and popular awareness of mumming had arrived as of Christmas 1916 and what, therefore, the practice represented at that moment. In 1916, in the context of the late-Victorian and Edwardian craze for folkloric nostalgia, mumming was seen as something firmly of ‘Shakespeare’s England’. There were scholars and critics whose interest in, and research of, mumming practices were central to the interest the practice had garnered in the early twentieth century: E. K. Chambers, Reginald Tiddy (the most specialized scholar on mumming) and, significantly, Fairman Ordish, chairman of the London Shakespeare League. Littlewood’s letter suggests he and Ordish would be able to provide the material needed to put the Mummers’ Play on at the Shakespeare Hut: ‘If you would care for it I should be most happy to work up something suitable from the thirty or so versions – or perhaps Fairman Ordish … could do something.’55 Littlewood’s ‘thirty or so versions’ suggest that exact number collected, but not published, by Tiddy before he went to war. The letter, dated 13 November 1916, was written three months after Tiddy was killed in action. The suggestion of the influence of the mummers on Shakespeare, too, is not Littlewood’s’ ‘belief’ but a result of work by Tiddy among others in the field. Reginald Tiddy, though, had died at the Somme on 10 August 1916, the day before the opening of the Shakespeare Hut.56 Tiddy’s loss at the Somme may be coincidental to the decision to feature mumming at the Shakespeare Hut, but it was a small area, academically speaking, and this makes it extremely puzzling



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that he is not mentioned at all in Littlewood’s letter to Gollancz or in Littlewood’s review of the occasion. However, Tiddy’s unequalled influence in the field suggests his loss may have been connected to the idea for the Mummer’s Play at the Hut and adds a tangible poignancy to this choice of entertainment. Academic interest in mumming was, in the Shakespeare Hut’s time, very new but any scholarly approach, particularly that led by Tiddy, did not detract from the nostalgia associated with it. Far from it, these studies were part of a folklore revival that was both fashionable among intellectuals and artists of the early twentieth century and linked closely with idealistic new approaches to education, academia, music and the arts more widely. Israel Gollancz himself summered at Steep, Hampshire, in a house called Hillcroft, which was associated with Bedales,57 the nation’s first and most famous co-educational, progressive school, while Arnold Dolmetsch, the folk and early music maestro, worked with both Bedales and the London and Stratford Shakespeareans.58 Linking Shakespeare with mumming is not a simply ‘throwback’ to ‘Merrie Old England’ in practice. Far more specifically, it links Shakespeare into a ‘natural’, pastoral English heritage but an idealized and potentially historically inaccurate one. However, this idea, presented by progressive idealism emerging through institutions, by academics such as Tiddy, by the Folklore Society and now by the Shakespeare Hut, dreams of a lost English idyll that can, somehow, be recaptured. The Elizabethan moment, with its pivotal shift into organized drama, is seen as the high point after which urbanization destroys England’s pastoral idyll. As Tiddy sees it: The Elizabethans achieved marvels in satisfying their two masters, the gallants and the groundlings, blending the classical and the traditional by the fusing power of their amazing vitality. But in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries growth of towns were perpetually dragging the classes apart. For in a town a man cannot – as in a village he must – know every one. And as soon as he can no longer

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know every one, communal life of the villages died very hard.59 This idyll, in which performance levelled classes and inequalities (apparently), is shattered by urbanization and the march of modernity. That there was once a more harmonious time, in which festivity and folk custom closed the chasm of class, is alluring as part of a constructed utopian past for England, represented by Shakespeare. Yet this mythmaking goes back as far as the early modern period itself, as Francois Laroque argues, when both Elizabeth I and James I encouraged certain festivities as a means by which to attempt to garner popularity among the labouring classes and prevent themselves becoming associated with an oppressive or modernizing aristocracy.60 As Laroque further articulates: The idea that festivals, poor and rich alike, draw upon the same mythical and imaginary stock is an attractive one, for it could blow apart the watertight compartments set up by ideologies and call into question the idea that the class struggle is universal.61 The nostalgia for such an ideal and therefore the construction of an early modern – or premodern – Renaissance Englishness that represents a simpler, more harmonious world is pervasive in the SMNT’s pre-war rhetoric, as Chapter 1 shows. It also directly inputs into the physical design and activities within the Shakespeare Hut. The desperation for a lost idyll is heightened but also made more fantastic by the realities of mechanized, modern warfare and, moreover, the impression of a levelling of class is necessary in any propaganda aimed at securing loyalty in the rank and file troops. Yet it is this idyll that is sought by the mumming at the Hut in 1916. However, while the early academic discourse of folklore study displays some egalitarianism on one hand (a love of the ‘simple’ pastoral world), yet, on the other, it only widens intellectual and class difference by establishing a separate



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world of the ‘rustic’ that is only adopted by the pastoral intellectual where it happens to coincide. Nevertheless, within the Hut, there was certainly a degree of levelling achieved by comparison to military experience on the lines. Images of life in the Shakespeare Hut clearly show officers and enlisted men eating and socializing without division. There was no racial divide or segregation between Māori and Pākehā New Zealanders. Further, though it is true that there were tiered charges to staying at the Hut (cubicles versus dormitories), none of these was more expensive than any serving man might be likely to afford. The ‘communal life’ Tiddy describes in terms of a lost village culture might in some sense be seen to re-emerge in wartime, when there is a need for collaborative, ordered and even ritualistic convention; successful communal living is critical. Yet officers were often still separated for key communal moments such as mealtimes, frequently leading to bitterness among the men – especially at Christmas time. At the Shakespeare Hut, the illusion of rural ‘Merrie Old England’ placed the already communal existence of the soldiers in an idyllic, fantastic environment, symbolized by Shakespeare, lost in a constructed ‘past’ in which all could perform, play and eat together. For the Hut, the Mummers’ Play brought this pastoral, rustic nostalgia and longing into wartime London and presented it as a quintessential ‘English’ – Shakespearean – Christmas experience. Soldiers were presented with the festivities as a gift and encouraged to feel part of a lost and precious English heritage, represented by Shakespeare having partaken, apparently, in the same Christmas when ‘he was a boy’. In his write-up of the Mummers’ Play for YM magazine, Littlewood emphasizes the Shakespearean authenticity alongside the ‘simpl[icity]’ of the play, commenting that ‘it was highly appropriate that this simple-hearted old folk-drama should have been played on ground dedicated to Shakespeare, for he undoubtedly saw it’.62 The Mummers’ Play was the centrepiece of the English Christmas project. The practice had historically – or, at least, since records of the eighteenth century cemented it

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so – been linked with the ancient festivities of spring rebirth and winter festivities. As Laroque explains: At Christmas time, when a Mummers’ play was one of the traditional seasonal entertainments, ‘Old Father Christmas’ would introduce the play. The performance would consist of a number of variations on the central theme of death and resurrection and the name of the chief character would vary from region to region: in place of the madman of the ‘Revesby Sword Play’, we sometimes find Saint George or Saint Patrick or other figures such as ‘King Cole’ or ‘Captain Slasher’.63 However, Laroque cites Chambers and Chambers cites Ordish, who, as we have seen, Littlewood suggests can provide a Mummers’ Play for the Shakespeare Hut. The basis for much subsequent work on folk plays and, in particular, mumming, can be traced to turn of the century. History and heritage both of ‘high’ drama and ‘folk’ customs are being reshaped and retrospectively applied to an earlier time to construct a utopia with which Shakespeare is almost metonymically associated. At the Shakespeare Hut, all its Shakespearean activities, but especially the Christmas Day festivities in 1916, create a microcosm of this utopian time and place but yet they are out of time, out of place. Outside the Hut’s walls is total war and its users are on borrowed time, as is the Hut itself. The Shakespearean England invoked within creates an anachronistic heterotopia and separates that festive day, in the commemorative Hut, from time and place beyond its mockTudor walls. Littlewood’s initial letter shows, too, the way in which the Mummers’ Play was to differ fundamentally from the other performances that provide markers in this book’s narrative of the Shakespeare Hut from its prehistory to its (re)construction. It was not performed by actors or by outsiders at all. It was to be performed by the Hut’s users and by amateur volunteers, as Littlewood explains, ‘the play could be done very simply, by



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amateurs, and with hardly any art at all, and as it has never been done in London before – so far as I know – would be sure to attract attention’.64 Again, the pastoral is inserted into the metropolitan via the Hut. The general tradition of mumming, which certainly can be traced to before Shakespeare’s time, refers to the putting on of dramas or general festive high jinx by, of course, amateurs and often involving the comic-festive ‘invasion’ of neighbours’ homes or a great house or landowner’s home to perform. The common factor of the diverse collection of practices known as ‘folk plays’ is that they are definitively amateur.65 This democratic approach to entertainments was not new to active soldiers. Some soldiers formed their own concert parties at the front lines or even performed Shakespeare; for example, as Ton Hoenselaars has explored, there were several amateur, soldier performances of Henry V in First World War France.66 At the Shakespeare Hut, though, there is no evidence that entertainments were by soldiers but rather for soldiers. Singing and impromptu performance certainly did take place (as both Triangle and Chute’s descriptions reveal), and an image in the YMCA archive shows soldiers from several nations posing on the smaller performance area of the Lounge as if ready to sing.67 However, the theatre was for professionals to give the troops the gift of performance, rather than for troops to express themselves or entertain each other in this way. The Mummers’ Play is the exception. On this festive day, roles are reversed and the troops do the performing. Littlewood, in his initial letter, points out that the Mummers’ Play is particularly suitable for the men of the Hut; ‘it is just what would amuse the soldiers – especially the fight between St George and “the Slasher”’.68 St George features in the Shakespeare Hut’s story several times (to which I shall return shortly); here as a representative of Allied forces fighting the Slasher, tacitly referencing Gallipoli and the prominent role of Anzacs in the Dardanelles campaign more widely. In his subsequent review of the Mummers’ Play, Littlewood asserts the significance of bringing this rural tradition to the capital, portraying it, too, as a lost antiquity:

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But the special event of the Old English Christmas at the Shakespeare hut was the revival of the traditional ‘Mummers’ Play’, with all its store of meaning and wealth of racy humour. For some reason or other the ‘Mummers’ Play’ has not been performed in London within memory – hardly in all England, save for a few old farmhouses, where the village ‘mummers’ still march in, ‘come Christmas’, with their paper ribbons and wooden swords, mouth their rough rhymes, and enact the great fight between St George and ‘The Slasher’.69 Littlewood explains that the play’s comic resurrection, in which St George/the Soldier is revived by the Doctor, ‘takes us right back to the primeval “vegetation myth” of the death and rebirth of the seed’.70 This fantasy of rebirth, Rupert Brook’s ‘richer dust concealed’71 on the battlefields, was to offer comfort to soldiers daily facing and witnessing death. Here, battle is played out in comic catharsis, ‘it was exactly the right thing for the soldier – ‘“mummers”, who fought the singlestick duel with a vigour and skill that no untrained villager could hope to rival.’72 Fighting – and dying – became just a comic, festive performance. The archetypal soldier character that pops up in many Mummers’ Plays, sometimes in place of St George, or merged with him clearly, lent himself particularly to the idea of performing a mumming play at the Hut. One of Tiddy’s collected Mummers’ Plays (from Malvern, Worcestershire), for instance, updates the soldier into the First World War context: ‘In comes I, the Valiant Soldier just arrived from France. With my broad sword and spear I’ll make King George to Dance.’73 Mummers’ Plays have also displayed a general tendency, which Tiddy identifies as beginning in the latter half of the seventeenth century, to absorb the politics of their times, in the form of parodic versions of political enemies or those seeking change or upheaval: The intellectual and the social change, combined to let in upon the Mummers’ Play a flood of essentially popular



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heroes and villains, bearing the names that hit the people’s imagination. … After that all manner of characters invade the play.74 Examples of this phenomenon can be found in some of the plays reproduced in Tiddy’s seminal (posthumous) anthology of plays, two of which are fascinating in the context of how we read the Mummers’ Play at the Hut. A play from Bulby Lincolnshire has not St George but a soldier (this is a common substitution or amendment) but he appears as ‘I the Recruiting Sergeant’: ‘Come all young men that’s a mind for listing,  / List and do not be afraid’,75 while Tom Fool is referred to as ‘Tommie’ and approached as the father of an illegitimate baby. Wonderfully, in a play from Heptonstall, Yorkshire (collected by Tiddy in 1909), a suffragette appears right in the last moments of the play, presumably fulfilling the mumming expectation for a cross-dresser to play a, potentially, grotesque woman: ‘In steps I, a suffragette / Over my shoulder I carry my clogs in my hand / And our Mary Ann shall keep to for any old man.’76 While Littlewood would have a Mummers’ Play that recreated a ‘Shakespearean’ festive moment, in fact the continuation of the mumming convention brought with it updated politics, to an extent, and a means through which current events and social change were rectified into rural village life, traditions and rituals. Any of these ‘new’ political elements could have made their way into the Hut’s mumming, though Littlewood’s write-up describes the play used as an ‘eighteenth century version’: The costumes were all ready, and, with little more than a hurried rehearsal a few minutes before, the little band of soldier-‘mummers’ came shuffling in – little Devil Doubt (a very bright little Boy Scout), with his broom to ‘sweep’ them in and ‘sweep’ them out, according to the curious old custom; the Turkish knight; St George (or King George, as he was loyally called in the eighteenth century version used at the Hut).77

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The antiquity and conventionality of the play performed at the Hut is repeatedly emphasized. Here is no modern interjection, no suffragette or recruiting sergeant to disrupt the Shakespearean heterotopia created in the Hut’s Christmas: Old Father Christmas – he was ‘Dad’ for short, a word which may not be Elizabethan, but at any rate deserves to be – came in very deed to the Shakespeare Hut on his own day! The happy thought of waking again the Old English jollities – the old sports, the old health-born revel that kept Christmas merry in the manor halls and farm-kitchens of once upon a time – sprang, as it happened, from the title of the Hut. Why not, it was said, have a Christmas that should be just the sort of Christmas Shakespeare knew? People have been pretending for years that it cannot be done. But it can be done if only the right spirit of you, heartiness, and good will is there. And it certainly was so at the Shakespeare Hut.78 The suggestion that ‘people have been pretending for years it cannot be done’ places this moment at the Hut as in defiance of a conservative attitude to performance and resistance to negativity over recapturing a ‘Golden Age’ of early modern festivity. Littlewood is undeterred by the anachronisms presented by the Mummers’ Play, assigning ‘Dad’ as de facto Elizabethan because it ‘deserves to be’ as every positive, homely word should. Shakespeare’s time becomes ‘once a upon a time’ only recaptured by the magical power of ‘heartiness and good will’ which is found at the Shakespeare Hut. The festive moment and perpetually heterotopic space of the Shakespeare Hut – made so by the festive otherness of leave, by its commemorative function and by its performance of Englishness for Anzacs troops – means that the performance within has power to invoke a utopian past denied by naysayers ‘pretending it cannot be done’. Littlewood jovially describes the scene at the Hut, where some four hundred men in khaki and in blue spent Christmas afternoon and evening in jousts and ‘merrie



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jestes’ that were all of them genuine old English, and yet were so utterly without pedantry that they might have been devised specially as an ideal means of forgetting fog-bound Bloomsbury in the year of grace 1916!79 These activities echo the jousts and merry games of the Shakespeare’s England exhibition in 1912 explored in Chapter  3, stage managed by Patrick Kirwan as ‘Master of the Revels’,80 just as he was at Shakespeare’s England,81 as Chapter 1 describes. These (re)constructed Shakespearean idylls for exhibition-goers in peacetime and soldiers at war links the pursuit of reconstruction from pre-war SMNT extravaganzas to austere wartime festivities inside the Hut. Littlewood directly describes the festivities as a ‘means of forgetting’, an escape, but, as is common to many accounts of the Hut’s activities, he skirts mentioning the active service, trauma and horror more likely to preoccupy the men’s minds than ‘fog-bound Bloomsbury’ outside the Hut’s doors. Collective forgetting is the purpose of the festivities, but the article itself contributes the first layer of amnesia by inserting Bloomsbury as the place and moment to be obliterated, rather than the Somme. Throughout his account of the day, Littlewood frequently emphasizes the extremely jovial mood, describing the men as happy and carefree, the occasion as nothing but fun. As the first extract from Littlewood, beginning this section, reveals, the ‘big hall … filled with as jolly a crowd of fellows as ever “waked the night-owl with a catch” in the days of Sir Toby and Sir Andrew – perhaps a good deal jollier!’.82 Scarcely a hint is made at the ‘real life’ to be faced beyond this rare and precious Christmas leave, which was, for many, a return to the Front. The only mention of the transience of the men’s stay at the Hut ignores the reality of their prospects; rather, Littlewood merely bemoans the fact that those who performed could not plan more events and sing again: Altogether, the one drawback about this old English Christmas at the Shakespeare Hut was that the men on

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a day or two’s leave could not stay to arrange yet more events for the whole of the ‘Twelve Days’ of Christmas. As was proved during the evening’s sing-song, there were any number of men there who could have helped out the carol-singers from Westminster Cathedral with the extra parts.83 The melancholy sense that these young men cannot stay for the ‘whole twelve days of Christmas’ is still woefully inadequate to convey their true situation. For most, the prospect was ultimately an inescapable return to the Front and their time of leave an only brief respite. The festivity and removal from reality to be found within the Hut, not only at Christmas but also all year round, was always characterized by temporariness and liminality. It was perpetually commemorative and festive, perpetually operating in a separate time and space to the outside world. Traditionally, of course, a time of festive inversions and high jinx, in the First World War Christmas Day troop-led suspensions of fighting became symbolic of growing disillusion with the weakening rationale for war. The Christmas Truce of 1914, the ‘ironies’ of which, as Joe Perry puts it, ‘continue to exert a hold on the popular and historical imagination’,84 represented a festive reversal in which the men place themselves in command for a very brief moment. Christmas Day was too, in wartime, a particularly poignant reminder of the distance of space and experience between soldiers and their homes and families, which is ostensibly the reason for the festivities at the Shakespeare Hut and other spaces of respite. However, the form these festivities took at the Hut represented a particular assertion of Englishness that can be read as a gift or a souvenir of England, as if to be given to the men as in some sense tourists (like the picture postcard Hut itself). Alternatively, it was a means by which to cement Anzac troops’ loyalty to the British Empire, despite more and more obvious distance growing between a British Dominion identity and a specific and separate New Zealand one.



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While the Anzacs at the Hut were treated to a warm and nostalgic performance of Englishness, those fighting on the front lines were experiencing a very different version indeed. On Christmas Day, 1916, there was no Christmas Truce, far from it. High Command having been troubled by the bottom-up truce instigated by fighting men on both sides in 1914, and repeated to much lesser extent in 1915, there was to be no ceasefire – and no disobedience – in 1916. While the New Zealanders at the Hut performed the play fight between St George and the Slasher, Anzacs in France – along with their British fellows – were appalled by the orders they received, as official Australian war historian Charles Bean relates: On Christmas day, at the hour when it was thought probable that the Germans would be sitting down to their midday feast, every gun of the Fourth and Fifth Armies fired two rounds at the points where the enemy’s troops and staffs might be foregathering. The fraternization which had marked the Christmas of 1914, and to some extent that of 1915, was entirely absent in 1916.85 These actions disgusted the men, both Anzac and many British and, as Bean explains, ‘rendered fighting men skeptical and cynical concerning the tenets of that Christianity which both sides professed’.86 It was this type of growing ‘ruthlessness’ that was generating feelings of disillusion with and disassociation from British high command among many soldiers. This type of action fed the growing sense of a separate Anzac identity, moving further from the shared English cultural and racial territory peddled continually by wartime propaganda aimed at the Dominions. An English package of ‘simplicity’, via evoking an imagined Golden Age of folk plays, games and song, was embodied in Shakespeare throughout the war, especially in its latter half, and enacted on Christmas Day 1916 in the Hut. This appropriation of Shakespeare fed the motherland myth yet, on the other hand, was so touristic as to be seen, in some

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ways, as a package of Englishness so foreign to the Anzacs that it offered more of a holiday sight than an affirmation of shared heritage. Littlewood’s account of the Mummers’ Play at the Hut frequently asserts the Englishness of the occasion and, in fact, the Englishness of the men, while also mentioning their New Zealand nationality, again an elision of their dual imperial identities. His page-long account repeats ‘English’/‘England’ some nine times. He establishes the Christmas festivities as a display of ‘Old English’ tradition and the men as English, yet also New Zealander: In a space cleared in the middle, the Old English sports went forward. So young English as well did these prove, that there was hardly a man there who did not show himself an expert at one or the other. Blindfold boxing, sack-racing, ‘ye ancient pastime’ of the pillow fight, pick-a-back wrestling – it needs but little searching in worm-eaten tomes to know that such things as these delighted our revered forefathers at Christmastide.87 A shared heritage as an English race (‘our revered forefathers’) is repeatedly referenced. Shakespeare and ‘his’ England of a pre-industrial, pastoral time is invoked time and again to establish a positive and benevolent English culture. Strikingly, Littlewood makes no mention of Māori soldiers, though many other contemporary accounts show that there were certainly Māori Anzacs staying at the Hut, as we have seen. Māori soldiers are markedly absent from Littlewood’s description, facilitating his emphatic elision of New Zealander and English racial identities. This elision, meanwhile, was growing less and less common among New Zealanders’ own comments, as we have also seen. Englishness is even asserted to the point of avowing the Christmas tree as an English tradition – and once again harking back to Renaissance ‘evidence’ and denying the Victorian import of the Christmas tree tradition from Germany, ‘did not Henry VIII have a Christmas tree at Windsor? And it



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was Old English then!’88 The Father Christmas that handed out gifts and the bedecked Christmas tree are far more indicative of a Victorian than an early modern Christmas. Here at the Hut was a patchwork of displays of a festive version of ‘Englishness’ presented to the New Zealanders as part of their own imperial heritage. The Mummers’ Play stood at the heart of this performance of Englishness and, by enlisting the New Zealanders to act it themselves, inaugurated them into the English heritage packaged up for them that 1916 Christmas Day. The Christmas presented at the Hut performed Englishness, recreated festive battles and established the inside of the Hut as a space out of time and place with the wartime city outside. In this way, Littlewood claims that a revival of Christmas spirit has been achieved: So if anyone now pretends that the true spirit of Yule is dead, it will at least not be believed in the Shakespeare Hut. It is the same spirit, after all, that underlays the Dickens Christmas – conveyed so well by Mr Alexander Watson in a recital of A Christmas Carol, which seemed not a bit out of place – the spirit that must one way or another be founded on kindness and cheery goodwill, the spirit of the Christmas of the past, the Christmas of the present, and the Christmas of the for-ever!89 Littlewood conveys, both at the start and the end of the piece, the idea of the Shakespeare Hut as a saviour of English tradition, a space in which English heritage is revived, preserved and championed. He comments that, ‘people have been pretending for years that [the sort of Christmas Shakespeare knew] cannot be done,’90 but that the Shakespeare Hut Christmas proved this to be false. He asserts the festivities at the Hut as a sort of utopian perfect English Christmas, a mishmash of Shakespeare, early folk drama and even Dickens. ‘Merrie Old England’, then, preserved (or constructed) monumentally in Stratford with Shakespeare as its patron saint –

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sharing his saint day with St George himself – was revived in the Shakespeare Hut’s heterotopia all year round but particularly on this festive Christmas Day. The festivities of spring – Easter and St George’s Day – are also joined on Shakespeare’s birth/ death day on 23 April. Anzac Day, on the 25th of the month, was inaugurated, too, in 1916. The Mummers’ Play brought St George to the Hut, invoked by Shakespeare in Henry V and frequently in every wartime. St George’s Day, and its associated festivities, had been officially abolished, according to Laroque, by Elizabeth I, which is ironic for those who liked to invoke the Elizabethan moment as that merry time of mumming. Marjorie Garber, though, asserts that St George’s Day was a fixture throughout the early modern period and up to the eighteenth century; ‘his feast day was on a par with Christmas’.91 Certainly, as both a national monolith and a festive hero, St George has continued to survive and feature in many festive performances, particularly May Day, Easter and Christmas. St George’s symbolic power for the English at times beset by war or even by social change is reflected in his frequent invocation in the pre-war SMNT rhetoric and in the Shakespeare Hut itself. At the end of the Shakespeare Ball’s opulent souvenir book, as Chapter 1 describes, Israel Gollancz looks forward to the Tercentenary to come, and with a dreadful irony for a post-war reader, ends the book with the words: ‘Cry – God for Shakespeare, England and King George!’ conflating the patron saint, and the Shakespearean king alike, with the current monarch and nation.92 As Garber observes, Henry’s speech uses St George with ‘the effect of raising the emotional war effort beyond the immediate moment’93 and its use in the First World War was prolific. That Shakespeare is supposed to have been born and died on the same day, St George’s Day, is part of the Shakespeare myth and the secular canonization of the man and his texts. For the Shakespeare Hut’s Anzacs, St George is brought to life by the Mummers’ Play and invoked by regular Henry V extracts played on the stage, to which I shall return in the next chapter. As Chapter 4 will reveal more fully, Henry at the Hut was played by a young girl, Fabia Drake, who writes



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in her autobiography of her performance, accompanied by an image of her in costume, captioned ‘World War I: “Harry of England”/ Henry V to the ANZAC soldiers’.94 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, which would also have been therefore, St George’s Day and two days before Anzac Day. Her pride in the power of these speeches is related to her perception of Shakespeare’s ability to rouse a ‘foreign’ or imperial army of Anzacs. She repeats the phrase ‘Harry of England’ interspersed with repeated mentions of the Anzac identity of the audience.95 By then, every effort had been made to construct Anzac memories of ‘Harry of England’, of Mummers’ Plays, of trips to Shakespeare’s Birthplace and of the friendly mock-Tudor beams and warm hearth of the Shakespeare Hut. It would not be enough, though, to offset the widespread Antipodean disillusion with British imperial rule that the war had catalysed.

The Shakespeare Hut’s last Anzacs were gone by mid-1919, headed home to the other side of the world. Yet it almost became an even more complex memorial construct, one whose reiterative premise can seem, given the history of the Hut’s layers of recursive memorialization, almost ironic. 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’.96 The scheme was never realized, in all likelihood due to funding problems. Nevertheless, this incident shows how crucial the Shakespeare Hut had become as a symbol of the New Zealand Diggers. A temporary memorial to Shakespeare in London

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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 the tragic multitude 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.’97 The original Shakespeare Hut was, in these terms, not only physically but also culturally demolished. The New Zealand Anzacs never got their Shakespeare Hut back home.

4 Performing femininity: Women at the Shakespeare Hut

23 April 1919. Gertrude Elliott, ‘the Lady of the Shakespeare Hut’,1 organizer of all the Shakespeare Hut entertainments and leading suffragist, ends a graceful speech for Shakespeare’s last birthday for the Anzacs at the Hut before presenting a copy of Shakespeare’s sonnets to each of the female volunteer workers. ‘A large audience of New Zealanders cheered her to the echo and at the end sang “For She’s a Jolly Good Fellow”’.2 All week, the New Zealand boys had been treated to Shakespearean and other drama; Norman T. Norman had played Shylock in the Merchant of Venice and, at the Shakespeare birthday gala, Fabia Drake had performed her Henry V speeches again, aged just fifteen. Having explored how the Shakespeare Hut came to be and how it functioned as an Anzac space, this chapter brings us now to the Hut stage as a gendered space. So, in order to arrive at why a crowd of jubilant demobbed New Zealanders sang this rousing chorus to Lady Forbes-Robertson on Shakespeare’s birthday (no longer, it would seem, named as a death anniversary, but a birthday), we must now go back in time to 1916 and look at the same three years through a different lens.

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The Hut was run day to day by a huge team of female volunteers, numbering several hundred (under, perhaps unsurprisingly, a small senior management board of men). Meanwhile, led by powerful, radical and talented women, the Shakespeare Hut’s theatre was a space in which ideas of cultural value were challenged, women had autonomy over production and its austere stage was a space for experimentation. The popular and the ‘high’ intertwined in anti-spectacular Shakespearean production. This chapter examines the femaleled performance culture at the Shakespeare Hut theatre, focusing on the significance of its stage for the development of women’s theatre and on our understanding of how Shakespeare and performance functioned in the fight for women’s suffrage. However, the Shakespeare Hut as a commemorative space and as a heterotopia are not left behind; memory and performance are at the core of how we can understand the Hut’s performances in the context of the history of Shakespearean production. Ill-suited as it was to the demands of full-length Shakespearean drama, the Hut stage was nevertheless a key Shakespearean focus for the building’s commemorative function. 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,3 even on evenings purely devoted to Shakespeare, make playful use of Shakespeare’s perceived ‘value’. In so doing they reflect the suffragist politics of many of the entertainers and of the principal director, Edith Craig – performance as education, performance as activism. Indeed, the choice of extracts often mirrored 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 Hut’s annual Shakespeare galas documents the format of such events at the Hut. Co-directed by Gertrude Elliott and Edith Craig, it included a host of stars. Elliott’s husband, Johnston ForbesRobertson, performed a soliloquy from Hamlet and Jacques’s



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‘Seven Ages’ speech and another national treasure, Lady Maud Warrender treated the troops to ‘Shakespeare Songs’. Israel Gollancz gave an address on Shakespeare before the great Ellen Terry stepped onto the tiny stage as Portia. Scenes from Henry V were performed by Craig’s all-female, teenage troupe, the Junior Players, and a range of other songs and extracts filled the evening.4 By deconstructing Shakespeare’s texts, the Hut performances did not necessarily create synecdochic representations of the plays from which the extracts were drawn but neither did they simply present a patriotic message as did the wartime fragmented texts explored in Chapter 2. Instead, fragments were assembled to create a performance that suited the new cultural and entertainment space offered by the Hut but also represented the female-led theatre advocated before the war by the Actresses’ Franchise League (AFL). The AFL was large professional and political organization that would come to shape the Hut’s performance space into something very special in the history of women’s theatre. It is important to acknowledge the very different roles of the Shakespeare Hut’s women. This chapter will first consider the female volunteers who ran the Hut’s practical functions and how they were presented to the male Anzac users, before moving onto a specific exploration of the Shakespeare Hut’s performance space. This space, I will argue, can be viewed in some senses as a proxy for the Woman’s Theatre the AFL strove to make a reality before the outbreak of war. The Hut’s performances and characters will give us means to explore this hypothesis and reveal the true significance of this small, forgotten theatre in telling a history of women producing, performing and directing Shakespeare after the war.

The ‘right’ kind of woman: Female workers at the Hut YMCA huts were openly designed to keep the young men safe, nurtured and out of trouble on the streets of London and

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promoted an ethos of homely escape from ‘sin’ without an explicit missionary function. How successful this undertaking can be perceived to have been depends, of course, upon whose account we are reading. George W. W. B. Hughes, YMCA secretary of the Shakespeare Hut, dedicated three years of his life to this work in England, far from his clearly beloved home and family in New Zealand.5 He is extremely frightened for the moral and physical safety of the New Zealand Anzacs, if left to their own devices on the streets of London at night. He writes to his wife: We had a social evening at the Shakespeare Hut last night for soldiers. It went off splendidly, with a good crowd of fellows present, and about 60 of the lady workers. It is our plan to have these gatherings every Friday evening, because we believe that many of the men will be kept off the streets and therefore out of danger.6 This theme of the Huts being spaces that keep the men ‘safe’ from the dangers of London, presumably more spiritual than physical (notwithstanding the growing problem of VD among the troops), is borne out in the presentation of the Huts in the New Zealand and Australian press of the time. In 1917, The Dominion reported: ‘[The YMCA’s] mission is … to shield the wayward from the wiles of the insidious and provide goodliving lads with healthy recreation and pastime.’7 This notion of the Anzac huts as places of sinless entertainment was central to their function as represented on the home front. However, it was not pure propaganda: Hughes’s letters show his genuine belief in the gendered dangers he thought lay outside the Shakespeare Hut’s prefabricated walls, primarily using the common contemporary euphemism ‘street danger’ to refer exclusively to prostitution. In April 1918, Hughes shares with his wife these very concerns: Everyday [sic] we are convinced that the real difficulty of our work is not seated in the camps, but in the city of



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London. It has been suggested that we should secure the right type of N.Z. Lady who could actually rescue our men from the harpies who infest the streets. The danger here is very different to that which we are so accustomed to in the larger centres in Australia and N.Z. It is a real thing here and our men must be safeguarded in every way.8 Here Hughes identifies clear difference between London and the centres back home. ‘It is a real thing here,’ he writes, implying the lack of real problems of such kinds in Australia or New Zealand. His language shows his constant awareness of the dangerous foreignness of London, and perhaps Britain as a whole, clearly not having found the homeland promised in the imperial wartime propaganda. The Shakespeare Hut’s English and New Zealander heterotopias blurred, eliding the two into a ‘home’ inside but under threat from urban dangers of the ‘real’ London outside. The predatory ‘harpies’ Hughes describes exemplify a widespread cultural fear, in the YMCA, of this encroaching female otherness (in contrast to the good Christian NZ ladies), clamouring outside the safe walls of the huts. His description of prostitutes as an infestation further highlights this fear of a monstrous tide of sin outside the Hut’s doors. Laying the blame with, and thoroughly dehumanizing, such women – as opposed to so many brave Anzac sons – was, of course, the norm and does not represent any unusual attitude in Hughes himself. A 1917 Australian newspaper article epitomizes the same fear: The chief problem of the London work is how far the YMCA can work effectively to keep our soldiers from the woman-peril of the streets. … The work … of our huts … in merely providing places where our boys can find brightness and convivial company, good food and rest, entertainments and amusement, and some of the snugness of club life, instead of strolling aimlessly around the streets at night is … preventing a big proportion from walking heedlessly into what are for many, just man-traps.9

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Once again, the notion of the female enemy outside the safety of the YMCA hut is bemoaned; the danger is a predatory female Other outside the Huts. Yet this picture of life in London does not fit with the accounts of some of the Anzac soldiers at the time. Many may have felt this presentation of the good entertainments of the YMCA in contrast to the sins of the streets to be rather hypocritical. In his autobiographical novel Civilian into Soldier, New Zealand socialist politician John A. Lee voices his dissatisfaction with the binary interpretation of sin and virtuousness in the wartime context. He writes: Sex was a banned passion for the overseas soldier until après la guerre. … But a whore was at least a step on the road to normality. Excess profits were good business, murder was nobility, bungling was generalship, getting drunk or sleeping with a girl were sin. … Patriotism couldn’t wipe out sex hunger. For men were loyal to sex long before they had ever been loyal to a nation state.10 Lee politicizes the issue of prostitution, constructing it as an emblem of the hypocrisy he so despises in the Anzacs’ experience of a war led by the ruling elite, mentioning, with bitter sarcasm, ‘business’, ‘nobility’ and ‘generalship’. By expressing the inadequacy of ‘patriotism’ to eclipse lust, he also hints at the fragility of that ‘nation state’ to which he was finding it hard to commit, either New Zealand or Britain. Meanwhile the Australian autobiographer, C. Hampton Thorp, also emphasizes, albeit in contrasting ways to Lee’s presentation, the centrality of prostitution in the leave experience for the Anzacs. Thorp, however, identifies those soldiers who partake in such pleasures as what he calls a ‘rougher element of Australian soldiers’, thus distancing himself from them and their behaviours. ‘During closed hours this type of Aussey,’ he writes, ‘will pick up one of the “young looking” females who are lying in wait for just such men as he’.11 Thorp’s portrayal of the London prostitutes as a dark and lurking threat echoes



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the devout concerns expressed by Hughes. Once again, the women are dehumanized, ‘females who are lying in wait’ as if predatory animals and, sure enough, he describes them later as ‘vampire[s]’, just as Hughes sees them as ‘harpies’. Lena Ashwell, to whom I shall return briefly later as a leading member of the AFL, also responds to YMCA’s conservative attitude to fraternization between men and women but from a very different point of view: [The YMCA] were bound down with the idea of keeping the sexes gracefully apart lest in any way they should influence each other on the downward path which leads to ruin. The idea of companionship, friendship, equality of status and interests was undreamt of. … There was every effort at first to follow this strange prejudice which strove to separate the two halves of the human race. There was much talk of the fearsome fact that the men who had come from the Colonies had, no doubt, wives and sweet-hearts whom they had left behind, and the men must be saved from the intriguing women who waited for them here in every street, behind every lamp-post.12 Ashwell here relates exactly the attitude to be found in the YMCA sources and autobiographical responses we have seen. Her frustration at their conservatism is palpable and she recognizes, in particular, the specific paranoia around ‘men … from the Colonies’ who needed protection from the predatory women of London. It is within this climate of fear of female predation on the men that the Shakespeare Hut existed. Its workers, virtually all women and volunteers, had to be seen as a totally unthreatening ‘kind’ of women, described for the New Zealand press back home as providing a safe space for Diggers: These women are doing noble work. … Many have never needed to work in their own homes, but here they dust and polish, tidy and decorate, cook and serve with the ardour

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of a strong patriotism. The café is conducted with the smartness of our leading places in New Zealand and above all the ladies set a standard which has a distinctly elevating effect. The mothers and sisters of New Zealand men cannot thank them sufficiently.13 They were uniformed, a little like nurses (Figure 4.1), were often local middle-class women doing their war work and were as such marked out as the antithesis to the ‘woman peril’. The article keeps the Hut workers very much indoors; cleaning, cooking and ‘serving’ the men, the picture of feminine domesticity acts as a direct contrast to the ‘man traps’ of London. As this description shows, the women were

FIGURE 4.1 Women workers at the Shakespeare Hut. ©YMCA, reproduced with thanks to the Cadbury Research Library. The Shakespeare Hut, c.1916, photograph, The Archive of the National Council of YMCAs (Young Men’s Christian Association) held at the Cadbury Research Library: Special Collections, University of Birmingham. YMCA/K/1/12/97 Green Book 11.



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presented as ‘elevating’, keeping the New Zealand boys in sight of an acceptable image of domesticity, dutiful patriotism and stainless morality. The Graphic’s elaborate description of the Hut, or ‘EighteenPenny Hotel’, encountered already in Chapter 3, sums up the presentation of the women volunteers and workers of the Shakespeare Hut, where ‘all round the tables waitresses flit, like rose-clad angels, in their rosy linen aprons, with black bands and neat black caps’.14 The contrast to be drawn between these ‘angels’ within and the outside ‘harpies’ the YMCA so feared could not be more obvious. The Graphic article, written by a woman, Margaret Chute, clearly demarcates the functions of gender within the Hut. Early in her lengthy article on the Hut’s marvels, she identifies her own femaleness as barring her from joining the Hut’s community as a user. She can only speak as an observer: ‘being just a woman, the privilege of sleeping and living under this YMCA Hut’s generous roof was denied me’.15 Similarly, the British Journal of Nursing carried an article on the Shakespeare Hut’s opening, in which its writer, ‘H.  H.’ describes the colour-coded women of the Hut, creating a soothing aesthetic for the men; ‘the men were welcomed by the canteen workers, whose pretty soft red overalls harmonized well with the blue and gray [sic] uniforms of the wounded and the uniforms of the civilian nurses in attendance’.16 Fitting the Shakespeare Hut’s feminine identity into that of the desexualized, caring woman, working for the comfort of their men – nurse, waitress, mother, sister – rather than the predatory, threatening femininity to be found outside its doors created a space of delineated female identity. This would, then, be bound to affect how female performances and direction onstage within the Hut were viewed. The Hut’s female-led and visibly female-dominated stage, too, could not be titillating but needed to be engaging enough to tempt the men to stay indoors. The uniformed workers and actresses onstage all performed femininities acceptable to the YMCA, providing a contrast to the perceived ‘woman danger’ stalking London’s streets. Yet, as this chapter will show, the key women of the Hut stage

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were feminists and active suffragists: politically radical in their own country, though not, as we shall see, to New Zealanders. They did not entirely adhere to the quiet, ‘angel’ in the Hut, offering instead a different powerful feminine presence, one of autonomy, agency and public voice. It is in this context of very specific gendered functionality that a manner of ‘Woman’s Theatre’ occupied the Shakespeare Hut’s performance space. The certain type of ‘safe’ femininity seen as crucial by the YMCA running the Hut surrounded the presentation of its women workers and must therefore have influenced the way the women on its stage were viewed. The gaze to which the performers were exposed was neither the antagonism of the anti-suffrage lobby nor the primed eyes of suffrage supporters. Nor indeed were these performances for the critics, who were not invited. The Shakespeare Hut performances were only open to Allied servicemen in uniform.17 The suffragist activism of the AFL members who directed, produced, acted and wrote for the Shakespeare Hut may not have been known to its predominantly Anzac audience, since those activities were in most cases British and US-based. However, even if the women they saw on stage were identified with such activism, women’s suffrage was far from a radical idea for the Hut’s New Zealanders. The Anzacs staying at the Hut would have been very young children, or not even born, when New Zealand became the first self-governing country in the world to give women the vote. In 1893, some twenty-three years before the Hut opened its doors, both Māori and Pākehā women were given the same voting rights as men.18 So, the ‘radical’ British cause of the AFL would not have been radical to the NZ soldiers. If they did know of the AFL campaigns as they sat and watched its leaders perform on the Hut’s stage, the very idea of these women having to fight for such basic rights must have only presented Britain to them as, at best, quaintly politically backward, a step back in time. Onstage at the Hut, women were expected (by the YMCA) to present an image of female virtue, talent and warmth19 to



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a young audience of men, thousands of miles from home and days away from the Front. Entertainments did include male performers, though they remained in the minority, and the management lay firmly with Elliott. Indeed, back home in New Zealand, press reports of the Hut’s comforts frequently dwelt on the maternal or sisterly welcome at the Shakespeare Hut; ‘the ladies set a standard which has a distinctly elevating effect. The mothers and sisters of New Zealand men cannot thank them enough.’20 One of its many-layered functions and identities, the Hut’s female identity, created by its middle-class volunteer war workers and female-led productions on stage, was presented as a ‘softer’ view of England as mother to the Dominions of her empire.

The Shakespeare Hut performances: A ‘Woman’s Theatre’ in wartime In 1908, the year the Shakespeare Memorial National Theatre (SMNT) committee was being formed, another organization was born: the Actresses’ Franchise League (AFL), established by actresses including Gertrude Elliott, Winifred Mayo, Sime Seruya and Adeline Bourne. While her husband, Johnston Forbes-Robertson (also an outspoken supporter of women’s suffrage), was helping to establish the SMNT, Gertrude Elliott was president of the new AFL, leading its high-profile resistance to the denial of women’s suffrage and its assertion of women’s rights and voice more broadly in the theatre industry. None of the AFL members could have foreseen the war that was to change the course of the suffrage campaign in so many ways, nor indeed that some of their key leaders would find themselves operating a Woman’s Theatre like none they had conceived, in order to entertain thousands of troops from the other side of the world. Yet the wartime efforts of AFL leaders are not the beginning, of course, of the story of Shakespeare and suffrage. The appropriation of Shakespeare’s texts, status

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and cultural capital in the British suffrage discourse is tangible and significant years before the Shakespeare Hut was built, as Susan Carlson21 and Sophie Duncan,22 among others, have explored. This relationship must inform our reading of the Shakespeare Hut’s performance culture, given that its theatre was managed by prominent suffragists, Gertrude Elliott and Edith (‘Edy’) Craig, as this chapter will reveal. Further, the fact that the Shakespeare Hut does not appear in narratives or analyses of Shakespeare and the suffrage campaign is curious; its forgotten status, until recently, has allowed a hole in the AFL’s story to develop,23 in which the wartime activities of several of its leaders seem not to have been substantially explored. Shakespeare’s relationship with the suffrage campaign is, in a way, to be viewed from two perspectives: the proto-suffragist Shakespeare perceived and utilized by suffrage propaganda and performance and also the view ‘from the outside’, the response to suffragism’s appropriation of this English national monolith. A 1910 article in The British Medical Journal articulates, from an external viewpoint, the idea of Shakespeare as ‘foresee[ing]’ women’s suffrage: Did Shakespeare, who seems to have known everything by intuition, foresee the suffragette? At any rate, he makes Cleopatra anticipate the ‘hunger strike’. When she is taken prisoner she says to Proculeius: Sir, I will eat no meat, I’ll not drink, sir; … this mortal house I’ll ruin, Do Caesar what he can. This is prophetic. But though one may admit that many suffragettes have more than the charm of her whom it was written – Age cannot wither her nor custom stale Her infinite variety we cannot see in Mr Herbert Gladstone much likeness to Caesar.24



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This piece may respond, with some disdainful, black humour, to suffragists’ appropriation of Shakespeare to the cause. Shakespeare features in suffragist materials and discourses in different ways, both through overt quotation and by reading Shakespeare’s texts – or specific productions of them – as pro-suffrage. Fragments of Shakespearean texts sometimes appear as suffrage slogans, such as a banner reading ‘perseverance keeps honour bright’ seen on the wall behind a suffrage fundraising stall in a surviving image from the Women’s Exhibition, 1909.25 This banner was selected to be reproduced for the film, Suffragette,26 by artist Anna Thomas but was transformed into to a marching banner, rather than its original, more restrained position behind a sweet stall, inserting Shakespeare retrospectively into the narrative of direct action and even, given the film’s focus, on militant suffragist activism.27 In reality, there appears to be little evidence of Shakespeare featuring in more militant or direct action; rather he appears to have played a significant part in forming the intellectual and philosophical arguments for suffrage. For instance, Johnston Forbes-Robertson’s famous portrayal of Hamlet, immortalized on film in 1913,28 was dubbed by suffragists the ‘reformer Hamlet’, as this reviewer, writing in pro-suffrage newspaper Votes for Women, argues: In his Hamlet there is something more … the reformer and pioneer who in every age is subjected to the petty spying and the slander of his generation. … He has the fine, intellectual, imaginative nature of a dreamer, and he is racked with the thought of another’s wrong. … He is, in fact, the reformer as he really is, and not as he is painted by his contemporaries and sometimes by the historian. … For once [Hamlet] is being presented by a man who is himself a reformer, who knows what it means to have embraced a cause.29 The reviewer sees a reformer in Hamlet, implying that Shakespeare would have been a suffragist if born in another

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time.30 It is Forbes-Robertson’s suffragist activism, however, that has woken such potential in the play and showcased it at this time of need. Meanwhile, Harley GranvilleBarker’s Savoy seasons in 1914 had inextricably intertwined Shakespearean production with the call for women’s suffrage, especially following his production of the first full-length prosuffrage play, Elizabeth Robins’s Votes for Women in 1907.31 Susan Carlson argues that Granville-Barker’s Shakespeare productions can be read as directly functioning as suffragist actions, whether or not all such associations were intended: Even Granville Barker’s thrust stage re-created the public immediacy of the suffrage movement. Whether Granville Barker sought such connections to the suffrage environment or his audience found support for the suffrage cause in his artistic decisions, the production values echo suffragist action and priorities.32 More deliberate decisions in the design and interpretation of the plays, however, were convincingly evident. For example, as Carlson identifies, the apparently baffling colour scheme of his 1912 Twelfth Night, pink, white, gold and green, clearly represented the exact colours of the AFL.33 More broadly, many, many examples can be found in the suffrage press and even through AFL supporters, in which Shakespeare is invoked as a voice of authority, of national identity and of reason, and he must be proto-suffragist. As mentioned back in the pre-war days of Chapter 1, for instance, Ellen Terry’s lectures on Shakespeare included her assertions that her favourite Shakespearean heroines would have been suffragists. Portia would, for Terry, have been a suffragist; suffrage newspaper, The Vote, reported that Ellen Terry saw Portia as one of Shakespeare’s ‘prototypes of modern suffragettes’.34 As such, Terry’s iconic Portia and her performance time and again of her signature piece, Portia’s ‘quality of mercy’ speech (performed, of course, in men’s clothing), was a pro-suffrage act.35 In 1917, unsurprisingly,



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a gala at the Hut would include both this Terry turn and Forbes-Robertson’s ‘reformer’ Hamlet speeches.36 What would be read as patriotism, ‘Shakespeare as patriot’ as Clara Calvo has phrased it,37 was also Shakespeare the suffragist.38 Yet the Shakespeare Hut’s intertwinement with suffragism is rooted not only on the cause’s history of Shakespearean textual appropriation and claim of Shakespeare’s protosuffragism but also in the Hut’s status as a commemorative materialization of bardolatory during the period of the suffrage campaign. As Chapter 1 detailed, the battle for suffrage was inserted into the (re)constructed Shakespeare’s England of the 1912 exhibition, at which pro-suffrage campaigners were restricted in their movements and activities, while the ‘Antis’ seem to have managed to have rather freer rein. This state of affairs was much to the chagrin of that reformer Hamlet, Sir Johnston Forbes-Robertson, a director of the event, who was appalled on returning from a trip abroad to find the antisuffrage campaigners had been allowed to take a stall at all at this Shakespearean event.39 By the time Gertrude Elliott would come to take the reins of the Shakespeare Hut theatre in 1916, it was with the specific backdrop of both Shakespeare’s place in the suffrage campaign and the suffrage campaign’s place in the commemoration of Shakespeare. The war would now bring Shakespeare as ‘patriot’ to the forefront, weaponized, as Chapter 2 explores, against a foreign foe. However, suffragists, just like those on the stall at Shakespeare’s England, fought to keep hold of Shakespeare as an ally to – and the theatre as a space for – reform, even in the turmoil of war. By 1914, the AFL had grown to some 900 members and gained an affiliated men’s group.40 However, the outbreak of war in 1914 would change the whole landscape of suffrage activism, though critics and historians do not always agree on the effect of the war on suffrage activism. As Katherine Newey sees it: The momentum of the campaign for women’s suffrage was halted, and women’s work in the theatre, as elsewhere, was

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directed towards the defeat of the nation’s common enemy. Specifically women-centred (or even feminist) concerns moved aside for national concerns.41 However, Katherine Kelly, one of the few critics to write on the wartime activities of the AFL, presents the case that the AFL certainly did not shut down for wartime, nor did it divert its attentions from its cause. She argues that the broadbrush idea of suffrage causes pausing for the war to come together is, in the case of the AFL, certainly not borne out by the evidence. Instead, the AFL’s ‘layering of nationalist and feminist allegiances and its temporary eclipsing of suffrage propaganda have been either simplified or overlooked’, based on the pervasive notion that the suffrage cause was eclipsed by a wartime one. Kelly presents a different reading of the AFL’s activities in wartime: During times of national crisis – particularly during the First World War – League members joined other suffragists in ‘displaying’ their identity as Englishwomen, entertaining troops and organising relief efforts to help fellow English citizens distressed by the war. But the League’s performance of patriotism neither undermined nor replaced its plans for reform within the profession. During this wartime activity, the AFL forgot neither its feminist nor its suffragist affiliations.42 Though Kelly seems to have been unaware of the Shakespeare Hut’s stage (it was thoroughly forgotten until later, as Chapter 6 will show), this theatre – its management, personnel and programme – would fit comfortably into her reading of the AFL’s activities. The use of Shakespearean extracts and carefully chosen (or at least when necessity allowed) performances under AFL direction for an audience exclusively of servicemen was, in many ways, part of this ‘performance of patriotism’. Not all the wartime activities of the AFL were forgotten, though; rather, as Kelly argues, they have suffered in retrospect



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from being ‘simplified or overlooked’. Of the AFL’s inner circle, Lena Ashwell is best remembered for her war work, travelling around the front lines with her concert parties. Shakespeare’s Tercentenary presented Ashwell with the rationale for beginning to include a Shakespearean element to her war entertainments, which she carried through to the end of the war.43 She also, when back in England, managed the entertainments at Ciro’s, Leicester Square which, at that time, was a YMCA hut and the only YMCA to admit both men and women. Her frustrations with the conservative attitudes to gender within the YMCA, as encountered earlier in this chapter, were slightly appeased when they finally allowed a co-residential hut.44 While Ashwell travelled and then ran the entertainments at Ciro’s, her fellow AFL leaders, too, offered war entertainments elsewhere in London. They organized ‘War Relief Matinees’, which are fairly well represented in scholarship on the AFL45 but the Shakespeare Hut, to which the AFL’s president dedicated most of her time,46 appears to have been almost entirely forgotten. Gertrude Elliott and Edith Craig spent three years producing and directing all the entertainments of the Shakespeare Hut stage. There, they worked closely with other AFL leaders and colleagues, most significantly the leading light in the campaign for a Woman’s Theatre (to which I shall return shortly), Australian actress and playwright, Inez Bensusan, who both wrote for and acted at the Hut. These women arguably created, at least in some sense, the Woman’s Theatre that had seemed so elusive to achieve in the AFL’s pre-war years. Gertrude Elliott, Lady Forbes-Robertson, tirelessly led the entertainments at the Hut, having been appointed to run its stage before the building even opened. Her husband, Johnston, was chairman, on paper, but she acted and was treated as the head of the operation and was Honorary Secretary and producer for the Hut’s theatre. Elliott was a very well-loved star of stage and as well as her role as president of the AFL. When she took on the entertainments at the Shakespeare Hut, these two strands of her career came together into something entirely new. Her organizational leadership of the

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AFL merged with her Shakespearean interests and her broad network of contacts among the upper echelons of the London theatrical community. This intersection resulted in a prolific era of performance production in which Elliott burst forth as a theatrical ‘leader’ in her own right. Elliott’s passion for female empowerment had far from diluted and her work at the Hut formed a fascinating period that led to her artistic and organizational independence as a performer and manager. Elliott had always been close, via her husband’s involvement, to the movement to provide a National Theatre for Great Britain, but her energy had been more directed towards her suffrage campaigning. When the Hut opportunity knocked, however, Gertrude stepped up to take on her wartime duty – and a chance to realize a sustained female-led theatre. The first mention of Elliott’s name in relation to the Hut’s entertainments can be found in a letter from playwright Arthur Pinero to Gollancz, dated 30 May 1916: Lady Forbes-Robertson should be asked to act as Chairman … for the providing of entertainments at the Hut. She is, there is no need for me to tell you, a clever and energetic woman, and she would have, of course, the help of her husband.47 Clearly, Elliott did not require Johnston’s help. She took on the role with zeal and set about organizing an ambitious programme of stage entertainments for the troops. She quickly engaged the voluntary services of a number of female theatre practitioners and formed a regular production partnership for the Hut’s performances with Edith Craig. Craig’s contribution to the story of the campaign for suffrage, the Woman’s Theatre and, not least, her (still rather under-valued) influence on modern production styles make her a formidable figure to find directing the Hut’s productions. Noted director, suffragist and daughter of the great Ellen Terry, before the war, Edith Ailsa ‘Edy’ Craig was regular director of the Pioneer Players, a suffrage performance company. Elliott enlisted a number



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of other performers who had been involved in the AFL and Pioneer Players, including Terry, to direct and perform in her new Hut performances. While far from the agitprop productions supported by the pre-war AFL, Elliott and Craig’s entertainments at the Hut would surely have been associated, by those in the theatre and suffrage communities, with their manager and director’s highprofile involvement in the Women’s Theatre project before the outbreak of war. This is where another of Elliott’s AFL colleagues’ involvement at the Hut comes in: Inez Bensusan was an Australian-born actress, playwright and director who had written a handful of pro-suffrage one-act plays (such as The Apple, 1909), along with other feminist skits and stories and, crucially, was head of the Plays Department of the AFL. In this central role, she coordinated, arranged and organized the prolific schedule of pro-suffrage plays and sketches written for the AFL, to be toured around the country as powerful propaganda in the battle for the vote. Solidifying an international core to the Hut’s management – Craig was British, Elliot American and Inez Bensusan Australian – Bensusan wrote for and starred in Shakespeare Hut entertainments48 and, while not leading it with them, clearly worked with Elliott and Craig closely in this wartime project. In 1913, while the SMNT campaign was becoming rather disarrayed following the somewhat counterproductive extravagances of the Shakespeare Ball and Shakespeare’s England exhibition and casting about them for a patch of land on which to solidify their plan, Bensusan was leading the AFL’s flagship project for a very different theatre. The Woman’s Theatre was to be the practical application of the AFL’s principles, both as a political and as a professional organization. As Kelly has identified, critical treatment of the AFL has often focused on one or the other of these functions for the organization, rather than identifying the possibility that it genuinely functioned fully in both capacities.49 Yet the Woman’s Theatre project straddled both, since ‘actresses and actors will be paid the same salary and all will have a financial interest in the theatre at

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nominal salaries’.50 It would provide an environment in which women in the theatre industry could work in every role, from set hand to producer, while men would solely be involved as actors. The idea caught international attention; an article in the New York Times stated that the scheme would be extended to a Theatre in the United States, once the London Theatre was realized. The same article detailed the plans for the Court: A co-operative feminist theatre, conducted solely by women, will be inaugurated in October, when the Court Theatre will be taken over by the Actresses’ Franchise League, of which Gertrude Elliott … is President. There will be no males except actors – women in the box office, women scene shifters, women painters, women designers, and a woman property manager. While the plays will not be the work of women alone, all the productions will deal with the emancipation movement.51 The report’s language, identifying (without apparent aspersion) the plan as ‘feminist’ and the structure as ‘co-operative’ highlights the very different, modern discourse of the AFL compared to the that of the SMNT during the same period. Johnston Forbes-Robertson and Gertrude Elliott indeed link the two movements via their own partnership and shared ideals; Forbes-Robertson had never been the voice of cultural imperialism that so often drove the SMNT’s public discourse. Appropriating Shakespeare for an imperial cause was far from the aims, in actual fact, of most of the practitioners involved in the SMNT, who were more interested in establishing a National Theatre that would both offer fair and reliable terms of employment for actors and engage the nation with both classic and modern drama. The Woman’s Theatre discourse was modern in tone and, while the AFL (like many of the suffrage organizations of the time) was overwhelmingly middle class in its membership. Yet its discourse was founded on the principle of female work (to which I shall return shortly), and the Women’s Theatre represented this in a practical way.



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In the context of Newey’s viewpoint, that with the outbreak of war, ‘specifically women-centred (or even feminist) concerns moved aside for national concerns’,52 an overtly ‘feminist’ endeavour such as the Woman’s Theatre project, which was not a suffrage campaign as such but a political and pragmatic attempt at enabling and empowering women both in their voice and in their professional potential, might well be ‘moved aside’ by the war. However, Kelly notes that the project continued until the middle years of the war, though she ‘find[s] no trace of the Woman’s Theatre after 1917’.53 Yet the Shakespeare Hut’s management and direction was female, its productions femaleled, its performers majority female. While the Shakespeare Hut was, indeed, not a Woman’s Theatre in the sense of the scale and openness of Bensusan’s original plan, it enabled many aspects of the scheme and presented an opportunity for a fully female-led theatre to thrive from 1916 to 1919, when the Hut’s Anzacs were all finally shipped home. The tiny theatre of the Shakespeare Hut would have to do for these ambitious AFL innovators for now. Elliott set about making the Hut’s little stage work for a range of performances. The black and white timber and plaster background is visible in several surviving YMCA photographs, including one showing an audience of soldiers seated for a show (Figure 4.2). The monochromatic 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.’54 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. At the same time, it questions the aesthetic or artistic emptiness of the Hut’s mock-Tudor affectations,

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FIGURE 4.2 A show at the Shakespeare Hut. ©YMCA, reproduced with thanks to the Cadbury Research Library. The Shakespeare Hut, c.1916, photograph, The Archive of the National Council of YMCAs (Young Men’s Christian Association) held at the Cadbury Research Library: Special Collections, University of Birmingham. YMCA/K/1/12/105 Green Book 11.

carried through to the stage backdrop, as an adequate space for performance. In fact, 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.55 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 inevitably subject to accusations of frivolity. Something of the Hut’s performance and production politics of adopting a minimalist approach yet featuring some of the greatest stars of pictorialism can be seen in Maurice Willson Disher’s biography of Shakespearean actor-manager Martin Harvey. Here, Disher offers an account of a Shakespeare Hut



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performance from a member of the audience (journalist and, at that time, soldier, Gordon Stowell), on 24 December 1916 (the night before the Mummers’ Play, examined in Chapter 3, was performed): But how on earth was he to spend Christmas Eve? With barely a shilling to spare he turned to the Shakespeare Hut, a Bloomsbury sanctuary built by the YMCA on the site purchased for the National Theatre. … Private Stowell, after he had made sure of a bed and something for supper … found himself on the free-list for a play. He looked at the stage in the hall and decided, ‘Anyone who could act on that could act on a tea-tray’ and then set his incredulous eyes on the notice-board which announced the personal appearance of Martin Harvey in David Garrick. In his tired, outcastat-Christmas mood, he sat without any great expectations until the visitor appeared. Still he was unimpressed. ‘Those little ferrety eyes in that great ham of a face revolted me,’ expresses his first feelings. ‘Then,’ he adds, ‘they riveted me.’ In all fairness that performance ought to be on the record of the National Theatre, upon whose soil it undoubtedly took place. Lady Martin-Harvey remembers it because they played by candlelight. That suited David Garrick perfectly.56 The idea that the magic of candlelight suited this Victorian play, about a Shakespearean actor, set in the eighteenth century is reminiscent of the anachronism of all the SMNT’s Shakespearean (re)constructions, including the Hut. Further, though, this reference to the Shakespeare Hut as standing on the ‘soil’ of the National Theatre and that the performances there ‘ought to be on the record of the National Theatre’ (an institution that was still yet to be realized, of course, when those words were written), adds poignancy to the idea of the Shakespeare Hut theatre as a step towards the Woman’s Theatre ambitions of the AFL. This stage, though tiny, temporary and rather makeshift in many ways, was symbolically significant

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as the wartime ‘stand-in’ for a National Theatre. Here, women directed on it, managed it, starred upon it. Gertrude Elliott could, rather audaciously perhaps, be remembered as the National Theatre’s first and, to date, only female artistic director. Under Elliott’s management, productions at the Hut were prolific. In addition to the regular entertainments that were usual for YMCA huts, the Shakespeare Hut included more formal weekly productions, a mixture of dramatic recitals, musical interludes and play extracts. In the style of pre-war suffrage productions57 the performances’ format was an eclectic mix of music, speech and drama in short ‘sketches’. This range of entertainments, drama and Shakespearean-themed events led to a fascinating freedom from the conventions of, or the designation of value to, the Hut’s stage as a performance space either for ‘low’ or ‘high art’, mirroring the eclecticism and ‘the refusal to distinguish between … the value of a play or a sketch, a raffle and a recitation’ that was integral to suffrage performances.58 The levelling of ‘value’ onstage in pro-suffrage plays came to represent the concept of universal franchise and, to an extent, burgeoning ideals of popular equality. The Hut became a place where new one-act plays and extracts from upcoming theatrical runs were performed, often before their release in commercial theatres. In a letter to her friend, the singer Lady Maud Warrender (who also appeared on the Hut’s stage), Ellen Terry writes that she ‘must return to town to collect Falstaff and sich-like [sic] trash for my tour which begins 29th this month (first showing at Shakespeare hut, Gower Street on the 20th)’.59 Even a tour by Ellen Terry, then, could start at the Hut. There were few, if any, amateurs who trod the Hut stage, contrary to the rare, cursory mentions the Hut has so far received in theatre history.60 Rather, these productions were performed and directed by some of the most famous practitioners of the day: Ellen Terry, Ben Greet, Martin Harvey, Edy Craig, among others. Records of the Hut’s productions are sparse and scattered; this was largely handto-mouth programming and there was no budget for more than the most basic of posters or programmes. However, some



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specific performances and productions can be pinpointed via surviving programmes, reviews and advertisements. By this means, it is possible to identify the diversity of the productions on the Hut stage. Examples include, in 1916, extracts from Julius Caesar, She Stoops to Conquer (starring Ben Greet)61 and David Garrick. From 1917 to 1919 soldiers were treated to an annual gala celebrating Shakespeare’s anniversary. In 1918, Mary Anderson, a huge star who had been notoriously elusive due to extreme stage fright, starred in scenes from Macbeth.62 Other programmes for the Hut’s entertainments show us the variety, in every sense, that was presented there. Co-directed by Elliott and Craig,63 one includes extracts from six different Shakespearean plays, while another evening’s entertainments show a distinct sense of the revue or music hall, in which there are songs, speeches – including one by Ellen Terry – and ‘Mr David Hickey will play the penny whistle’.64 Here, in the politics of the fragmentation of Shakespearean texts, side by side with popular entertainments, lies another challenge to the straightforward notion of a maternalized, politically benign or patriotic version of female-led Shakespearean production. The connection between Elliott and her colleagues’ work at the Hut and their years of activism as suffragists is both inevitable and evident. Rereading the programming in this context, the focus on Shakespeare, both performance and commemoration, is crucial to the significance of the Hut in the context of gender politics and theatre. One recalls that in a Woman’s Theatre, according to Bensusan, ‘the plays will not be the work of women alone, all the productions will deal with the emancipation movement’.65 As I have shown, Shakespeare was a strong presence in the suffrage movement’s press and campaigns.66 Now, in the Shakespeare Hut, a female-led theatre used Shakespeare both as a ‘performance of patriotism’ and as a performance of reformism. Its performers as well as the selection of texts and extracts across its productions – Terry’s Portia, Forbes-Robertson’s Hamlet, combined with Bensusan’s skits and Craig’s direction – bring their significance in pre-war suffrage campaigning to the Shakespeare Hut.

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That Elliott staged impressive entertainments weekly, and worked extremely hard, is widely corroborated. In an entry in her diary on 24 March 1917, Johnston’s sister, Ida, writes, ‘Gertrude [is] running [a] one act … at Shakespear [sic] Hut … Gertrude organises a concert every Saturday.’67 Press references to Elliott’s extensive ‘war work’ at the Hut suggest she was employed full time in arranging these productions. The Oakland Tribune reported: Her soldiers and sailors hut … was the most popular in London. The hostess, herself, practically lived there. ... She inducted every one of her friends of the stage, of the musical world, of the world of art and entertainment, into her service.68 This portrays Elliott as very clearly in control, owning her management of ‘her soldiers and sailors hut’ and others joining the work entering ‘into her service’. The notion of women’s ‘war work’, especially among the upper middle and moneyed classes, was embodied in the Shakespeare Hut, with its 350 female volunteers and its female-led stage. Its stars, too, probably viewed this as their wartime duty, their bit for the war effort. As Mary Anderson writes in her memoir, ‘I acted and spoke in camps, huts, many theatres. … The war raged on and thousands were perishing. All we could do was to keep working.’69 The Hut’s presentation of theatre and musical entertainments was perceived as the fruits of Elliott’s patriotic war work, alongside a galaxy of stars and supported by a group of female practitioners. This legitimized female agency, leadership and the idea of women acting as work in itself. Newey has argued that the public struggles of the suffrage campaign, which made women visible as active citizens and speaking subjects, were increasingly absorbed into the war effort, but not always with feminist arguments foremost.70 However, one of these ‘public struggles’ had been relating to women’s rights and recognition in the workforce and this



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was prominent in the AFL’s mission. In 1908, inaugurating resolutions of the AFL had included ‘that women claim the franchise as a necessary protection for the workers under modern industrial conditions, and maintain that by their labour they have earned the right to this defence’.71 This rhetoric of ‘work’ and ‘labour’ was, therefore, central to AFL aims. It also permeated the wider discourse of the British female suffrage movement before the war and the transference of energy into ‘war work’ was commonplace among many middle-class and upper-class suffragists. While Newey argues the war may have ‘absorbed’ women’s public voice, actresses – the senior members of the AFL included – had the unique advantage of their war duties still being to speak publicly, to act, to be visible. Since the AFL had always specifically asserted performance as a form of ‘labour’, including themselves in the ‘workers’ they aimed to represent, the notion of performance as war work is a small leap to make. Elliott’s work at the Hut, like her AFL colleague Lena Ashwell’s concert parties at the Front, served to legitimize female-led performance and management. These women’s productions, then, could move from subversive to hegemonically acceptable, even commendable, in the eyes of the public and the government. While reading these two distinct performance contexts as a direct transfer of ‘duties’ from suffragism to straightforward wartime patriotism would be reductive, there is an elision of the public voice of the suffragist and the public voice of the actress. While agitprop plays were no longer easy to produce, Shakespeare’s texts, fragmented into bitesize pieces, could function on both patriotic and feminist levels, if set in the context of their pre-war use (Terry, Forbes-Robertson, Granville-Barker) and their wartime use (postcards to the Front, gifted copies of Shakespeare’s works for soldiers). In addition to empowering female-led production in the sense of professional ‘work’, though, the Shakespeare Hut performances could be viewed as a means by which femaleled wartime theatrical production became maternalized. The Hut performances were given to an almost entirely male

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audience of a very young average age, while the entertainments Elliott arranged often featured middle-aged women. Whether a maternalization of female performance is necessarily problematic for the trajectory of the rise of ‘Women’s Theatre’ supported by the pre-war AFL is debatable. Elliott worked tirelessly at the Hut while also mother of four children; in addition to any maternal role lent her by the press coverage of her care of the young Anzacs at the Hut, so she was a working, rather than a domestic, mother figure. Yet, the Junior Players, a regular group of performers at the Hut, are difficult to delineate within the Hut’s maternal function. A troupe of often cross-dressed teenaged girls, the Junior Players provided some of the weekly performances at the Hut as well as taking part in the annual Shakespeare Memorial galas. A rare example of the programme of one of the Players’ performances, dated 27 July 1918, shows that they performed extracts from Bulwer-Lytton’s Richelieu, Boucicault’s The Shaughraun and Shakespeare’s Henry V.72 Here, not only were the performers all girls, the stage manager and pianist were women, as per the Women’s Theatre model. In this way, the Hut offered a space for younger actresses to perform. In her 1978 autobiography, Fabia Drake provides a rare account of performing on the Shakespeare Hut when she was just fifteen years old. As briefly mentioned in the context of the Anzac identity of the Hut in Chapter 3, Drake cross-dressed as the eponymous soldier-king to perform extracts from Henry V on several occasions. She writes, As … we would be playing to soldiers, it was decided that the scene we would enact should be from Henry V. … 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 of the curtain and speak the Agincourt speech to my Army on the floor. Four 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.73



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She spells out the rationale for using these ‘magnificent speeches’ as she calls them, citing their ‘urgency and a rallying force that can be incandescent’.74 The approach to performing a stripped-down Shakespeare, with ‘no extras … no army’ strikes a contrast with the hundreds onstage at the Drury Lane gala explored in Chapter 2, or more generally the huge casts of the spectacular Shakespearean productions of Herbert Beerbohm Tree and others in the late-Victorian and early-Edwardian theatres. Instead, the notion of the ‘army on the floor’ conjures a picture of an inclusive, interactive, even immersive exchange between performer and audience at the Hut. The youthful player and audience are both, or so she recalls, whipped into a frenzy by Shakespeare’s stirring words, able now to relive war after the Armistice in a safe Shakespearean heterotopia. Drake appears proud of the contribution she perceives herself to have made to the morale of the troops she entertained as a diminutive (as her portrait as the king, accompanying the account, verifies; Figure 4.3), cross-dressed Henry V. A female Henry V in wartime, as her Henry would first have been performed, must surely remind the audience of the absence of young men, of the war contribution of women and, in a carnivalistic reversal of original practice cross-dressing, present a ‘rallying’ cry from a young woman dressed as a king. However, Drake was not the only female Henry V in wartime – nor were the Junior Players the only all-female company to perform (parts of) the play. Accompanied by a photograph of actress Gwen Lally as Henry V, the following article identifies her dutiful war work in filling in for the male actors away in the war: For some time the Sunday papers have been filled with pictures of the women of Europe who have replaced the men – now at the front – in all sorts of masculine activities. … But the climax was reached when Miss Gwen Lally, an English actress, chose to do her share as a substitute by filling the gap left by the actors who were taking bugle calls, in place of curtain calls, at the front.75

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FIGURE 4.3  Fabia Drake as Henry V c.1919. Image likely to have been taken by Henry T. Brice, Shakespeare Hut manager who took all the interior images for postcards (as verified by originals in the YMCA Archive, YMCA/Q11 Acc 2002/62 pt). The accompanying text writes of Brice’s support for Drake in the context of this role. Reproduced without rights credit in Drake, facing p. 33.

Here, female cross-dressing in Shakespeare is legitimized – read excused – as a duty in the war effort, stepping up to the male roles left empty, temporarily ‘filling the gap’ left by a dearth of young men. Lally is presented as taking up this ‘curious’ duty in the Tercentenary year, and the writer wryly sees this as something of a jape in the context of the all-male early modern stage for which Shakespeare wrote: Curiously enough, Miss Lally has introduced this idea of girls taking men’s parts in the year of Shakespeare Tercentenary, which is putting this reverse English on the stage custom



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of Shakespeare’s day, when feminine roles were invariably played by men.76 This is as a festive reversal, ‘this reverse English’ on original practices of all-male production. Commemoration, ‘in this year of Shakespeare’s Tercentenary’, can be, in practice, more festive than sombre, where commemorations are of the long dead (of whom there is no living memory) and, in Shakespeare’s case, an occasion for costuming and reversals. Commemorative occasions, as I argued in the introduction of this book, can therefore become as heterotopic as any other occasion delineated as festive. Female cross-dressed Shakespeare in 1916 is presented here as ‘excused’ by both the festive moment and the necessity of war and, as such, is depoliticized. Yet wartime necessity cannot account for all-female production, such as the Junior Players’ scenes. While many young male actors had indeed been conscripted, there were still older actors in London ready to play parts, as every play list confirms. All-female Shakespeare, even today, still comes with marketing that caveats and justifies its existence, usually using the discourse of equal employment opportunities. As Harriet Walter said of starring in Phyllida Lloyd’s all-female Shakespeare trilogy, it would ‘celebrate, and notice, and not be coy about, addressing the gender imbalance’.77 In a similar way, though in reverse, all-female Shakespeare was excused by the war. However, this disclaiming of political agenda in favour of pragmatism does still open the door to all-female production. Fabia Drake and the Junior players at the Shakespeare Hut were not the only women to play all-female Henry V in the war and its immediate aftermath. Marie Slade’s all-female production of the play, best remembered for its Stratford run in 1921, started life in the war. In June 1916, her all-female company played Henry V at the Queen’s Theatre. However, Gordon Williams notes that ‘subver[sion]’ in the use of Shakespeare in the First World War was unlikely to take hold, writing: Attempts to subvert the status of Henry V as a vehicle for wartime patriotism were easily contained. Wartime

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Shakespeare was non-problematic: as the great national poet he self-evidently represented the nation’s views. He served to justify the worth and rightmindedness of Britain’s theatre as well as her foreign policy.78 When he makes reference to the all-female Henry V, though, he does so only to draw attention to the performance of one of its cast, not reading the idea of all-female Shakespeare as ‘subversive’ in itself. Indeed, Williams presents Shakespeare as ‘non-problematic’ for wartime use due to his status as ‘national poet’, which had been, of course, reasserted in the years preceding the war, for Londoners and high society at least, through the highly visible 1910–12 SMNT events. So, for the commentators of the day, and critics since, there is no perceived connection between wartime ‘women’s theatre’ and the Women’s Theatre project pre-war, at least in relation to Shakespeare. Women taking on male parts could be perceived in the same way as women working in munitions factories, they were ‘a substitute … filling the gap left by the actors who were taking bugle calls, in place of curtain calls’,79 rather than making the ‘feminist’ statement encapsulated in the AFL’s Women’s Theatre project. Yet the relative safety (and cultural capital) of Shakespeare’s name and status, supplies, perhaps, an excellent vehicle via which something rather radical can take place without the usual hindrances and backlashes. By playing Shakespeare, wartime women were asserting their patriotism. However, it cannot be ignored that there are different ‘Leagues’ behind the two all-female Henry Vs. While Marie Slade’s production was linked to the Women’s Patriotic League, engaged before the war in recruiting territorial soldiers among other activities to promote patriotic Britishness, the Henry V at the Hut was organized by AFL core members, whose organizational agenda was feminist and political, not overtly patriotic, though displays of patriotism must help the cause. Returning to Kelly’s reading of the AFL’s wartime activities, that ‘League members joined other suffragists in “displaying” their identity as Englishwomen,’ she sees this as ‘performance



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of patriotism’ integral, not contrary to the AFL’s ‘feminist [and] its suffragist affiliations’.80 Surely there is no more efficient way to achieve this than by producing Shakespeare for the troops, as did Elliott and Craig at the Hut and Lena Ashwell at the Front. In this context, the Junior Players’ all-female Henry V scenes at the Hut, just like Marie Slade’s all-female production of the play, presented a very different presentation of womanhood. This gender-fluid representation of a key symbol of masculine Englishness (Henry V – and Shakespeare), especially in Fabia Drake’s young body on stage (she first performed Henry V at age thirteen – her account is of the 1919 performance, at least its third time at the Hut, when Drake was still just fifteen), is also a woman onstage rallying and commanding troops. In the further context of the Joan of Arc figure, the rallying, flag-carrying suffragist so often used in pro-suffrage propaganda, Drake, Slade and Lally all presented a very familiar image, a symbol of female empowerment. Returning, too, to Shakespeare’s part in the pre-war pro-suffrage campaign, cross-dressing within Shakespeare’s world had been significant. As Susan Carlson suggests regarding Granville-Barker’s production of Twelfth Night (the one in, as she argues, AFL colours), ‘the boyish, masculine playing of Viola seems well in keeping with the reformulating of women’s roles which served as a subtext for the suffrage campaign’.81 Brought into wartime, then, crossdressed Shakespeare did not merely ‘justify the worth and rightmindedness of Britain’s theatre’82 as other Shakespeare production might have done. In this context, Shakespeare is appropriated to justify the feminism beneath Elliot and Craig’s Hut work, facilitating a sidestep into a Women’s Theatre that is legitimized both by wartime role reversals and by festive reversals of the heterotopic space of the Hut. A delineated space, the Shakespeare Hut was uniquely distinct from the ‘real’ wartime London outside. It was caught in a perpetual festive moment of commemoration of Shakespeare by virtue of its repeated shows and amusements, its Shakespearean, mockTudor novelty and its hauntingly high turnover of users. This commemorative festivity provides a context in which role-

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reversal can be accepted as carnivalesque and, in any case, the wartime audience would have been well accustomed to seeing women doing ‘men’s jobs’ during the war. Yet including male impersonation as a regular feature of its Shakespearean performances is not only significant because it challenges gender expectations. It was another way in which the Hut performances transgressed the boundaries between the classical or legitimate theatre and the populist, music hall traditions. This had been a division that had always held back the SMNT project, which previously seemed unable to build a successful bridge between popular support and an idea of ‘high’ culture, only dividing the issue still further along class lines with its opulent displays (such as the Shakespeare Ball and Shakespeare’s England exhibition explored in Chapter 1). The Shakespeare Hut project not only brought public support back through its wartime benevolence, as Chapter 2 showed, but through its successful hybrid of every ‘level’ of drama and performance on its stage. The male impersonator had become a popular and regular fixture in the Edwardian and wartime music halls. Drake’s appearance on the Hut stage, impersonating Henry V – a character seen as Shakespeare’s male paragon of warlike, patriotic masculinity – is a fascinating meeting of the popular and the classical stage at that moment. Certainly, the context of the music hall tradition allowed stage cross-dressing as an acceptable norm. As Alison Oram articulates, The gender-crossing woman came from the world of entertainment, comedy, and marvellous happenings. What is fascinating about women’s gender-crossing is how strongly it continued to carry this playful and humorous tone, and how late it was in the twentieth century before it was reinterpreted as sexual deviance.83 Drake’s Henry would not, then, have necessarily been perceived to be politically, socially or sexually challenging in the context of a ‘variety’ stage format. However, with hindsight, this female



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Henry V hints at a more significant moment in female theatre history. Directed by openly gay, pro-suffrage Edith Craig and AFL president, Gertrude Elliott, Henry’s magnetism and leadership embodied in the form of a young woman amounts to a significant theatrical and sociopolitical moment. The Hut’s fluid transgression of theatrical modes was another way it allowed a female-led Shakespeare to flourish. Nevertheless, in wartime, the association of Shakespeare with these female-led productions lent a different kind of patriotic legitimacy to its performances. Framed by textual choices that nodded to the very plays being widely quoted in war propaganda could align the Hut performances with simple wartime patriotism. This effect is heightened by the ‘foreignness’ of its Anzac audiences who were not only new to the country but were ‘Dominion’ soldiers, many of whom had volunteered for service based on a particular view of a ‘Merrie Old England’ that was their motherland and required protection, ‘the “home” we had heard of all our lives!’84 Shakespeare’s invocation by war authorities was as part of this utopian England that was worth fighting for, as Chapters 2 and 3 show. Yet there is another level to the patriotism performed at the Hut. Returning to Kelly’s assessment of the AFL’s wartime activities, this is all part of their ‘performance of patriotism’ in which the ‘AFL forgot neither its feminist nor its suffragist affiliations’.85 After the war, the momentum was not entirely lost for allfemale Shakespeare. In April 1921, as part of the ‘Shakespeare Day’ celebration in London, Marie Slade’s all-female Henry V played at the Strand before a run in August at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre; Fabia Drake played the Earl of Cambridge.86 A Review of the 1921 Shakespeare Day celebrations in the Stage notes the performance: A novelty of the celebrations was the all-women performance of so markedly a men’s play as King Henry V, given at the Strand on Tuesday afternoon. The performance, in aid of the Middlesex Hospital was ‘a women’s tribute’ to the poet. It had, of course, the defects of its qualities.87

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This response in the industry paper identifies the performance as a ‘novelty’, which is justified in two ways, as a ‘women’s tribute’ and by virtue of its charitable cause. Women are identified as paying ‘tribute’ (under male direction, by Frank Woolfe) to the male playwright as all patriotic people should, on ‘Shakespeare Day’. Their fundraising also posits the performance as for a good cause, a novelty to raise money for caring for the sick, ultimately bringing it back around to a ‘feminine’ function. The Stratford performances of the all-female Henry V were in fact part of the New Shakespeare Company season, funded by the Shakespeare Hut, to which I shall return in Chapter 6. For now, it is important to note that there was an all-female Henry V in the Hut every year while its stage hosted performances. Once the building’s function changed, the Hut would become the facilitator of a very different all-female Henry V, funded by its rent. The space the Hut provided for female-led Shakespeare and modern performance, then, formed a bridge between the pre-war Women’s Theatre project and female-led production entering the mainstream with less controversy. While before the war Elliott had been highly active and an organizational force in the AFL, she had yet to move into true independence from her husband in the context of her theatrical career. However, while still working at the Shakespeare Hut, Elliott produced her first self-managed production, The Eyes of Youth, followed by Come Out of the Kitchen at the Strand. After the Hut closed its doors to Anzacs in 1919, she formed her own company and made successful tours of South Africa and, significantly, Australia and New Zealand in the early 1920s.88 Her stardom in the Antipodes was of a very particular kind: she had gained widespread fame for her Shakespeare Hut war work and was honoured in both countries during her tour. In Australia, she was guest of honour at a formal tea, representing the female war worker abroad; the event was ‘to show their appreciation of the war work done by Lady Forbes-Robertson (Gertrude Elliott) and, indirectly, of the many other British women war workers’.89 In New Zealand, she was presented with an award



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for her services to the country, in the form of a golden tiki statuette.90 For Elliot personally, as well as representing the AFL and all ‘women war workers’, this meant recognition of female-led theatre as a positive force during wartime and as a national service. However, that the award was a tiki, a Māori not a colonial symbol of New Zealand, reduces any hint of the service being an imperial duty. ‘Remembering Shakespeare’ through performance at the Hut had, in fact, all but abandoned the imperial rhetoric of the pre-war SMNT (though every gala performance ended with ‘God Save the King’). The space was, as Chapter 3 argues, relatively inclusive; its New Zealand heterotopia was not segregated along racial lines, nor to a great extent on class lines either. The presentation of the female leader of the Hut stage, in New Zealand, with a Māori symbol is the culminating moment then, for the Shakespeare Hut’s more global, inclusive Shakespeare. The opportunity for female-led theatre presented by the legitimacy of female war work and situated within the unique performance venue created in the Shakespeare Hut bridged the gap between Elliott as organizational activist and as independent theatre producer in her own right. Yet the Hut performances are not only significant for Elliott’s own career and influence. The continuation of professional alliances that had strengthened through the AFL meant that Elliott’s time managing the Hut was a time of freedom for women on its stage, at least in terms of managerial and directorial autonomy. As for Elliott’s version of Shakespeare, the Hut had a stage where fragmenting and splicing, singing and joking were all welcome approaches to his texts. Inspired, perhaps, by suffrage performances, perhaps even by music hall, Elliott’s management of the Hut’s stage was certainly unique. Terry’s proto-suffrage Portia and Johnston’s ‘reformer’ Hamlet met singers, musicians and teenaged crossdressers on the Hut’s stage, presenting a female-led version of Shakespearean production that effortlessly crossed the boundaries of cultural forms.

5 After the war: 1919–23

After the Armistice, the Shakespeare Hut remained home to hundreds of Anzac soldiers waiting to be demobbed. The long road home for Dominion troops often consisted of months of waiting for a place to begin the voyage by boat and the Shakespeare Hut extended its time as an Anzac home to accommodate many of these temporarily homeless men. However, it was clear that soon the Hut would be empty and without purpose. The last of the Anzacs had left the Shakespeare Hut by mid-1919. What would the Shakespeare Memorial National Theatre (SMNT) committee do now with a site occupied by a significant and well-loved building, a site destined for a National Theatre whose realization was perhaps even further off than ever? This was a new era for the Shakespeare Hut. Yet another purpose was found for this truly multifunctional space, a purpose that would not only prove to be truly internationally significant but also would lead directly to a new era of ‘national’ Shakespeare production. Rather than immediately seeking its demolition, and once again led by Israel Gollancz’s innovative thinking, the SMNT committee allowed the Hut a new life, if only a temporary one. In 1919, brokered by Gollancz, the Hut was leased to

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the YMCA as a headquarters for their new Indian YMCA in London, to be known as the Indian Students’ Hostel. The Hut was no longer to be an Anzac space but would quickly become known instead as ‘Little India’ in London. Meanwhile, the £3,000 annual rent the YMCA paid for the Hut’s use would fund Britain’s first national Shakespeare company, a rare Stratford–London collaboration, and would go on to influence both the National Theatre and, even more clearly, the creation of the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC). Just as the Hut had a dual role in its final years, this post-war chapter must consist of two distinct parts. The story focuses both on the Hut’s new identity as an Indian, scholarly space and also on the role of the Hut both practically and symbolically, in creating a ‘national’ Shakespeare company.

Little India The Shakespeare Hut’s function in London’s Indian intellectual and political culture during its brief time serving as the Indian Students’ Hostel was truly significant. However, for the trajectory of this book studying the Hut as a case study of Shakespearean heterotopia, commemoration and performance practices, it poses something of a quandary. In fact, ‘Little India’, as the Hut came to be known, fundamentally abandoned the building’s Shakespearean ambitions, culture of performance and even, arguably, its commemorative function, to be replaced with high intellectual pursuits and education. Therefore, the first part of this chapter looks at the absence of Shakespeare and the Hut’s metamorphosis into an educational and political meeting point for extremely significant intellectual figures in India’s cultural and political landscape of the early 1920s. It examines, in other words, a new heterotopia, a ‘Little India’, in which radical political and philosophical discussion was part of daily life. However, it is really a time when the Shakespeare, as it were, is taken out of the Shakespeare Hut and relocated in Stratford as the



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New Shakespeare Company (NSC). This Stratford–London collaboration opens further the debate over whether Shakespearean commemoration needs a ‘solid object’ or whether performance can, in fact, be commemorative. The negotiations between the YMCA and the SMNT to decide the future of the Shakespeare Hut appear to have been both amicable and efficient. The relationship between Gollancz and the YMCA had clearly remained positive through their unusual wartime partnership. Gollancz even hoped to effect a longer ongoing relationship, mooting the idea of creating a partnership focussing on post-war education but it fell on deaf ears in an SMNT committee now turning to the future of their long-awaited new theatre. Nevertheless, the SMNT were evidently happy for the Shakespeare Hut to remain. Clearly, the Bloomsbury site could not immediately be used to erect a theatre so soon after the devastation of war had changed both the cultural and economic landscape of the city. Instead, a ground rent was swiftly agreed and this money ring-fenced for the establishment of the New Shakespeare Company in collaboration with Stratford, a venture which will be the focus of the second part of this chapter. The YMCA then went to work refitting the Shakespeare Hut to be an educational, cultural institution for peacetime, rather than a respite space from the horrors of war. No expense was spared in creating this new oasis of education and Indian intellectual culture; K. T Paul, the intellectual lead for the project, records that the YMCA spent some £8,000 ‘to make [the Shakespeare Hut] suitable for our work’.1 The Hut’s very location was perfect, in the heart of the burgeoning intellectual sector of the city, predating the University of London’s landmark building, Senate House, by a decade but clearly influencing the erection of the University’s first home for its new Institute for Historical Research, for which very familiar looking ‘Tudor Huts’2 were erected all along Malet Street in 1921.3 Already a stone’s throw from the British Museum, the Shakespeare Hut was being transformed into an educational space where performances would give way

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to lectures and its theatre would become a ‘lecture hall with a capacity of 700’.4 Its residents would be scholars, not soldiers. At the time, regulations in India under British rule stipulated that young Indians wishing to enter many professions – such as certain branches of medicine, the Indian Civil Service or to become a barrister – must spend a set number of years in England, compelling many young, educated Indians to make the long and expensive journey to complete part of their education in London.5 The Shakespeare Hut was to create a centralized educational space for many of these young scholars and professionals, of both sexes, to stay, meet, attend lectures and socialize. On 4 February 1920, the Shakespeare Hut was ‘opened’ for the second time, in a ‘well-attended’ ceremony.6 The guest of honour to open the Hut was poet and critic, and enthusiast for Asian art and culture, Lawrence Binyon,7 who was also by this time, of course, best known by the general public as he still is, as the author of what would become arguably the most iconic of First World War poems, ‘For the Fallen’. Binyon’s complete speech on the occasion survives and offers a clear window on what the new life of the Shakespeare Hut was to represent: One of the greatest problems today is that each race should try to understand the races which are different from itself. There is the problem of nationality and the national spirit. Many, full of the horrors of the war and recognizing how vile have been the fruits of a strong national feeling, would like to cut it right out altogether, but after all, national character is something too strong to be suppressed. To my mind, it is not suppression of national character which we should aim at, but it is education … Europe has this strong genius for action and India has genius for contemplation. Let us recognise each other’s gift. Let England and Europe recognise the extreme value and power of thought and the things of the mind. Above all let us try and understand each other.8



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The speech generally focused on the Hut as a space of mutual understanding and respect between Indian and English intellectual life and culture. Binyon’s comments on fears around nationalism reflect the post-war terror of conflict but, significantly, we also lose the language both of empire and of patriotism found so often in commentary on the Hut’s previous function for its New Zealand users. However, the speech unabashedly adheres to a racialized notion of national identity, homogenizing the ethnically diverse India into one ‘race’. To Binyon, national difference is racialized and inescapable, even if presented here as positive. Binyon tries to emphasize the potential of the Hut as an exemplar for international collaboration, rather than subjection or even duty, though its success in this capacity would remain to be seen. Just as was the case in the marketing of the Hut as a New Zealand YMCA space (see Chapter 3), the Shakespeare Hut as Indian Hostel was similarly presented as a wholesome space, protecting youths visiting London from the empire from the seedier side of London life. Edwyn Bevan, chairman of the Hut, was interviewed in 1921 to ‘satisfy the curiosity on the part of the press’ about what exactly the Shakespeare Hut now was. His statement on its value foregrounds its function in providing a positive space for Indian students, one where they are protected from ‘temptations’, echoing the similar hopes of the YMCA for its Anzac troops: Undoubtedly in many cases, a young man has gone back to India demoralized or embittered, having seen much of what is evil or sordid in London and little of what is good, but his chances of seeing what is good, have, as a rule, been precious poor. Men of strong character and principle, such as some I have known overcome the temptations incidental to loneliness in a great city far away from home traditions, really make the best of their time here and carry back to India an extension of knowledge for the benefit of their country. But others no doubt have got harm rather than good by coming and carried back to their country little

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of value. That is why an enterprise like this hostel is so extraordinarily important.9 The Shakespeare Hut’s reinvention for the Indian students once again attempts to present these foreign visitors with a safe corner of London – and England – in which they can ‘see what is good’ in English life rather than the seedier side of the capital. The Shakespeare Hut’s unthreatening domesticity is utilized as a means via which to present the benevolence of the British culture and state. Having spent its first three years as an Antipodean heterotopia, the Shakespeare Hut’s ‘rebranding’ as an Indian space was both fast and effective. From their inception, the Indian years of the Shakespeare Hut were governed dually on the spot and from a distance in India. The Committee of Management in London was appointed by the Indian National Councils of the YMCA (INC) and all matters of policy or strategic decisions, too, had to be referred to the latter.10 This was not an English ‘gift’ to men of a ‘Dominion’, as the Hut had been provided to the Anzacs; rather, this was fundamentally an Indian enterprise in London. Quickly, the Shakespeare Hut became a well-known and established meeting place, educational institution and focus of Indian identity in London. However, the period of its existence as ‘Little India’ corresponds with moments of bloody oppression by British forces in India and the calls from Gandhi to peaceful response in the face of brutality. The relative safety of ‘Little India’ was a crucial space in which British imperial rule could openly be discussed – at least for a time. An article by St Nihal Singh, published in the Graphic in 1921, details life at the Shakespeare Hut. Singh portrays the Hut as an oasis of India in the centre of London and offers probably the only complete contemporary opinion piece on the Hut’s significance as a cultural space. Singh was a prolific journalist and writer; as we read his 1921 piece on the Shakespeare Hut, it is interesting to recall that, the previous year, Singh had published a work entitled Ruling India by Bullets and Bombs: Effect of the Doctrine of Force upon the



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Future of Indo-British Relations, and was an outspoken and successful journalist.11 Singh’s presentation of the Shakespeare Hut is significant in this context; he has chosen to promote the place extremely positively, using strong language of Indian national identity and intellectualism throughout while erasing almost entirely any link with Shakespeare. Singh writes, first, of Indian ‘national poet’ Rabindranath Tagore visiting the Shakespeare Hut, presenting it as a meeting place for the highest order of Indian creativity and intellectualism. ‘Tagore,’ he writes, ‘spent his last evening in London amidst his own people at the little India, otherwise known as the “Indian Students’ Union and Hostel”, or the “Shakespeare Hut”’.12 Introducing the Hut not as representing Shakespeare in particular but instead associated immediately with Tagore transfers the literary-cultural association from an English to an Indian ‘national poet’ and from past glory onto current genius. Towards the end of the article, Singh returns to Tagore’s relationship with the Hut, recalling that On one occasion I heard Rabindranath Tagore lecture to [the young people at the Hut] upon India’s soul, upon the culture that was evolved in the forest fastness of Ind. So reverently did they listen to that man, who for all the world looked and talked like a rishi of old, that it left no room in the mind for fear that young India had become lost in the maze of materialism.13 Tagore is represented here as both timeless and inspirational for a new generation of Indian thinkers who, throughout the article, Singh presents as united in their mission to free India from its subject state, both politically and culturally: ‘One and all, they are distressed at India’s present condition and long to see her stand erect among the nations.’14 Tagore’s visits to the Shakespeare Hut also made it into the mainstream press, as far afield as Northern Ireland, as the Northern Whig reported, ‘Indians idolise Tagore, their national poet. The lecture hall was packed.’15 Reports such as these fix the date of at least one

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of Tagore’s lectures as April 1921, the month in which, during the war, the Shakespeare Hut had celebrated the English national poet. It would not be until July of that year that Israel Gollancz would lecture at the Hut on ‘Shakespeare and India’, the content of which appears, frustratingly, not to be extant.16 Tagore had previous contact with Israel Gollancz and his Shakespearean memorial endeavours, however. The poet’s contribution to Gollancz’s Book of Homage to Shakespeare published for the Tercentenary back in 1916 (see Chapter 2) was a specially written poem in Bengali with an accompanying English prose translation by the poet himself. Tagore presents Shakespeare as a force of nature adopted by England rather than, as many of the other contributions to that collection portray him, defined by his race. ‘Your fiery disk appeared behind the unseen,’ he writes. ‘O poet, o sun, England’s horizon felt you near her breast and took you to be her own.’ The translation concludes with Shakespeare’s presence in India, ‘the palm groves by the Indian sea raise their tremulous branches to the sky murmuring your praise’.17 The manuscript original of this piece is framed by a note to Gollancz, thanking him for the gift of a book, Boccaccio, and stating that the poem was written especially for the occasion.18 Gollancz’s gift involves Singh further in European literary history, as opposed to how we may have read his entry in the Homage without context, as a commissioned, one-off piece. Tagore had been a direct part of Gollancz’s Tercentenary memorial, yet, for Singh, he is the only poet of the Shakespeare Hut by 1921, with no mention made at all of the Hut’s namesake. Renaming the Shakespeare Hut ‘Little India’, a nickname that was widely used for the Hut during its post-war years,19 Singh erases its original name for most of his piece. In fact, he uses ‘Little India’ as the primary name, without quotation marks, but instead puts its two official names in inverted commas, calling it ‘little India, otherwise known as the “Indian Students’ Union and Hostel”, or the “Shakespeare Hut”’, which clearly prioritizes the name that assigns the building as an Indian space most powerfully, while relegating its other two



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titles only as alternates to its true name. This renaming, by Singh and others, establishes the Hut as a heterotopic space within which Indians can be ‘at home’ and usual divisions and factions are erased in an intellectual, cultural, religious and even political ‘common … ground’: ‘The Hut’ provides a common meeting ground for the fair Aryan from Kashmir and the sunburnt Dravidian from the South, and makes each respect the culture evolved by races far removed from one another, which, in India’s wonderful crucible, have, through the slow process of centuries, coalesced into one. It enables the Muslim from Bengal to break bread with the Brahman from Gujerat, and each to broaden his ideals of brotherhood.20 Singh consistently presents the Hut as a space in which Indians are united by a national identity that transcends racial divides within the country, which is an unequivocally political statement given the context of resistance to British rule back in India during the Hut’s short existence. He thus also resists British perceptions of ‘Indianness’ as racial, as exemplified in Binyon’s opening speech. Instead, Singh asserts a clear sense of ‘Indianness’ to be expressed at and via the Hut, ‘Little India’, by underpinning it with hyperbolic descriptions of Indians’ views of the home and identity. ‘No people are more conscious of their nationality than young Indians,’ he writes, ‘especially young Indians away from their Motherland.’ In contrast to the portrayal of the Shakespeare Hut as part of a British imperial ‘motherland’, the word frequently being used to assert British benevolent rule and racial identity over the Hut’s New Zealander Anzacs, Singh designates an Indian spiritual and political homeland. His presentation of the Hut as a space in which divides of race and religion are put aside provides a microcosmic model in ‘Little India’ of what can then be inferred is possible in India itself free of British dominance. However, in contrast to the presentation Singh provides of a ‘Little India’ as a powerful space of social cohesion,

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the Shakespeare name is sometimes markedly absent from British press descriptions for very different reasons – and to opposing effect. A short such piece on the Hut entitled ‘London Contrasts’ paints a picture of the Shakespeare Hut as foreign space and, troublingly, as a curiosity for the English passer-by: The coolest people in London these days are undoubtedly our coloured visitors from Africa and India. They are literally in their element! If you pass a certain Indian Students’ Hostel in the heart of London one of these evenings, you can see them squatting, Indian fashion, on the little strip of grass outside. Gentle murmurs of conversation in their native tongue are wafted out of the still air, and the raised, bungalow-like structure, brightly lighted and windowless, behind, gives you a vague feeling of being suddenly transported to the mysterious East.21 Comparing this description to the original reports of the Shakespeare Hut’s architectural design, which was not changed with the new function of the building, we find its quintessentially English ‘Tudor Touches’22 or ‘Elizabethan’23 features have morphed into a ‘bungalow-like structure [that] gives you a vague feeling of being suddenly transported to the mysterious East’. This far-fetched attempt to exoticize this mock-Tudor Hut’s architecture would be almost comical if it were not for the troublingly imperialist, nay, racist, undertones of this writer’s representation of both the building and its users. It is noticeable that the article fails to use the name ‘Shakespeare’ at all, instead referring to the Hut as ‘a certain Indian Students’ Hostel in the heart of London’, which is a starkly obvious omission, since it was a well-known (and seemingly well-loved) local landmark during its brief existence. Dropping the Shakespeare association allows, here, a redefinition of the Hut as an exotic, foreign building, alien to its location. Here is a clear attempt to erase the Shakespeare



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Hut’s original – and directly opposing – intentional material function as a monument to Englishness, presumably due a to racial prejudice against its new users. Meanwhile, a report by the Committee on Indian Students (1921–2) was chaired, interestingly enough, by the Earl of Lytton, who had once been instrumental in the Shakespeare Memorial project and was, by then, occupied in British–Indian politics. The committee was called to explore the problem of providing appropriate facilities for Indian students in Britain, along with other issues raised by Indian students themselves. Students had clearly reported problems of ‘race prejudice’; even the moderate politician and lawyer Sivaswami Aiyar, writing of his visit to the Hut, mentions students raising the ‘existence of very considerable race prejudice in England against Indian students’.24 The committee though, appears simply to have denied the problem altogether; it was reported that ‘allegations that race prejudice against Indian students is general in the United Kingdom are not supported by the Committee’.25 There was, therefore, no official response to the students’ concerns over racist behaviours and limited opportunities, which appear to have been considerable. Particulars are given of the efforts made by the committee to ascertain whether there is any justification for the deep-seated suspicion among Indian students that the official organization known as the Indian Students’ Department was created in order to act as a government agency for political espionage. However, the conclusion is reached that this suspicion is entirely without foundation.26 This would not be the only time the issue of British government spies emerges at the Hut, as I shall explain a little later. Clearly, though, the fears, ‘suspicions’ and experiences of prejudice reported by the Indian students using the Hut were entirely denied credence. As for the Shakespeare Hut itself, once again it seems to be well-liked by its users, and ‘is described as having won the favourable regard of many Indian students’.27 Yet one purpose identified by the official report appears to be that the Hut

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should be creating better integration between Indian students and the English around them but its efforts to ‘provide facilities for social intercourse between Indian students and English people … are said not as yet to have been so successful as was anticipated’.28 The Shakespeare Hut had become ‘Little India’ and, instead of assimilating Indians into English cultural expectations, it had created an Indian heterotopia. Inside, the Hut was an Indian, intellectual space, a space for debate and the exchange of ideas. It had not created a place in which to lose Indian identity within England but, conversely, affirmed the legitimacy of independence. The theatre having been changed into a lecture hall, the Shakespeare Hut was no longer a performance space. However, it was a vibrant intellectual venue, with diverse and impressive speakers regularly giving lectures and taking part in discussions. Topics were usually political or philosophical and often led to lively debate, which seems to have been highly valued by its users and visitors as designating a genuinely open intellectual space. G. K. Chesterton, for example, speaking on ‘Ideals and Work’, brought laughter to the Hut’s lecture hall by making nonsense of the idea of industrialism being a sort of idealism: ‘there had never been’, he said, ‘an Ode to a Pair of Trousers’. Instead he suggested that honour and idealism in an industrial world might be attained by ‘appeal[ing] to the international idea’.29 This is one of a number of moments preserved from the Shakespeare Hut’s Indian years in which internationalism and inter-faith collaboration are raised as ideals. The Hut is a unique space, which, as Singh describes, ‘enables the Muslim from Bengal to break bread with the Brahman from Gujerat, and each to broaden his ideals of brotherhood’.30 This collaborative, forward-facing outlook for the Hut’s debates meant that Indian internal politics and the relationship between India and other nations were often key topics, such as when Baron Hayashi, the Japanese ambassador, spoke on ‘India’s Influence on Japan’ in 1922.31 Beyond Indian politics, topics for lectures covered other political current affairs, including the volatile situation in Ireland, which was



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debated in relation to the idea, really, of imperial central rule versus home rule. Lord Morris, former prime minister of Newfoundland, gave a lecture entitled ‘What is Dominion Government?’, in which he argued, Once they allowed people to manage their own affairs … they immediately removed all cause of friction, but just as long as one country insisted on managing the affairs of another country and another people, they were going to have friction. … He preferred the right to manage his own affairs, even if he managed them wrongly, rather than that someone else managed them (cheers).32 It is small wonder, in this place of regular, lively discussion on the future of India and the possibility of independence or home rule, that Lord Morris’s comments, loaded with parallel, would produce cheers. His wildly incorrect prediction that ‘there would never again be a bit of trouble in Ireland’ once government in the north had become established must, at the time, have seemed an alluring position. However, there were much more direct discussions on India’s situation taking place at the Hut. Unlike its wartime function as a space for male users, as ‘Little India’, the Shakespeare Hut was a mixed gender space. Further than that, though, it was frequented and addressed by some leading female freedom fighters and women’s rights activists, echoing its previous life as a suffragist-led theatre (see Chapter 4). In February 1921, when the new Viceroy of India, Lord Heading, addressed the Indian students at the Shakespeare Hut, he was ‘confronted in a friendly way’33 by Sarojini Naidu. Naidu, ‘the Nightingale of India’, was of course a leading Indian poet, ‘a prominent leader of India’s freedom movement and a passionate and influential feminist’ who went on to become the first female regional governor.34 Her impassioned, unscheduled speech called upon the new Viceroy to consider Indian freedom and explains her own intention to ‘live those political ideals of liberty, justice and

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love, even for enemies, though they make us endure anguish untold’, making clear her opposition to the current regime. ‘It is for the custodian of England’s honour’, she said, ‘to see that India has a freedom based on mutual understanding, and not a regime based on violence.’35 Her speech made news and, in fact, overshadowed reporting of the Viceroy’s own words. Women were once again speaking publicly in the theatre of the Shakespeare Hut, but the context now was one of revolutionary politics in a precarious empire. The Shakespeare Hut was a place in which Indian women’s voices could be heard; it was a place in which, as Singh describes it, ‘young men meet … young women from their own land, and lose that sex-consciousness which … has proved, curiously enough, the greatest handicap of India today’.36 The Hut’s co-educational philosophy was pragmatic but also significant. Women and men were undertaking advanced education together; women were speaking out as leaders. Another female activist, Renuka Ray, who would become a leading Indian freedom fighter and campaigner for women’s rights,37 visited the Shakespeare Hut regularly when she was a young activist, already in direct contact with Gandhi. Ray’s memoirs reveal that she viewed the Hut as a ‘meeting place’ and discussed politics with leading intellectuals and activists of the time, including Indian Nationalist, Subhas Chandra Bose, at that time a hero of the cause.38 She also met the influential revolutionary Virendranath ‘Chatto’ Chattopadhyaya, ‘an itinerant anticolonial nationalist’ who ‘moved from one anticolonial underground to another’ and was instrumental in organizing and uniting Indian students and the broader Indian diaspora in Europe. While in London, Ray took an active interest in broader politics and discussions of idealism – she joined the Fabian Society and knew George Bernard Shaw there – and embodies the interconnection of various radical and idealist political movements overlapping at the Hut’s hub. Resisting the temptation to join Indian revolutionary terrorists while in London,39 she instead moved in intellectual circles at the Shakespeare Hut, a space for peaceful if radical debate, and



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there met her husband, Satyen, when ‘he came to Shakespeare Hut meetings in London and we saw a lot of each other’.40 Ray’s recollections of her time in London, punctuated by Hut visits, reveal London in the early 1920s as a place where Indian activists and revolutionaries met and were able to debate Indian politics, ironically, away from the direct brutality to be found in India. The Shakespeare Hut provided a space in which informal debate as well as formal lectures on radical topics flourished. Outside the Hut, though, the welcome experienced by Indian students in London was often more than disappointing. Students frequently complained of suffering ‘race prejudice’ in their daily lives and in their attempts to move forward with their careers. As Sukhbir Choudhary documents, Indian political activist, poet and writer, Moulana Mohammed Ali, visited London during the Hut era, finding his reception in England not at all as he had anticipated: [He] had expected that when Indians like him visited the country and its people they would not be regarded as aliens. But his stay there had belied his expectation. In the busy centre of London, he had experienced how callous the British public were to the tremendous issues that affected millions of people in India most vitally. … He was regarded almost as an alien in the very centre of the British Empire, which, in the time of its urgency and crisis, he had always been called upon to consider his own.41 The bitterness of a cold prejudice in London faced not only by students but also by respected Indian thinkers, was deeply divisive especially, as Choudhary notes, so soon after the sacrifices demanded of Indian soldiers defending the British Empire in the war. Moulana Mohammed Ali’s ideas, however, threatened the imperial loyalty Britain continued to demand: In an Empire of 450 millions of people, ‘little imperialist Englanders’ could not, without doing irreparable damage

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to the fabric of the Empire, formulate any policy in utter disregard of the sentiments and aspirations of the Indians who alone numbered 315 millions.42 The Shakespeare Hut, in its new role as ‘Little India’ presented a space in which Indian national identity was expressed and where, in the face of prejudice beyond its walls, strengthened. The frequent references to its multifaith, multi-ethnic harmony within, despite being a space in which lively and animated debate prevailed on many political issues, presented the Hut as a ‘little’ microcosm of a united and independent India based on idealism and intellectualism, unified and independent. By the time of Gandhi’s infamous arrest by the British in 1922, the fight for Indian independence had reached a true crisis and, over in London, the Shakespeare Hut’s days must now be numbered. On 10 March, journalists sought the opinion of students within the Hut on the resignation of the secretary of state for India, E. S. Montagu. The students responded that they had the ‘highest admiration’ for him and noted that he had ‘visited this Hostel on more than one occasion and invariably he received a good reception’.43 On 11 March, a meeting was held at the Shakespeare Hut ‘to express the Indian students’ sense of grief and their participation in the sufferings of their nation’.44 The shock of Gandhi’s imprisonment was felt across the empire and mourned by Indians supporting independence from across the globe. In England, this collective grief was articulated by gathering at the Shakespeare Hut, ‘Little India’, to express sorrow and disbelief: Sunday 12th was a day of complete mourning. The Lounge of the Shakespeare Hut, which is very much alive, full of merriment on every Sunday, though crowded today, was pervaded all day by a strange calmness and unutered [sic] grief. Every one moved and spoke quietly, almost in whispers. The restaurant, a bigbooming [sic], buzzing rendezvous, was almost completely deserted.45



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Here told by an anonymous correspondent for the 1922 account of Gandhi’s trial, and as Choudhary also recounts,46 the Hut’s Indian identity takes on a new role, a space of contemplation and even of religious observance, as ‘in the evening prayers were held in Zend, Sanskrit, English and other languages by Parsees, Muslims, Hindus, Christians and several European sympathizers of India’.47 Once again, there is inter-denominational respect and cohesion; this place was not assimilating young Indians into English culture or solidifying their imperial loyalty. On the contrary, it was uniting many young Indians in a more cohesive national, independent identity. The year after Gandhi’s arrest, the Shakespeare Hut would cease to be ‘Little India’ once more. It was only ever destined to enjoy a fleeting existence, as the YMCA’s N. G. Joseph explains: Even when we took the leasehold of the Shakespeare Hut, the Committee of Management knew that our days in this place were numbered. The London County Council was asking us from time to time to vacate the premises, so that the temporary structure could be pulled down.48 Finally, the Indian YMCA vacated the Hut and moved the student hostel to a permanent home further along Gower Street on 6 October 1923. Rumours that the Indian YMCA was becoming infiltrated with British spies had become alarming, too. Perhaps, if true, this is hardly surprising, given the individuals attending the Hut and the radical ideas discussed openly within its walls. Arriving in 1929, Sundar Kabadi (an associate of leading Indian revolutionary, M. N. Roy) conflates the old and new premises in this concern: There had been persistent and well-founded reports that the YMCA, once known as the Shakespeare hut, at 110 Gower Street, London, was a veritable headquarters for the British authorities to spy on the political activities of Indian students. The wave of resurgent nationalism which had erupted throughout the length and breadth of

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the country had made its greatest impact on the Indian students in England.49 The Shakespeare Hut became known as a central space in which Indian nationalism could be explored, a ‘Little India’ free from imperial rule, right in the heart of the British empire’s capital city. It would appear that this could not stand for the British authorities. It certainly cannot have helped the Hut’s chances of survival, either physically or in public memory. Neglect in enacting remembrance can become active, deliberate forgetting, to which I shall return in the next chapter. Perhaps the Hut, now politically dangerous, needed to be forgotten. However, regardless of the British authorities’ potential motivations to hasten its demise, it is inescapable that the Shakespeare Hut was always, by definition, temporary. It had been created for wartime, a time separated from the norm, on a space always intended for a different building. It was liminal, between solid object memorial and ephemera. Finally, by late 1923, the Shakespeare Hut stood silent and empty. Demolition was well underway by early 1924, when Israel Gollancz wrote to The Times on the occasion; his words will begin the next, and final, chapter of this book. It had only ever been a temporary home, just as it was temporary in every aspect of its existence: a temporary memorial, a temporary National Theatre, a temporary New Zealand and, finally, a temporary India. It was a stage set, in a way, a theatre of identity, memory and performance, a chameleon space in which the time and place of outside was suspended, idiosyncratically exemplifying Foucault’s nebulous idea of heterotopia. Yet the Shakespeare Hut in all its guises was also permeated by the radical politics and dynamic national identity formation of its very specific temporary moment, 1916–23. Now, just once more, I must go back in time to 1919, leaving the Indian students to the Hut, and shift focus, briefly, to the means by which Shakespeare left the Shakespeare Hut, and follow his name and memory back to Stratford.



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The New Shakespeare Company ‘This is not a time for anybody to look rich or act rich,’ advised Lady Astor MP, Britain’s first female Member of Parliament, on her visit to the Shakespeare Hut to open a bazaar in December 1919, appealing to ‘those who had made money out of the war to do their bit’, according to newspaper reports.50 In these austere times, just when it had immediately become clear that the need for the Shakespeare Hut in its current form must soon come to an end, something had to be done to reestablish momentum for the Shakespeareans involved in the SMNT. Ostentatious plans, though, were out of the question. Advocates for a National Theatre were at a key juncture. There was no way to justify the expensive erection of a theatre directly after the war in a London landscape still scarred, both literally and culturally, by Zeppelin raids, scattered with repurposed, commandeered buildings and dotted all over with temporary huts and austere structures for the troops. However, it would not be long before questions would begin to be asked about the money raised before the war and what could be done with the site. No, a theatre would not do, nor could the Shakespeare Hut be repurposed in itself to provide anything useful for the SMNT cause. As the first part of this chapter has shown, the Shakespeare Hut itself found a very unusual new purpose, becoming ‘Little India’, the Indian Students’ Hostel of the YMCA. However, as I have also shown, ‘Little India’ was an almost total repurposing of the Hut in many ways, not least in the conversion of its theatre into a lecture hall and there is, to date, no evidence of involving Shakespeare in life inside the building. This is excepting, of course, for the always undeterred Sir Israel Gollancz (knighted following his war work), who gave a lecture there, entitled ‘Shakespeare and India’, in July 1921. It would not be quite true, though, to say that all links with the performing arts were lost in the Shakespeare Hut’s later years. The building was the location for the headquarters of the YMCA Music Section,51 which

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focused, after the war, on supporting musical endeavours of injured servicemen as well as promoting music in education and performance throughout the country. In a letter to the Music Times, the chairman of the Music Section Committee, J. D. McClure, set out the aims and activities of the Music Section to try to drum up support from professionals in the music business, hoping for donations of money, instruments and skills. ‘The YMCA Music Section,’ explains McClure, ‘sets out to provide for the training of disabled ex-servicemen who are musically gifted. … Its aim is … the furtherance, through the YMCA, of anything that will help to bring music into the national life.’52 The Music Section advertised regularly both for donations and services and listed the Hut as its central office. The Shakespeare Hut address, especially for sending donations, created gravitas and a clear link to the arts and performance. However, the location of the Music Section at the Hut does not seem actually to have been due to any significant musical activity there but rather was a conveniently appropriate address and space in which to run the project. This was the last trace of a performance emphasis in the Hut’s public image and it can only be described as a shadow of its former performance culture. The Shakespeare Hut had left behind its performance past as a space but if its new function generated revenue, then that money could be used to launch a very different kind of Shakespearean scheme. It was the definitive purpose of the SMNT to make its mark on London, to create a ‘temple of drama’53 in the capital. However, war had changed everything. The built environment in London was remapped by war and the public were in no mood for monumentalizing civilians. Even before the end of the war, it seems, Gollancz proposed, to start with, the formation of a company rather than the construction of a theatre. Two letters from director Martin Harvey to Gollancz in August 1918 detail the director’s misgivings at the prospect of this shift in immediate aims. He is not at all convinced by the idea that performing Shakespeare is the ‘grand scheme’ in itself:



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I wish indeed I could have been with you tomorrow, because I think you are taking a very serious step. I have the profoundest admiration for the extraordinary powers of organization of Sir Arthur Yapp and the YMCA, and I have no doubt that these powers of organization might be of immense value to us in the proposed Shakespeare National Memorial Theatre. But I do feel very strongly that we should not whittle our grand scheme down to the starting of such a Company as is suggested in your circular. No; I do think we must stick manfully to our original proposal, that is, the erection in London of a Memorial Theatre, and anything short of this we ought not to entertain.54 Gollancz’s scheme to promote a company is seen here as a distraction from the ‘grand scheme’ of establishing a National Theatre. That the theatre must be a building, rather than existing for any length of time as a company only, is clear to Harvey. With the hindsight now at our disposal, it is easy to see that a National Theatre can exist without a building, as exemplified by the National Theatre of Scotland, which is purely a company and has no permanent building. However, following the many years of fierce debate over a National Theatre as a monument to Shakespeare, a shift to a company would represent a fundamental shift, too, in how commemoration was enacted. The idea that Shakespeare’s texts could stand for themselves as a memorial was frequently debunked in the pre-war SMNT rhetoric, as Chapter 1 shows. This is the objection made clear in Harvey’s second letter to Gollancz regarding the proposal: When I said I was heartily in accordance with the proposed Conference I had not gathered that you proposed to start a Touring Company. Provided, however, that we do not lay aside the larger scheme – which isn’t after all a Shakespeare Memorial (and a Touring Company could not be called that!) I see no reason why we should not use any income derived from the property of the Committee in

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encouraging the performances of Shakespeare. ... But such a Company will never, I fear, be sufficiently distinguished to give performances of Shakespeare that completeness and dignity which should mark the work of a National Theatre. I cannot help feeling that to start a Touring Company is beginning at the wrong end!55 That a ‘touring company could not be called’ a memorial is fundamental in Martin Harvey’s view and represents the opinion, too, of many members of the SMNT. However, whether or not the project was viewed as a memorial, the time had come for compromise and collaboration, as opposed to the stubborn inertia that threatened to destroy the SMNT’s plans altogether; Israel Gollancz clearly saw that the time had come to call in Stratford. In May 1919, ‘an alliance, fraught with interesting possibilities for the future, has recently been effected between the Shakespeare Memorial (National Theatre) Committee and the Governors of the Shakespeare Memorial, Stratford-on-Avon’56 and the New Shakespeare Company was born. Despite any doubts over what the scheme represented in terms of the ‘grand scheme’ of the SMNT, there was enough support for the New Shakespeare Company to get it off the ground in time for the summer season that same year. One key Stratford Shakespearean, however, was not convinced at all by the scheme, not least in terms of it requiring partnership between the London and Stratford Shakespeareans. In a letter dated 27 February 1919, Frank Benson, who had for many years managed the Stratford Festival (and had been knighted, in a toga, onstage at the Drury Lane Tercentenary gala), expressed to Gollancz his discomfort with the decision to collaborate. ‘The Governors accept your scheme,’ he writes. ‘It was a small meeting. I was the only one who voted against you’.57 He provides two strong objections. The first was that it did not match his creative ideals; ‘frankly,’ he writes, ‘I do not believe in theatres managed by All the Talents. I believe in individualism rather than collectivism’. However, his second



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reason is much more pragmatic and impassioned; he fears a London takeover of Stratford: I am very jealous lest Stratford-on-Avon which has done good work for forty years, should be made subservient to the aims and needs of London. Co-operate, but don’t subordinate or else you will kill a live thing.58 While Gollancz and the SMNT had struck a deal with the Governors at Stratford, Benson could see potential trouble on the horizon. He anticipated both a clash of ideals around collaborative working (rather than the auteurism of the actor– manager era) and a metropolitan domination of Stratford’s unique rural Shakespearean town. The reality, however, did not warrant Benson’s fears. The 1919 season at Stratford appears to have been a marked success, under the adept directorship of William BridgesAdams. The collaboration may partly have succeeded due to its chairing by Sir Johnston Forbes-Robertson, who was universally respected as an actor–manager and who had a style of communication which, according to extant letters, tended to be calm, eloquent and unwavering in intentions. In August 1919, Forbes-Robertson was in Stratford watching the season. He saw The Merry Wives of Windsor, The Winter’s Tale and Julius Caesar and wrote to Gollancz to give him the verdict on the productions, ‘all admirably given, a reflection [of] the greatest credit on Mr Bridges Adams’, who had been appointed director of the company. Forbes-Robertson ‘feel[s] very optimistic’ about the NSC and its potential: The company is an excellent one. [They] work into each other’s hands, and show a fine spirit in working for the sake of the play, and not for themselves individually. It will be a thousand pities if this company cannot be kept together, and under Mr Adams.59 Forbes-Robertson suggests provincial tours – ‘a fine advertisement!’ – and even a tour of the United States and

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Canada after a run in London. Unlike Benson’s fears for Stratford, Forbes-Robertson emphasizes the need for working together, ‘hand in hand with Stratford’ to make a success of the company. Indeed, his judgement was clearly correct; the NSC indeed toured America successfully as well as touring the provinces. By the time the British Drama League met in Stratford for their conference in September 1919, the NSC had just completed a successful enough first season. Gollancz spoke on the need to further the project. He justified the use of the site for the Shakespeare Hut, ‘where countless thousands of soldiers witnessed performances by Sir Johnston Forbes-Robertson, Lady Forbes-Robertson and Miss Ellen Terry’,60 before going on to argue, carefully and at first with some circumlocution, that the company could come first, before the theatre, which he reassuringly describes with his usual lyrical flourishes as ‘the dream-in-chief … the establishment of a temple of drama in the heart of the Metropolis’.61 Having established that the dream of a National Theatre was not being supplanted, his rhetoric in favour of supporting a company, for now, was clearly of a gently persuasive nature: Sir Israel inquired why a start should not be made with an endowed company, or series of companies, to present Shakespeare in London, the provinces and, if need be, the Empire? He had proposed in July 191862 to a conference of representatives of the National Committee and of the body entrusted with the upkeep of the Shakespeare Hut, that experimentally they should endow a team of actors that should not be disbanded and called together from time to time, but should be a permanent company, with a steady income, freed from the precariousness of an actor’s life.63 The presentation of job security and decent wages for actors emerges countless times in the debates around the possible advantages of a National Theatre, especially in discussions with practitioners. Gollancz, here, presents this as a key advantage



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of his scheme. He goes on to contextualize the importance of the NSC in the wider project of achieving a Shakespeare Memorial National Theatre: A magnificent building with poor acting would be worse than no building at all; but one could build the whole edifice on the foundation they now had. The first thing would be not to lose what they had got. It was better to achieve a little than to talk about a lot and do nothing.64 Here, Gollancz acknowledges, by implication at least, one of the key problems facing the SMNT even before the war; that for all the fundraising, publicity and grand events, nothing had actually materialized. Following Gollancz’s speech to the conference, all hell broke loose, when Annie Horniman rose and spoke with great indignation on the very complaint Gollancz was inferring: that, so far, the SMNT may have ‘talk[ed] a lot and done nothing’, and many more complaints besides.65 Horniman drew attention to a perceived lack of financial transparency, an ill-judged use of money on the Gower Street site (‘did they take the trouble to check that it was neither near a tube station nor on an omnibus route?’) and pronounced the potent accusation, several times, of a ‘white wash’.66 Horniman, described unpleasantly by Adrian Frazier Woods as ‘a middleaged, middle-class, dissenting London spinster’67 had in fact been a formidable theatre patron and manager.68 Her words clearly struck several nerves on this occasion, leading SMNT stalwart Mrs Alfred Lyttelton to brand her speech ‘offensive’ and Gollancz to refer to it as ‘a disgrace to the conference’.69 Her objections, however, to a lack of transparency in the SMNT’s affairs only echoed similar concerns voiced widely in the press before the war. The impassioned argument that ensued from Horniman’s speech shows the fractures still pervading the theatre community regarding the National Theatre scheme. Her thinly veiled accusations relating to the SMNT’s financial affairs stand in jarring contrast to Israel

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Gollancz’s characteristically grandiose and optimistic style of public speaking and it would seem the meeting rather descended into an unpleasant row, rather than a constructive discussion on the future of the project. However, despite Horniman’s objections, which also represented broader scepticism on the future of the SMNT scheme, the New Shakespeare Company took root, due partly to its simple success and the ring-fenced income from the Shakespeare Hut rent from the YMCA. While it took some years to establish itself entirely, it was to become the most prestigious of British companies. It would feed directly into the eventual formation of the Royal Shakespeare Company as we know it. As Sally Beauman puts it in her 1982 history of the RSC: From 1919 onwards, the Memorial Theatre was always to have its own resident company in one form or another and would never have to depend again on the services of an outside touring company such as Benson’s. That a resident company at last became a reality was due to two unlikely and incongruous factors: the existence of a small wooden YMCA hut in Bloomsbury, and the collective guilt, after years of inertia, of a body in London rejoicing in the cumbersome title of the Shakespeare Memorial National Theatre Committee.70 Where Beauman has acquired the impression of a ‘small wooden hut’, or whether we must read it as artistic licence in the absence of ready evidence for the nature of the building, one cannot be sure. However, the resulting ‘incongr[uity]’ she assigns to the building, versus the SMNT committee, is misleading. The Shakespeare Hut was neither ‘small’ nor unrelated to the SMNT agenda, but, conversely, a large, statement building directly related to the cause of memorializing Shakespeare in London. The deep irony was, in trying to bring Shakespearean memorialization to London (as Gordon McMullan suggests Gollancz attempts to do during 1916),71 the SMNT still ended



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up sending Shakespeare back to Stratford from whence he came. In terms of the realization of any National Theatre in Shakespeare’s honour, there he would stay for another half a century and more. The Shakespeare Hut and the New Shakespeare Company, though, were the elusive success stories the SMNT so badly needed. The NSC fully justified maintaining the arrangement Gollancz had made in 1919 with the YMCA to rent the Shakespeare Hut site for the following almost four years. The NSC, funded by the £3,000 annual ground rent from the Shakespeare Hut, could be entirely financially transparent, and presented very good value for money. The arrangement helped to put some crucial distance between the SMNT and past accusations of opaque and undirected use of funds, while the purpose to which the site was put (a home for Indian students and in housing the benevolent YMCA Music Section) ostensibly maintained the site as a useful one for the nation. An appendix to the proposals of the SMNT executive meeting to discuss the potential collaboration with Stratford on 20 February 1919 details precisely and openly the sum required, £3,000, and how it would cover the expenses of the new company in its first year: The sum of £3,000 will allow:Five weeks’ rehearsals Four weeks’ preliminary tour Five days’ rehearsals at Stratford From July 26th – September 6th A Company of 20 on tour Expanded to 30 at Stratford; Six medium cast plays (on tour) plus 2 large cast plays (at Stratford)72 This initial costing is for the first year but, as we have seen, this was repeated annually until 1923. Gollancz’s relationship with the YMCA was clearly extremely positive and it would appear

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from proposals in the minutes from January to February 1919 that there was considerably involvement of the YMCA in the first discussions, implying, almost, that the venture was a collaboration between not just the two Shakespearean groups at London and Stratford but with the YMCA as a third important partner. In practice, however, others were less convinced than Gollancz that a core role for the YMCA was appropriate in the NSC scheme. The NSC remained a success. It took over the annual Stratford season, toured the provinces as well as the United States and remained an official collaboration between Stratford and London, chaired diplomatically by Forbes-Robertson, into 1923. This was a collaboration between, at best, precariously co-operative, at worst, rather uncomfortable cousins, Stratford Shakespeareans and their London counterparts. Here we leave the Hut. After a good run of funding the NSC, its days were numbered. It is now late 1923. Emptied of the Indian students, its Anzac days are long gone, and Shakespeare has departed for Stratford. Its stage has fallen silent; its doors are locked for the last time. The Shakespeare Hut is about to be unceremoniously demolished. There will be no occasion made of its loss. No plaque will be put up, as it was for the US Eagle Hut on the Strand, to remind passers-by of its brief but important existence. It will, very soon, be forgotten. Chapter 6, the final chapter of this book, takes up the story of the Hut’s disappearance from the physical, historical and cultural landscape and, finally, I will consider the ways in which it has since been reclaimed and (re)constructed for a new century.

6 Epilogue: Forgetting and ‘remembering’ the Shakespeare Hut, 1924–2016: Festivity, bardolatry and (re)constructing ‘memory’

Forgetting the Shakespeare Hut, 1924–2014 It seems appropriate to begin the end of the Hut, and the end of this book, with Israel Gollancz’s own words on the Hut’s eventual demise. There is little need for introduction to this extract from Gollancz’s letter to The Times on the occasion of the demolition of the Shakespeare Hut in the spring of 1924. In his own words, Gollancz has left for us, the

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‘future historian[s]’, an account of this building as he perceived and wanted the public to perceive it. Gollancz begins by explaining the Hut’s rationale and function in the plainest terms, as a gift to overseas troops that successfully presented a positive image of Britain: ‘The site for the National Theatre became the site of the YMCA Shakespeare Hut, where hundreds of thousands of the British forces from overseas found a home that made “Old Blighty” dear to them.’1 Here, Gollancz establishes the worthiness of the Shakespeare Hut scheme as part of the war effort but in particular in creating a ‘home’ in Britain. It is interesting that he does not identify the foreign soldiers as New Zealanders, but rather as ‘British forces from overseas’, which gives a general impression of the Shakespeare Hut as a presentation of ‘Old Blighty’ to secure the imperial loyalty of ‘Dominion’ troops from anywhere and thus singlehandedly to make Britain ‘dear to them’. This is presented as the Shakespeare Hut’s first achievement. He goes on, though, to designate it as a performance space, with no further reference to any other function, describing it as the place where soldiers ‘had the prized good fortune of hearing Miss Ellen Terry, Sir Johnston Forbes-Robertson, and other glories of the stage in Shakespearean and other roles that have made them famous throughout the Empire’.2 The imperial function is reinforced here, since the theatrical reputations of Terry and ForbesRobertson span the British territories; to hear them in real life is ‘prized good fortune’ for the foreign troops. Gollancz’s letter then continues into a poignant passage that seems to suggest he had some notion already that the Shakespeare Hut was in danger of being forgotten, once the building itself had been torn down. ‘May I add,’ he asks, ‘as a record of the facts, the following brief note on the fortunes of the Shakespeare Hut, of interest, perhaps, to the future historian?’3 Gollancz seeks leave to set down on ‘record’ the ‘facts’ of the Shakespeare Hut, as if fearing it will either be lost or misrepresented. His thoughts of the ‘future historian’, too, suggest he views it as future significance, which he then goes

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on clearly to justify further, explaining that the rent generated, as Chapter 5 has explored, provided the financial backing needed to establish the New Shakespeare Company, which (as Chapter 5 shows) would not otherwise have existed: The hut – or rather the congeries of huts – is now in process of demolition, the site having been sold to the Rockefeller Trustees for the School of Hygiene, about to be erected thereon. Granted rent-free to the YMCA during the war, the site has yielded during the past three or four years a substantial annual rent, the hut being used as a YMCA hostel for Indian students. Waste land – for such would have been the condition of the site without hut – would have yielded little or nothing at all. This rentage [sic] enabled the Shakespeare Memorial Committee to achieve a very noteworthy contribution towards the aims of the National Theatre movement in connexion [sic] with the Shakespeare Memorial Project – namely, the organization of a special company of Shakespearean players – the New Shakespeare Company.4 Throughout the open letter there threads a sense that Gollancz is defending the Shakespeare Hut, and the SMNT’s use of its land, from criticism. He is rationalizing its existence as of benefit to country, to empire and to furthering the performance of Shakespearean drama, which is, of course, a frequently stated purpose of the SMNT. Gollancz, having presented the case of the Shakespeare Hut’s national, imperial and conceptual importance, addresses its fate. On the site secured for the Shakespeare Memorial National Theatre, there will soon arise a Temple of Hygieia, erected by the princely munificence of an enthusiast for humanity – a noble monument of American friendship for Britain. On another site, granted, let us hope, by the State, in the new London now developing, a Temple of Drama, dedicated to Shakespeare’s name and fame, will arise in due course, when

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munificent enthusiasts for the humanities – the hygiene of the mind and soul – are moved to bring to realization the high endeavours and the well planned scheme of the Shakespeare Memorial Committee.5 In his characteristically hyperbolic style, Gollancz presents the demolition of the Hut as a sacrifice to a great purpose for ‘humanity’ and a symbol of Anglo-American ‘friendship’, removing any negative implications of the SMNT’s failure to achieve its aim yet again. He takes the opportunity, too, to suggest that the next site could – or should – be provided by ‘the State’, a step towards the idea of a National Theatre that would be subsidized by government on a clear and substantial basis. Gollancz sidesteps from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine as a Temple of Hygieia to a ‘Temple of Drama’, determining a national – or further still, human – need for a new theatre. That this theatre would be dedicated to Shakespeare to provide ‘hygiene for the mind and soul’, posits the act of attending theatre not as a frivolous pastime (as the wartime Entertainment Tax had deemed it) but, as per the SMNT’s agenda, an intellectually healthy and culturally vital pursuit, if it is in the patriotic name of Shakespeare. We must commemorate Shakespeare, then, with the longed-for National Theatre now to stand in the ‘new London’. This is a landscape irreparably altered by war but now greeting modernity with monumental architecture such as was exemplified in the LSHTM itself and other flagship buildings arising at the time that similarly functioned as outward-facing or global sites, such as Australia House in Aldwych (by the site, in fact, of the Australian YMCA’s Aldwych Hut). The proposed National Theatre becomes for Gollancz in 1924, then, no longer a throwback to Shakespeare’s England, or a long-overdue homage, as the pre-war SMNT rhetoric repeatedly suggested. Instead, it would be part of London’s shift into modernity, towards a ‘new London’. If we read this article as suggesting he foresaw the annihilation of the Shakespeare Hut in public memory, then

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Israel Gollancz was right. Its physical demise indeed led indecently quickly to its almost total obliteration from all the stories to which it had once been so crucial. We can, to some extent, trace the process of forgetting through the few written references to the Shakespeare Hut that have found their way into published works over the last century. There is barely a handful of references to the very existence of the Hut, let alone mentions in studies of Shakespearean performance history. As early as 1939, we find the Hut already drastically mis-described. In their ‘history of the Shakespeare industry’, Amazing Monument (1939), Ivor Brown and George Fearon mention the Hut only briefly, in reference to the wartime use of the Bloomsbury site: ‘During this period the site was rented to the American Red Cross, for an annual figure of about £3,000, and used for “The Shakespeare Hut”, whither came soldiers on leave for entertainment and refreshment.’6 This is all very confused – the site was not rented to the American Red Cross, of course; in fact, it was not rented out for this figure of ‘around £3,000’ until after the war, when the site was rented to the YMCA as a base for the new Indian YMCA and the rental income used to fund the New Shakespeare Company, as Chapter 5 explains. This inaccuracy marks the beginning of many chains of misheard whispers leading to the Hut’s total disappearance from public memory. In his 1951 Making of the National Theatre, Geoffrey Whitworth refers to the ‘Great Shakespeare Hut’, albeit briefly,7 but by 1982 the Hut has diminished to being described by Sally Beauman cursorily (and inaccurately on two counts) as ‘a small wooden hut in which to entertain British troops’ (my emphasis).8 John Elsom and Nicholas Tomalin, in their 1978 A History of the National Theatre, refer to a single function of the Shakespeare Hut, ‘to entertain wounded troops’, which is incorrect as its primary function, though some wounded troops would have visited on occasion. In this and its other rare mentions in theatre histories, the Hut is represented as a space for amateurs to entertain the troops. Drawing on this account in his exploration of amateur Shakespearean

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productions, Michael Dobson suggests that ‘the “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.’9 The first accurate mention of the Shakespeare Hut in theatre history studies seems to have been a brief description of Fabia Drake as Henry V on the Hut’s stage, in Emma Smith’s performance history of the play for the Cambridge University Press ‘Shakespeare in Production’ series edition in 2002.10 The story opens up a little more in 2010, when Clara Calvo mentions Forbes-Robertson’s speeches at the Hut in her pathleading work on the Tercentenary, published in 2010,11 and Antonio Moreno Hernandez describes the same occasion briefly in his extensive study of the performance contexts of Julius Caesar in the same year, though with reference to the Hut audience as ‘a handful of WW1 soldiers’ with the usual diminution of the significance of the Hut’s production scale.12 Not one of these mentions of the Hut, however, identifies its theatre as a professional, regular or significant performance space, because the traces of its existence as such had become so entirely obscured over the preceding century. It is clear, then, that the Shakespeare Hut’s function as a professional performance space, and its importance to those actors that played on it as ‘National Theatre … soil’13 was quickly and entirely forgotten – and stayed so for nearly a century. In the introduction to this book, Paul Connerton’s words on forgetting helped to begin the journey to understanding how the Shakespeare Hut came to be, in the context of the drive to memorialize Shakespeare. The same words can now help to define how to approach a century of amnesia surrounding the Shakespeare Hut’s existence. ‘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.’14 The SMNT project was always built on

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this negative, that it was a national shame to ‘forget’ Shakespeare by not ‘remembering’ him monumentally. This narrative was inextricably entwined with a broader sense of English national identity and the anxiety that bubbled beneath the imperial rhetoric the SMNT exemplified at this, the approaching end of empire. That the Shakespeare Hut itself was forgotten may be personally upsetting to specific individuals, once the amnesia is revealed, especially to those whose heritage to which it may contribute: to a New Zealander whose grandfather stayed there, for example. However, the forgetting itself is not personal but collective. Forgetting can be an active process, rather than simply the absence of active remembrance. The decisions subsequently made that the forgotten object should once again be remembered are as political as the collective amnesia itself. To understand how and why the Shakespeare Hut was forgotten, it must be looked at from pragmatic as well as ideological or political angles. First, it is easy to understand the actual physical annihilation of the Shakespeare Hut. Pragmatically speaking, the building was always defined by its temporary status, due both to its wooden, prefabricated design and its wartime planning consent. More obliquely, though, the Shakespeare Hut could never be the lasting memorial for Shakespeare the SMNT had anticipated. It did not provide the permanence and grandeur the committee had looked forward to; it did not send the message of Shakespeare’s timeless dominance. The Bloomsbury site was always to be reused and, with the war removing the possibility of imminently building a National Theatre for some considerable time, it is hardly surprising that the SMNT would choose to recoup their equity from the site by selling it on and looking elsewhere once times were a little more favourable. Returning to Gollancz’s 1924 open letter, the hope was now officially voiced that the state would provide a site, finally recognizing the need for a National Theatre in London. Built on the site of the Shakespeare Hut over the mid- to late 1920s, the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine

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now forms an imposing part of the local architecture. Its dominance of the area was not to last long (the 1930s would bring the monolithic Senate House building which now looms over the school), but nevertheless it is an impressive statement building and continues to house that cutting-edge, global-facing educational institution to this day. On the school’s website, an interactive timeline teaches its version of history of the institution. 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 School was, until research rediscovered the Hut, hauntingly inaccurate. In 2012 the timeline stated: The National Theatre Committee was formed to set up a memorial to Shakespeare in London. It had purchased the land in 1913 intending to build a Shakespeare Memorial Theatre in readiness for the tercentenary of the playwright’s death in 1916. These plans were shelved at the outbreak of war and the vacant site remained a wilderness of huts and rubble until the mid-1920s.15 This account reveals how the Hut had been erased from architectural and cultural history and, therefore, collective memory. The words were accompanied by a picture of the site, in which the back of the Shakespeare Hut complex can just be seen peeping through, yet it is relegated to the ‘wilderness’ both physically and figuratively, obscured so completely by trees and fencing that any glancing viewer could not possibly notice it is there. By 2014, after the Shakespeare Hut’s existence had emerged following the ‘Monumental Shakespeare’ project (King’s College London and the University of Western Australia),16 the school amended its timeline to mention that a ‘mock Tudor’ building once stood on the site, but still did not mention the Shakespeare Hut by name.17 Despite staging a large-scale commemoration of the Shakespeare Hut in 2016 (to which I shall return later), the school’s timeline remains, at the time of writing,18 just as it was, with no mention by

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name of the Shakespeare Hut, nor any new image showing the building clearly. The last significant step for the Shakespeare Hut was in 1924, when the people of New Zealand presented a gold tiki statuette to Lady Forbes-Robertson, in recognition of her service to their troops.19 After that, from the mid-1920s onwards, the trail of remembrance of the Shakespeare Hut becomes very faint indeed. In the memory of the Diggers who used the Hut, there may have been the last images of many friends and colleagues lost or mutilated (physically or mentally) during the war. For those 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, in 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 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.20 Indeed, it barely needs noting that the previously orderly process of forgetting and remembering was painfully destabilized, in the context of the sheer numbers of amnesiacs suddenly entering society. At the same time, governmental endorsement of certain aspects of remembering, such as sanctioned memorial sites, attempted to erase or prohibit dangerous cultural memories, such as the lethal mistakes of the British command in relation to disproportionate Anzac losses. One other possible element in forgetting the Hut must be the ‘female’ identity it acquired through the gender of many of its entertainers, workers and, often, its high-profile supporters. While the Hut was visited by military bigwigs on occasion,

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the famous name attached to it was Lady Forbes-Robertson, almost all its ‘workers’ were women and, while these women were not in direct authority in the Hut, it was represented to its users day-to-day as 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 position, 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 ironically notes, ‘the war … taught women to be servants’.21 So, in line with much of women’s ‘war work’, the Hut may have been sidelined in that sense as better forgotten. Perhaps forgetting the Shakespeare Hut is paradigmatic, too, of cultural and individual forgetfulness after the war. The Hut was designed to offer a moment of respite in the midst of the unthinkable violence to which servicemen were subjected, yet this may itself be the very reason for the amnesia surrounding it. In Australia and New Zealand, the Anzac myth relies heavily on an emphasis on British command bungles, abjection and relentless suffering. British authorities were unequivocally responsible for disasters such as the Gallipoli landing, and it is certainly no consolation that a venture like the Shakespeare Hut, whatever its ideological agenda or result, was a small positive gesture for Anzacs. Nevertheless, while its founding may have stemmed from a somewhat paternalistic attitude to the needs of Dominion troops, its resulting maternalistic provision demonstrates another side of the British war effort that distanced itself in that sense from the cold-hearted orders that sent those same troops to almost certain doom. Yet, as Jock Philips convincingly argues, ‘public memory of the Great War in New Zealand focused less on “futility and waste” than that in Britain’.22 That the Shakespeare Hut was associated with the war, then, would not necessarily mean

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we can expect it simply to be forgotten for not fitting in with a specific narrative of suffering and abjection. As Philips continues, the dominant narratives in New Zealand war writings are often ‘a strong anti-officer sentiment which belies the public image much promoted during and after the war that officers and men were an egalitarian fellowship’.23 This is indeed the Hut’s narrative, in terms of photographic evidence and the few surviving writings describing life there. However, it was a break to the routine perhaps, such as exemplified on Christmas Day when all ate a full festive dinner together, as opposed to the men’s usual exclusion from the plum puddings and roast beef of the officers’ mess Christmas feast. So, on a simple level, the Shakespeare Hut does not fit the narrative either way. The ‘other sentiment’ Philips identifies in New Zealand war writings is ‘hostility to the English balanced by regard for the Australians’.24 The Shakespeare Hut did welcome all Allied servicemen, yet it was always designated a New Zealand space; its ‘Kia Ora’ sign pronounced this to all visitors. The Hut was New Zealander – not ‘English New Zealander’ either; the choice of a Māori greeting spoke the soldiers’ minds on that point. It is unlikely that, however many times it was stated in the press or by staging an ‘Old English’ Christmas, or by performing Shakespeare, New Zealanders could be persuaded that the Shakespeare Hut was truly English. In fact, left to its New Zealanders’ own devices, the Shakespeare Hut might have become remembered to posterity at the point when it almost became an even more complex memorial construct. As Chapter 3 recalls, in 1919, a group of New Zealand Anzac servicemen proposed to build a replica of the Shakespeare Hut as a war memorial back in New Zealand.25 The Shakespeare Hut had become emblematic of the New Zealand Anzacs, not of ‘Merry Old England’ at all. In the end, it is this very ‘forgetting’ of the Shakespeare Hut that broadens our perceptions of the function and meaning of commemorative objects during the First World War, of remembering Shakespeare and indeed of notions

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of commemoration in a much wider sense. Connerton’s differentiation 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. Yet, in the case of the Shakespeare Hut, these definitions are blurred. In the first instance, Shakespeare’s name shared the space with Lieutenant Leslie Tweedie, whose memorial faded with 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 starkly visible and there is a sense that the proximity of death lingered around Hut’s users. It then can be seen as a living memorial to everyone who passed through it and appears somewhat to confound Booth’s claim that ‘architectural memorialization of the dead and missing was kept distinct from the design of architecture that would be used and inhabited by the living’.26 On the contrary, this instance of temporary architecture quite consciously did both. The invocation of Shakespeare’s name to delineate the Bloomsbury site into a physical place of both commemoration and use by active soldiers led to a highly unusual intersection of the living and the dead, the historical and the mourned. Shakespeare’s largest material commemorative object in 1916 was merely temporary, merely functional – yet, as we resurrect it from oblivion, we find that it serves valuably to blur the boundaries in any attempt to define commemoration.

Coda: Remembering the Shakespeare Hut, 2016 The Shakespeare Hut and A Book of Homage to Shakespeare, Israel Gollancz’s two realized schemes for memorializing Shakespeare in 1916, will always now share their own centenaries with the Shakespeare death ‘celebrations’. As such, interest in remembering the Shakespeare Hut in 2016 was

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entwined in the broader project of memorializing Shakespeare once more. This coda reflects on the second life of the Shakespeare Hut, in the context of the 2016 commemorations in London and Stratford, using this as a moment to pause and compare how we read these events in relation to those 100 years ago. This context provides the setting via which attempts were made to ‘resurrect’ the Shakespeare Hut. It was (re)constructed via various (often unrelated) public events and media coverage yet, significantly, these were temporary forms that created new heterotopia in which the Shakespeare Hut provided a parallel space to the realities of 2016 London, as the Hut itself had done in 1916 in such different circumstances. These (re) constructions are now gone, even more temporary in their lives than the Hut itself; this coda explores those new ‘Huts’ in the context of the 2016 Shakespeare celebrations in London and Stratford, mirroring the Shakespeare Hut’s context of not only the wartime Tercentenary, but the Shakespeare Memorial National Theatre (SMNT) committee’s 1910–12 events leading up to it. On 23 April 2016, the RSC presented their Shakespeare quatercentenary extravaganza, ‘Shakespeare Live!’, directed by Gregory Doran, at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford, simultaneously broadcast across the nation (and the world online) by the BBC. This was an impressively elaborate, star-studded gala, in which, for those inside the theatre, Shakespearean scenes and sketches were punctuated by quick and skilful set changes, while those watching from home were provided with interspersed mini-features of Shakespeare’s life in Stratford. The Shakespearean scenes in the theatre stood for themselves; the same scenes at home were in some sense ‘explained’ and contextualized with oddments of biographical detail (or conjecture). These framing pieces were presented and narrated by the most famous of screen Shakespeares, Joseph Fiennes, the ‘Will’ of Shakespeare in Love, strolling past Elizabethan pig farmers, Tudor buildings, donkey stables and similar pastoral scenes. Shakespeare, then, is partially embodied; ‘he’ is taking the television audience for a tour

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around Stratford, offering ideas about how Hamlet might have been inspired by the loss of Shakespeare’s son and other rather unscholarly, but always alluringly human, approaches to the texts. Meanwhile, the audience back in Stratford saw the workings of the theatre, the skilled stagehands and set movers, the lighting changes – the mechanisms of performance. The same gala, then, was experienced within the theatre heterotopia, where place itself is dynamic, where ‘onto the rectangle of stage, one after another, a whole series of places that are foreign to one another’.27 Those forming the audience at home were both spectators, vicariously ‘in’ the theatre, and virtual tourists to the Birthplace, and all the Shakespearean heterotopias among streets and surrounding fields of Stratford. ‘Shakespeare Live!’ recalls 1916’s Drury Lane Julius Caesar gala and the Shakespeare Hut’s annual galas in many ways, since it followed, as they did, a revue format. Fragments as disparate as Cleopatra’s death (here played by Harriet Walter) or Macbeth’s descent into madness (Rory Kinnear) are interspersed with comedy turns and songs. As the Shakespeare Hut anniversary programmes did, the RSC (on a far grander scale) mixed traditionally ‘high’ and ‘low’ forms for their commemorative piece, acknowledging the diverse modes Shakespeare has, by now, infiltrated. However, the change in moment renders a different effect. The ‘low’ art of the music halls is now met with nostalgia and, to a significant extent, the humour presented at the RSC in 2016 required knowledge of Shakespeare – and a shared theatrical and cultural history – to be effective. We might expect to find great leaps in the way Shakespeare is presented between the death throes of the British Empire in the early twentieth century and our now more global culture of the twenty-first. We might also expect to find the presentation of fluidity of gender and the female presence in the theatre to be entirely transformed. Drury Lane’s gala, despite involving many of the leading lights in the Actresses’ Franchise League and the campaign for suffrage (Gertrude Elliott, Lillah McCarthy, Ellen Terry and more), was not a format in which they could have

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meaningful agency. The chosen play to be presented in full, Julius Caesar, is one of the most male-dominated (in terms of available parts), while women mostly featured in the gala via silent tableaux. While justifications for women taking on male parts during the war came usually in the form of the idea that there was a dearth of available actors, as Chapter 4 shows, in fact it was clearly not a problem faced by the organizers at Drury Lane. Women took part – but silently. In ‘Shakespeare Live!’, the gender balance onstage was quite healthy: Judi Dench, Harriet Walter and Meera Syal, among many other distinguished women actors, were prominently featured. Women perform the ‘famous’ female character speeches; other than Dench’s brief comedy turn as Hamlet, there is little challenge to male actors’ roles. This, though, is still a vast contrast to Drury Lane’s silent women, whose talents were entirely unused for the occasion. Nevertheless, even in 2016, ‘Shakespeare Live!’ arguably takes fewer risks with gender presentation than the galas at Shakespeare Hut, where women, as director and producer, were always running the show. In true revue style, ‘Shakespeare Live!’ included diverse modes and forms in juxtaposition. For instance, a scene from Much Ado About Nothing was followed by a rendition of Cole Porter’s ‘Brush Up Your Shakespeare’ and none of the song’s more violently misogynistic lines were cut. This number was followed directly by a prerecorded rendition of John of Gaunt’s ‘This royal throne of kings…’, used so often too in the First World War (in fact usually revived at times of national crisis), performed by Simon Russell Beale, strolling through castle ruins, with lingering shots of rolling hills behind, before a close up moment on Beale’s final words: ‘this England’. ‘Shakespeare Live!’ does perhaps reveal that the British commemorate Shakespeare from one centenary to the next with not so very many differences in the ideologies presented as we might like to think. From Ellen Terry’s cross-dressed doctor/Portia, or Fabia Drake’s Henry V on the Hut’s little stage to advising how to make women ‘kowtow’ at Stratford in 2016 could be read, if seen in isolation, as rather a regressive

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step. Yet this would be extremely disingenuous; the diversity represented onstage at Stratford in 2016 was a far cry from the Drury Lane gala in 1916. There were no silent women here, no all-white stage population. The Royal Shakespeare Company has, in fact, long become a force for the promotion of diversity and inclusivity; in late 2016, their senior management team stated proudly – and accurately, in terms of major companies – that they have ‘led the way in diverse casting’.28 Nevertheless, the Shakespeare Hut’s mix of high and low, gender-bending casting and female-led management and direction did place it in some senses ahead of its time, at least in terms of women’s relationship with Shakespeare and commemoration. We are still not finding as much female-led theatre in the mainstream as Gertrude Elliott, Edith Craig and Inez Bensusan might have hoped to see after a whole century had passed. Unlike the Shakespeare Hut, for instance, the Royal Shakespeare Company and the National Theatre have yet to experience female artistic directorship. However, the time, as goes the suffragist motto, is now. In 2018, the RSC ran a full season, for the first time in its history, in which all productions were directed by women and has continued actively to promote equity in onstage gender representation. At the Globe, its incoming female artistic director (its second in a row) has pledged to work towards 50:50 gender-blind casting. It is also not to be assumed that the companies and theatres, or the performances they are producing, are perpetuating an assertively patriarchal or cultural imperialist appropriation of Shakespeare’s ‘memory’. Rather, this process is more insidious and dwells more, perhaps, in the broader media, education systems and in our national cultural memory’s construction of ‘Shakespeare’. ‘Shakespeare Live!’ itself cannot justly be read as intentionally promoting a conservative ownership of Shakespeare, nor consciously to enact cultural imperialism. Some critics, though, used the occasion to make the usual disheartening grab for English Shakespearean ownership. Some critical responses differ surprisingly little from the attitudes to the impending 1916 ‘World Tribute’ to Shakespeare we find in the SMNT’s pre-war discourse. For example, The

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Observer (more often known for its often acerbic centre-left intellectualism and high cultured content) ran a review by Robert McCrum which presented a thinly veiled version of the early-twentieth-century cultural imperialism that characterized the bardolatry of the pre-war and wartime years: Despite many intrinsic challenges, Shakespeare Live! was an apt and vivid reminder of the playwright’s chameleon brilliance, his astonishing powers of assimilation, and the way in which the inspired juxtapositions of his language and poetry can ignite the cortical synapses of the imagination like no one in our literature. As usual, the man himself, always so impossible to pin down, was strangely absent, being both there and not there. Which is only another way of saying that Shakespeare, at once timeless and universal, speaks for the world.29 The cliché of Shakespeare’s ‘universal[ism]’, of transcending boundaries – a world language – always risks a very short sidestep into the idea of English-speaking culture as furnishing the world with the pinnacle of genius. It is not clear anywhere in his review in what way McCrum is arguing that ‘Shakespeare Live!’ was, as the title calls it ‘a bold and innovative tribute’; it actually neither took nor claimed to take any big cultural or creative risks. McCrum simply is compelled to return to the adage of Shakespeare’s ‘universal’ meaning and appeal. However, if Shakespeare ‘speaks for the world’ not even, at the absolute least, ‘to’ the world, then the sidestep has already been taken. The unsustainability of the assertion that a single early modern English writer, however exceptional, can ‘speak for the world’ seems as lost to McCrum in 2016 as it was on those writers in 1916 who commented on and reviewed the Tercentenary commemorations and their planning. How far one can read Stratford’s celebration as being the nation’s celebration, however, is very different to its predecessors in a pre-broadcast media era. In 1916, one must choose Stratford or London, while for the 2016 spectator, both

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could easily be experienced. Many Shakespeare fans, scholars and observers probably sampled both, even on the same day. The Shakespeare Hut was a London space, however hard it tried to resemble Stratford with its mock-Tudor exterior, and its celebrations of Shakespeare were essentially of the city around them – the music halls, the theatres and the immediate effects of the war. Performances there were sometimes even candlelit for fear of the Zeppelins above.30 This was a far cry from the Shakespeare parade at Stratford that could still go on, as every year, war or no war, in the comparative safety of this rural town. In 2016, it was Stratford’s large-scale event that was televised for the nation, primetime on BBC at 8.30pm on a Saturday night. The 23rd of April 2016 in London did not see an elaborate gala such as, even in wartime, Drury Lane provided. Instead, throughout the year, there were events linked via the Shakespeare400 project. A range of cultural organizations commemorated Shakespeare at different times and in different ways, each with full autonomy. This project was led with full awareness of its 1916 precedents, coordinated as it was, by King’s College London and, in particular by Professor Gordon McMullan, whose work on Gollancz and the Tercentenary is prolific. There were in London, therefore, diverse responses to the anniversary rather than a centralized extravaganza, though largely these were still presented by the capital’s most prominent arts venues rather than by a fringe or avant-garde. The debates over whether, where and how to build a Shakespeare statue or a theatre, and the ultimate agenda of the Shakespeare Memorial National Theatre (formed from the two movements) all amounted to how Shakespeare could be mapped onto London, as the introduction of this book argues. London, as capital not only of the nation but, symbolically, of the empire and commonwealth, had no clear solid memorial to Shakespeare, and if Britain wanted him to ‘speak for the world’ as our modern reviewer McCrum so audaciously claims, this needed to be marked in London. For all the elaborate set building and costuming, the Shakespeare Ball, Shakespeare’s

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England, a maquette competition for a statue,31 architectural competitions for the Shakespeare Memorial National Theatre, a finished theatre design by none other than Edwin Lutyens, still, Shakespeare could not be mapped onto London. Again in 1964, a huge exhibition marked the 350th anniversary of Shakespeare’s birth – but once again this was temporary. No lasting statement was made with the scale or permanence of a building or flagship statue. When the Shakespeare Hut opened its doors in 1916 – and closed them for the last time in 1923 – there would be no other Shakespeare memorial stage in London, purpose-built as such, until the opening of the National Theatre’s doors six decades later, in 1976. But, as Johnston Forbes-Robertson had advised way back in 1912,32 Shakespeare was kept out of its name. There is a plaque in the theatre concourse (if you look carefully you will find it), stating that the theatre is built in Shakespeare’s memory. However, it is really not until Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre opened, in 1997, that Shakespeare was truly mapped onto the capital. It is the Globe, not the National Theatre, that represents the (re)construction of Shakespeare’s London – or England – seen in the SMNT’s events and ideals. It is Shakespeare’s Globe that looks a lot more like a ‘Merrie Old England’ to grace a postcard to send home than the postmodern utility of the National Theatre’s aesthetic. In her seminal book The Shakespeare Trade, Barbara Hodgdon takes her reader with her on a walk through Stratford in the 1990s, casting a critical eye over the construction of Shakespeare created by this enduring site of Shakespearean pilgrimage. Shakespeare is mapped onto Stratford-upon-Avon, a process begun in the early bardolatry of the eighteenth century but embedded in the Victorian era, and made tangible by the purchase of the Birthplace for the nation by the Shakespeare Birthday Committee (which became the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust) in 1847. In homage to Hodgdon’s approach, we can take a stroll from the National Theatre to King’s College London on 23 April 2016, in other words, walk from the building

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that grew from the SMNT’s dream to the campus from which Gollancz worked, tirelessly, to make it happen. The National Theatre, finally realized in 1963 at the Old Vic and 1976 in its own building, marked the quatercentenary with talks, conversations and lectures, as well as an exhibition of all the National Theatre Hamlets. In a moment of full circle, I was invited to present the prehistory of the National Theatre, and in particular to tell the story of its first ‘stage’ – the Shakespeare Hut – as the first event in their commemorative day programme. For my lecture, I was granted permission to add another Hamlet to their list: Sir Johnston ForbesRobertson, who stood on the little Hut stage and gave his set of Hamlet speeches. The ‘reformer’33 Hamlet, husband of the Hut’s ‘artistic director’, founding member of the Shakespeare Memorial National Theatre, advocate for the very name ‘National Theatre’34 and the first actor to believe himself, potentially, to be speaking Hamlet’s lines on National Theatre soil. In a lecture room of the National Theatre, an audience gathered to hear the prehistory of the National Theatre but it was the Shakespeare Hut that led to the queue stretching back to the end of the hall to ask questions. This forgotten building, forgotten perhaps for all the reasons I have suggested previously, was, in 2016, exactly what this audience wanted to remember. Leaving the National Theatre, I cross Waterloo Bridge to the Strand, and into Somerset House East Wing, now part of King’s College London, Gollancz’s own university. For a modest sum, visitors can enter the Shakespeare quatercentenary exhibition, ‘By me William Shakespeare: A Life in Writing’. I buy my ticket and enter. A minimalist aesthetic greets me; pale plain walls and succinct exhibition boards line the hallway, as King’s College students in earphones, heads down, furiously edit their essays while guarding the precious exhibits. Each room contains early modern artefacts and manuscripts, all leading to the pièce de résistance – Shakespeare’s will. The unassuming glass case has a small gathering of tourists looking transfixed, but the exhibition space is quiet. Tucked away in a downstairs

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corridor of Somerset House, the original building of which once saw the 1604 Conference that ended two decades of war with Spain, examples of Shakespeare’s signatures are the highlight of the display. Authenticity is achieved simply via the manuscript hand. In total contrast to the SMNT’s elaborate (re)construction of ‘Shakespeare’s England’ in 1912, twentyfirst-century Shakespeare tourists come to see material authenticity. Where, in 1912, there was every claim to authenticity while no part of the exhibition actually belonged to Shakespeare’s time, here the opposite is the case. The exhibition is created purely from the ‘authenticity’ of signature, humanizing Shakespeare enough for him really to have put his name to such commonplaces as a will and a deposition. Yet this is a different kind of bardolatry, perhaps. Here, we make a pilgrimage to see relics, not so very unlike the pilgrimages made to the Birthplace of the past two centuries. There are no souvenirs to buy at the exhibition, none of the stalls of souvenirs to be found at Shakespeare’s England, no Shakespeare thimble to match Barbara Hodgdon’s purchase in 1990s Stratford: no ‘novelty item for the Shakespearean exchange economy’.35 Here is stripped back bardolatry – not so much the ‘Shakespeare Trade’ as the Shakespeare homage, where bardolators can see the most precious relic, Shakespeare’s written word. Yet there is no performance here; the contrast with ‘Shakespeare Live!’ is palpable. One commemorates the drama, the other the book. Both, though, seek to find a tangible something by which Shakespeare can be remembered. By the summer, the exhibition is gone and Shakespeare’s will has returned to the National Archives once more. 12 August 2016. A few hundred people are seating themselves around tables laid for tea in the wood-panelled library of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, standing on the site of the Shakespeare Hut, the corner of Keppel and Gower Streets in Bloomsbury. The atmosphere is festive – commemorative – and lively with anticipation. ‘Waitresses’ perform as those of the Shakespeare Hut, moving around tables in black and white uniforms,

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pouring tea. The Shakespeare Hut photographs are all in black and white, of course, so perhaps they do not realize that its waitresses were always distinctively dressed in rose pink. These waitresses reconstruct the photographs of the women workers, rather than the workers themselves. In titling the event and accompanying installation ‘Resurrecting the Shakespeare Hut’ there are several clear implications. First, the presentation of the project as an authentic revival of the Hut, a bringing it back from the dead, gives visitors and audience the sense that they are seeing a ‘true’ representation of the Shakespeare Hut, made more meaningful by the fact of it taking place on the very spot, the geographical authenticity of this crossroads in Bloomsbury. Further, the word ‘resurrecting’ unabashedly implies deference, the religious connotations are not subtle, and once again for the Shakespeare Hut, there is a sense of revering Shakespeare, as well as revering war dead. Outside the library, on the floor below, a little corner of the Hut has been constructed, complete with the ‘Kia Ora’ sign and a model of the fireplace. Shakespearean quotations have been printed on the furniture and walls and on the hearth; ‘Kia Ora’ is no longer the only message. The completeness of the Hut’s New Zealand heterotopia is disrupted by the intrusion of a Shakespearean touristic agenda and by recalling the design of the Hut’s exterior. The Shakespearean quotations added to the Hut’s imagined interior enforce these two readings, imposing a constructed cultural memory of Shakespeare, once again fragmented beyond synecdoche, in terms of its full textual context. ‘We happy few, we band of brothers’ has been added poignantly to the ‘Kia Ora’ fireplace. This is, of course, extracted from a speech persuading men to fight an overwhelming enemy, that to die for their country, together, is the ultimate honour. This is not Shakespeare, but Shakespeare’s Henry V, quoted here; that age old problem of assigning wise edicts to Shakespeare with extreme selectivity as to their dramatic context. Shakespeare’s King Henry V, invoked so often, in the First World War (as Chapters 2 and 3 both show) is here again to motivate the men to fight for Shakespeare’s England. The

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quotation invades the New Zealanders’ space. ‘Kia Ora’ was their chosen welcome in 1916; there was nothing on these walls calling for them to fight, nor expecting them to sacrifice themselves ‘happ[ily]’. It is hard to know where to begin to define just how far down the rabbit hole we are, in terms of Foucault’s rather vague idea of heterotopia, in this installation. On the spot of the Shakespeare Hut, the building that stands above it has, for a few months only, a little corner of the Hut back inside, like a plant pushing up determinedly through solid concrete. This is heterotopia within heterotopia, recursive, a mise-en-abîme of commemoration, much like the effect of the 1916 Drury Lane gala and all wartime attempts to monumentalize Shakespeare. This is a memorial of a memorial: to Shakespeare, to the fallen in the First War, to New Zealand’s changing relationship with Britain at the end of empire. The most modern innovations – projections, sound, materials – have still returned the memorial to fragments of Shakespeare, just as was so tempting in wartime London. There is ‘the’ gramophone, in the corner – but no longer can it play ‘The Long, Long Trail’,36 as ‘Triangle’ heard it, the anonymous New Zealander writing for the Evening Post we met in Chapter 3. Now it plays imagined, ‘resurrected’ voices of the Hut, as interpreted by actors: a ‘New Zealander’ reads an Anzac letter home; Gertrude Elliott, a New Yorker, has become English. The performance in the library, though, reenacted the Hut’s opening speeches and sought to interpret the stories of the Hut into a narrative; a New Zealand Anzac falls for an idealistic feminist working with Hut’s directors. The second half was a series of Shakespearean readings and recitations by women; these were not specifically selected from the Hut’s programmes but rather were chosen by the actresses and director themselves. One, however, did recall a very particular Hut moment. A young actress took to the stage dressed in chainmail and delivered a speech from Henry V just as Fabia Drake had done nearly a century earlier.

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The event brought together very different stakeholders in the Hut’s memory: the then New Zealand High Commissioner (Sir Lockwood Smith), the International Relations Director of the YMCA (Ken Montgomery), academics, Shakespeare fans, First World War researchers. Sir Lockwood Smith made a speech in which he was visibly moved; the Shakespeare Hut had been forgotten, he said, and now it was being remembered again at last. Recalling the event the following year, Sir Lockwood commented on the meaning of the Hut’s revival for New Zealanders: From the uttermost ends of the earth they’d come. They couldn’t have been further from home. Those who’d survived Gallipoli, were further torn and scarred by the horrors of the Western Front. But here at Shakespeare’s Hut they found some comfort, the warmth of fellowship and, above all, some fun. Every family in New Zealand had been affected by the War, one in every five males alive served. It was just so moving to share in the re-enactment of the opening of the Hut – 100 years later – the Māori songs, the stories, the magic of Shakespeare.37 Sir Lockwood’s words reveal the cultural meaning, as a war memorial, of the Shakespeare Hut, just as that group of Anzacs who sought to rebuild it at home had seen it. Once again, the Hut provides a home in which Anzacs can be imagined sharing some moments of ‘fun’ separated in space and time from the ‘horrors’ to which they had been subjected and to which many were destined to return. The ‘Māori songs, the stories, the magic of Shakespeare’ all come together for a New Zealander experience, though, not an English one. The Hut’s heterotopia – and the new one experienced by the audience on 12 August 2016 – was one in which Shakespearean performance mixed with a performance of identity and with the construction and (re)construction of memories. The last of 2016’s revivals of the Shakespeare Hut was held later in the year, when a collaboration between feminist

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theatre company Scary Little Girls, the School of Advanced Study and myself resulted in a ‘living walk’ inspired by the suffragists of the Shakespeare Hut. Devised by Naomi Paxton and Rebecca Mordan, the walk led audience participants around Bloomsbury, in and out of squares, shops and pubs, where they found Shakespearean scenes, readings from feminist tracts, a New Zealand Digger asking the way, the first performance in a hundred years of the hitherto lost skit A Bit of Blighty written for the Shakespeare Hut and, at last, cross-dressed women perform a roaring music hall finale in the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine’s foyer. The various and apparently incongruous pieces in this immersive performance represent the hotchpotch of the Hut, both in terms its performance culture and its multiple layers of heterotopia. Many elements were taken directly from the Hut’s surviving performance history, added to which were aspects of its cultural meaning – feminist texts are read, an Anzac stops to chat. The Shakespeare Hut itself is scarcely mentioned in the piece, only by the lone soldier asking the way; this is not so much ‘remembering’ the Hut as exploring the intersection at which it existed – that metaphorical and literal crossroads again. Material traces of the Shakespeare Hut are both scattered and sparse. A 1917 bed ticket survives at the National Army Museum in New Zealand,38 brought back perhaps in the pocket of Anzac fatigues and somehow surviving for a century. At the Auckland War Memorial, too, can be found some letters and postcards home from the Hut. ‘11/12/17 Russell Square. London. These photos will give you a fair idea of our club in London. Everything is done in good style,’ writes one Anzac soldier on the back of a postcard of the Hut’s Writing Room, perfect for those back home to imagine precisely where he is sitting.39 Postcards pop up occasionally, too, in memorabilia auctions, curling at the edges, yellowing with age: the lounge, the billiard room, the writing room, the stage. Ellen Terry and Israel Gollancz both kept programmes from the Hut’s Shakespeare anniversary galas; Terry’s is in the British Library,

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Gollancz’s is over the Atlantic at Princeton. George W. W. B. Hughes’s letters, on Shakespeare Hut headed paper, are in a suitcase belonging to his family in Melbourne, Australia. Back in London, only a few traces survive. The National Theatre Archive has a few spare invitations, in almost perfect preservation, to the Hut’s opening on 12 August 1916. They have its original architectural designs. Yet the Hut itself is entirely gone. At Shakespeare’s Birthplace, Stratford, in 2017, after a lecture I had given on the Shakespeare Hut, attendees were given a free pass to go into the Birthplace and look for Francis Bennett’s signature on the famous graffiti window now exhibited in its own specially designed space. Bennett, as Chapter 3 describes, was a New Zealand soldier who survived the war and wrote his memoirs some years later. He describes clearly that, on a Shakespeare Hut pilgrimage to Stratford, he was allowed to sign his name on the window, near Sir Walter Scott’s autograph.40 Here it can still be seen, if you look carefully. Heading up to see it again after my lecture, while the audience enjoyed the next talk, I find one of the audience members having a look for Bennett’s name. She could not wait and sneaked a little guiltily away from the next lecture to make a pilgrimage of her own. We all peer at the pane – the room guide, the visitor and me – not because Shakespeare might once have looked through it, but because an Anzac soldier who stayed at the Shakespeare Hut once wrote his name on it and made his mark on Stratford. Now as lost as the Hut itself, the talks, the commemorations, performances, installations, exhibitions, all these new Shakespeare Huts, too, are gone. The reconstructed Hut lounge installation, with its ‘Kia Ora’ fireplace and gramophone, could not be saved. It was built only to be held up by the surrounding architecture of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine’s lobby; it could not stand on its own. Transient, only existing in memory, commemorating a commemoration, all these attempts to remember the Shakespeare Hut made new Huts. There are multiple Shakespeare Huts now, (re)

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constructed in public memory: one for New Zealand, whose soldiers never got to build their own Hut back home; one for Stratford, where stands the real Tudor Birthplace; one for the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, who no longer see only a ‘wasteland’ before their building was realized; one for the National Theatre, which now has five Hamlets and knows that Ellen Terry thought she acted on the National Theatre soil; one for feminist history, to help reinsert the Actresses’ Franchise League into the story of the First World War; one for Shakespeare, who never got his permanent Tercentenary Memorial built in London. Shakespeare, through the Shakespeare Hut, has been re-‘remembered’ once more, commemoration and bardolatry has been performed. Now we can pack up the exhibition boards and artefacts, because homage has been paid, until 2116.

NOTES Introduction 1 Fabia Drake, Blind Fortune (London: Kimber, 1978), p. 36. 2 Drake, Blind Fortune, p. 37. 3 For example, in her autobiographical account, My Reminiscences: Social Development in the Ghandian Era and After, activist Renuka Ray describes the Shakespeare Hut as a ‘meeting place’ for Indian students, intellectuals and independence campaigners (New Delhi: Allied Publishers, 1982), p. 40. 4 Gary Taylor, Cultural Selection (New York: BasicBooks, 1996), p. 89. 5 Paul Connerton, ‘Seven Types of Forgetting’, Memory Studies, vol. 1, no. 1 (2008), pp. 59–71. 6 Lord Lytton, ‘The Shakespeare Tercentenary’, in Mrs George Cornwallis West (ed.), Souvenir of the Shakespeare Ball (London: Frederick Warne, 1911), pp. 21–3. 7 Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 13. 8 Marvin A. Carlson, The Haunted Stage: The Theatre as Memory Machine (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003), p. 2. 9 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. 10 Michel Foucault, trans. Jay Miskowiec, ‘Of Other Spaces’, Diacritics, vol. 16, no. 1 (Spring 1986), pp. 22–7. 11 Foucault, ‘Of Other Spaces’, p. 25. 12 Ibid., p. 24.

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13 Kelvin T. Knight, ‘Placeless Places: Resolving the Paradox of Foucault’s Heterotopia’, Textual Practice, vol. 31, no. 1 (2017), pp. 141–58. 14 See Peter Johnson, ‘Unravelling Foucault’s “Different Spaces’’’, History of the Human Sciences, vol. 19, no. 4 (2006), pp. 75–90. 15 Johnson, ‘Unravelling Foucault’s “Different Spaces’’’, pp. 78–9. 16 Geoffrey Whitworth’s The Making of a National Theatre (London: Faber & Faber, 1951) was the first setting down of the ‘story so far’ for the National Theatre campaign, followed by John Elson and Nicholas Tomalin’s The History of the National Theatre (London: Cape, 1978), published just two years after the opening of the current National Theatre building on the Southbank. Much more recent is Daniel Rosenthal’s extensive book The National Theatre Story (London: Oberon, 2013), which leads us all the way from the first debates around the theatre and the monument at the turn of the twentieth century right up to the twenty-first. 17 A new monograph on the AFL, published the same year as this book, does restore the Shakespeare Hut’s name to the AFL’s story: Naomi Paxton’s Stage Rights: The Actresses’ Franchise League, Activism and Politics, 1908–58 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018). 18 St Nihal Singh, ‘A Little India in London’, The Graphic, 11 August 1921, p. 197.

Chapter 1 1 For detailed work on Gollancz and 1916, see Gordon McMullan’s publications that follow. Gollancz’s most avid scholar is the person who now holds almost the same position, one hundred years later: McMullan is Professor of Literature, too, at King’s College London and can reflect on Gollancz from that unique position. See in particular McMullan’s Introduction to the reissued A Book of Homage to Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016) and his chapter ‘Goblin’s Market: Commemoration, Anti-Semitism and the Invention of “Global Shakespeare” in 1916’, in Coppélia Kahn and Clara

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Calvo (eds), Celebrating Shakespeare: Commemoration and Cultural Memory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), pp. 182–201. See also his co-written Foreword, with Philip Mead, for this book. 2 National Theatre Archive SMNT/1. 3 Anon., ‘The Masque of Shakespeare’, The Times, Friday, 1 July 1910, p. 12. 4 Anon., ‘The Masque of Shakespeare’, p. 12. 5 Edith Balfour Lyttelton, The Masque of Shakespeare, printed pamphlet play script, undated and unattributed (unpublished, printed 1910), National Theatre Archive SMNT 7/2/2. My attribution of date and author is verified by press reports and private papers – see individual references, p. 5. 6 Lyttelton, The Masque of Shakespeare, p. 8. 7 Ibid., pp. 14–15. 8 Ibid., p. 5. 9 McMullan, ‘Goblin’s Market’, pp. 182–201. 10 Israel Gollancz, ‘Epilogue’, in Mrs George Cornwallis West (ed.), Souvenir of the Shakespeare Ball (London: Frederick Warne, 1911), pp. 48–9. 11 McMullan, ‘Goblin’s Market’, p. 185. 12 Ibid. 13 Lynne Walhout Hinojosa, The Renaissance, English Cultural Nationalism and Modernism, 1860–1920 (London: Palgrave, 2009), p. 151. 14 Francis Oswald Bennett, A Canterbury Tale: The Autobiography of Dr. Francis Bennett (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), pp. 89–90. 15 Barbara Hodgdon, The Shakespeare Trade: Performances and Appropriations (Philadelphia: The University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998), p. 191. 16 Hodgdon, The Shakespeare Trade, p. ix. 17 Ben Jonson, ‘To the Memory of My Beloved, the Author Mr William Shakepseare, and What He Hath Left Us’, in William Shakespeare, Comedies, Histories and Tragedies (London: Jaggard and Blount, 1623).

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18 Coppélia Kahn and Clara Calvo, ‘Introduction: Shakespeare and Commemoration’, in Coppélia Kahn and Clara Calvo (eds), Celebrating Shakespeare: Commemoration and Cultural Memory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), pp. 1–14. 19 Lytton, ‘The Shakespeare Tercentenary’, pp. 21–3. 20 Michael Dobson, The Making of the National Poet: Shakespeare, Adaptation and Authorship, 1660–1769 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), p. 6. 21 For critical explorations of the Homage see Coppélia Kahn, ‘Remembering Shakespeare Imperially: The 1916 Tercentenary’, Shakespeare Quarterly, vol. 52 (2001), pp. 456–78, and McMullan, ‘Goblin’s Market’ and ‘Introduction’ to A Book of Homage to Shakespeare. 22 I shall engage with this debate in Chapter 5 of this book. 23 Virginia Woolf, ‘Solid Objects’, first published in The Athaenium, October 1920, reprinted in David Bradshaw (ed.), The Mark on the Wall and Other Short Fiction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 54–9. 24 Orlando mss, National Trust Collections, Knole House NT 3072441. 25 A portrait, by Clare ‘Tony’ Atwood, of Vita in this attire for 1910 Ball and Masque hangs at Ellen Terry’s House, Smallhythe Place in Kent (now owned and managed by the National Trust), to this day (NT 1118225). A photograph of the painting can be viewed in the National Trust’s online catalogue at: http://www. nationaltrustcollections.org.uk/object/1118225 (accessed 2 November 2017). 26 The programme surviving in Ellen Terry’s papers gives only a date of 21 April but for this to be a Saturday night (as the main productions were at the Hut in all extant accounts), this must have been 1917. Ellen Terry Archive, British Library MSS ET/ D439. 27 For example, Ellen Terry’s lecture the following year, ‘A Shakespearean Discourse on Some of the Heroines of Shakespeare’, was given at the Theatre Royal, 25 May 1911 (programme, Ellen Terry Archive, British Library MSS ET/ D476). Within the lecture (as verified by later published versions), The Vote reported (anon. ‘Shakespeare as Suffragist’,

NOTES227

29 July 1911, p. 180) that Ellen Terry saw Portia as one of Shakespeare’s ‘prototypes of modern suffragettes’. 28 George Bernard Shaw, ‘A Dressing Room Secret’, in Mrs George Cornwallis West (ed.), Souvenir of the Shakespeare Ball (London: Frederick Warne, 1911), pp. 7–10. 29 Anon., ‘Shakespeare Ball’, The Western Gazette, 23 June 1911, p. 2. 30 Lady Randolph Churchill’s remarriage to George Cornwallis West ended in divorce during the period in which she was organizing the Ball and the exhibition; she then returned to her title as Lady Churchill. For clarity, I have chosen to refer to her by her title as Lady Churchill throughout, as this was the enduring name she adopted from this period onwards. 31 Reproduction of Ball ticket, priced ‘thirty shillings’, Souvenir, un-numbered page (23r). 32 Anon., ‘Shakespeare Ball’. 33 Cornwallis West, Souvenir, endpage. 34 H. Hamilton Fife, ‘The Shakespeare Ball’, in Mrs Cornwallis West (ed.), Souvenir of the Shakespeare Ball (London: Frederick Warne, 1911), pp. 25–30. 35 Anon., ‘The Shakespeare Ball’, The Staffordshire Advertiser, 24 June 1911, p. 9. 36 Marion O’Connor, ‘Theatre of Empire: “Shakespeare’s England” at Earl’s Court, 1912’, in Jean E. Howard and Marion F. O’Connor (eds), Shakespeare Reproduced: The Text in History and Ideology (London and New York: Routledge, 1987), p. 75. 37 Israel Gollancz, A Book of Homage to Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1916). 38 Letter from Frederick Warne to George Heyer, 16 April 1913, National Theatre Archive, SMNT 1/16/24. 39 Hamilton Fife, ‘The Shakespeare Ball’, pp. 25–30. 40 Ibid, p. 25. 41 G.K. Chesterton, ‘On the Shakespeare Ball, by One Who Was Not There’, in Mrs Cornwallis West (ed.), Souvenir of the Shakespeare Ball (London: Frederick Warne, 1911), pp. 11–13. 42 Ibid, p. 12.

228 NOTES

43 Ibid. 44 Israel Gollancz, ‘Prologue’, in Mrs Cornwallis West (ed.), Souvenir of the Shakespeare Ball (London: Frederick Warne, 1911), pp. 48–9. 45 Anon., ‘Shakespeare Ball’, p. 2. 46 Hinojosa, The Renaissance, English Cultural Nationalism and Modernism, 1860-1920, p. 150. 47 Gollancz, ‘Prologue’, pp. 48–9. 48 For example, see Jonathan Bate’s article, ‘Shakespeare Nationalised, Shakespeare Privatised’, English: The Journal of the English Association, vol. 42, no. 172 (March 1993), pp. 1–18. 49 Kahn, ‘Remembering Shakespeare Imperially’, pp. 456–78. 50 Ibid., p. 457. 51 McMullan, ‘Goblin’s Market’, p. 184. 52 Gollancz, ‘Epilogue’, p. 49. 53 Cornwallis West, Souvenir, p. 6. 54 Foucault, ‘Of Other Spaces’, pp. 22–7. 55 Ibid., pp. 25–7. 56 C. E. Humphrey, ‘Ladies Letter’, The Northern Whig, 12 March 1912, p. 10. 57 Hodgdon, The Shakespeare Trade. 58 Churchill archive CHAR 28/82/16-26. 59 Ibid. 60 Hodgdon, The Shakespeare Trade, p. 233. 61 Ibid., p. 235. 62 Gollancz, ‘Epilogue’, p. 49. 63 Letter from Jennie C. W. [Lady Randolph Churchill] (Coombe Abbey, Coventry [Warwickshire]) to ‘DD’ [Edith Lyttelton], 5 August 1911. Churchill Papers (Churchill College Cambridge Archive) CHAR 28/78/81-3. 64 Image (uncredited) ‘Queen Alexandra at the Shakespeare’s England Exhibition’ Dundee Evening Telegraph – 10 May 1912, p. 2; anon., ‘The King at the Shakespeare Exhibition’, The Sheffield Evening Telegraph, 20 July 1912: ‘The King

NOTES229

and Queen paid a visit today to the Shakespeare’s England Exhibition today’, p. 8. 65 Anon., ‘Prince Asks Dwarf at Exhibition’, Dundee Courier, 31 July 1912, p. 4. 66 Letter from George Bernard Shaw to Mrs George Cornwallis West (Lady Randolph Churchill), 20 January 1912, Churchill Papers (Churchill College Cambridge Archive) CHAR 28/81/4-8. 67 Letter from Jennie C. W. [Lady Randolph Churchill](Coombe Abbey, Coventry [Warwickshire]) to ‘DD’ [Edith Lyttelton], 5 August 1911. Churchill Papers (Churchill College Cambridge Archive) CHAR 28/78/81-3. 68 Letter from ‘Mary’, surname unknown, to ‘Jeannie’ (Lady Randolph Churchill), July 1912 (specific date not given), Churchill Papers (Churchill College Cambridge Archive) CHAR 28/81/60. 69 Anon., ‘Shakespeare’s England’, The Daily Herald, 29 April 1912, p. 6. 70 Anon., ‘Shakespeare’s England’, p. 6. 71 Marion O’Connor, ‘Theatre of Empire: “Shakespeare’s England” at Earl’s Court, 1912’, in Jean E. Howard and Marion F. O’Connor (eds), Shakespeare Reproduced: The Text in History and Ideology (London and New York: Routledge, 1987), pp. 68–98. 72 Anon., ‘Igorrotte [sic] Village: Curious Natives to be Seen at Earl’s Court’, The Daily Herald, 11 May 1912, p. 3. 73 Shari M. Huhndorf, Mapping the Americas: The Transnational Politics of Contemporary Native Culture (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009), pp. 59–60. 74 Huhndorf, Mapping the Americas, p. 61. 75 Anon., ‘Igorrotte [sic] Village: Curious Natives to Be Seen at Work at Earl’s Court’, Daily Herald, 11 May 1912, p. 3. 76 Robert W. Rydell, ‘The Louisiana Purchase Exposition, Saint Louis, 1904: “The Coronation of Civilisation”’, in Michael L. Krenn (ed.), The Impact of Race on U.S. Foreign Policy: A Reader (New York and London: Garland, 1999), pp.124–62 and p.142. 77 Letter from [illegible] to Miss Strachey, 20 May 1912, Women’s Library, LSE 2LSW/D/4/07.

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78 Letter from ‘P.S.’ (presumed from reply and other correspondence to be Philippa Strachey) to Mrs Parkyn, 12 June 1912, Women’s Library archive, LSE, Box FL373. 79 Unsigned account of the ‘Suffrage Stall’, Women’s Library, LSE 2LSW/D/4/07. 80 Letter from ‘P.S.’ (presumed from reply and other correspondence to be Philippa Strachey) to Miss F. Blundun, 4 July 1912. Women’s Library, LSE 2LSW/D/4/07. 81 Undated newspaper clipping attached to letter from Dorothy L. Blunden to [?], dated 8 June 1912. Women’s Library, LSE 2LSW/D/4/07. 82 Unsigned letter to Mrs Parkyn, 8 June 1912, Women’s Library archive, LSE, Box FL373. 83 Letter from Mrs Parkyn to Philippa Strachey, 13 June 1912, Women’s Library archive, LSE, Box FL373. 84 Letter from A. M. Hendy to Mrs Robinson, 30 June, 1912, Women’s Library archive, LSE, Box FL373. 85 Foucault, ‘Of Other Spaces’, p. 25.

Chapter 2 1 Letter from Israel Gollancz to Sir Arthur Yapp (secretary of the YMCA), 13 May 1918, National Theatre Archive, SMNT/2/1/14. 2 Anon., ‘Once More unto the Breech’, The Times, 22 April 1916, p. 5. 3 Israel Gollancz, ‘The Shakespeare Tercentenary’, The Times, 23 November 1915, p. 9. 4 Clara Calvo, ‘Shakespeare in Khaki’, in A. L. Lafuente and M. D. Porto Requijo (eds), English and American Studies in Spain: New Developments and Trends (Alcalá: Alcalá de Henares, 2015), pp. 10–30. 5 Werner Habicht, ‘Shakespeare Celebrations in Times of War’, Shakespeare Quarterly, vol. 52, no. 4 (Winter 2001), pp. 441–55. 6 Richard Foukes, Performing Shakespeare in the Age of Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 186.

NOTES231

7 Habicht, ‘Shakespeare Celebrations in Times of War’, p. 451. 8 Ibid. 9 Anon., ‘A Memorial Theatre’, The Times, 2 May 1916, p. 6. 10 Frederick Askew, ‘Foreword’, printed (c.1917) for St Andrew Church, Gorleston. This is now a rare text but a copy survives at the Millennium Library Heritage Store of the Norfolk County Library Service, Call number GOR 940.44. 11 Mrs George Cornwallis West (aka Lady Randolph Churchill), ‘Prologue’, in Mrs George Cornwallis West (ed.), Souvenir of the Shakespeare Ball (London: Frederick Warne, 1911), p. 6. 12 Askew, ‘Foreword’. 13 Fred Askew, Shakespeare Tercentenary Souvenir: England’s Thoughts in Shakespeare’s Words (Lowestoft: Flood and Son, 1916). 14 Askew, ‘Foreword’. 15 Francis Colmer, Shakespeare in Time of War (New York: Dutton, 1916), pp. vii–xiv. 16 Colmer, Shakespeare in Time of War, p. xvii. 17 Ibid. 18 Ibid. 19 Ibid. 20 Gollancz, ‘Epilogue’, pp. 48–9. 21 Ibid., p. 49. 22 Colmer, Shakespeare in Time of War, p. xxxv. 23 Ibid., pp. 118–19. 24 Recruitment Poster, 1915, Imperial War Museum Archive Art. IWM PST 5154. 25 Julia Briggs, Reading Virginia Woolf (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006), pp. 11–12. 26 Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry, Oxford: OUP. 27 Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway, David Bradshaw (ed.) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1925, this edition 2000), p. 73. 28 Melba Cuddy-Keane, Virginia Woolf, the Intellectual and the Public Sphere (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 84.

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29 Woolf, Mrs Dalloway, p. 73. 30 The Military Service Act brought compulsory enlistment for all single men aged 18–41, with few exemptions, such as those involved in essential war-related industries, church ministers and those with health problems. The Military Service Act, Parliamentary Archives, HL/PO/PU/1/1916/5&6G5c104. 31 The Tercentenary would have fallen on 23 April but was, in 1916, measured by exact reference to the Old Style date of his death (thus conveniently avoiding the Easter weekend). 32 Gollancz, A Book of Homage to Shakespeare. 33 Clara Calvo, ‘Shakespeare as War Memorial’, Shakespeare Survey, vol. 63 (2010), pp. 198–211. 34 It has so far not been possible to trace and identify this newspaper clipping, but the original is found in Sir Israel Gollancz’s papers, NT Archive [uncatalogued to item level] SMNT/1. The clipping carries a handwritten date of 6 February 1916. 35 Anon., ‘A Shakespeare Hut: Use of the National Theatre Site Offered to the YMCA’, The Observer, 15 March 1916, p. 5 36 Letter from Oswald Stoll to Israel Gollanz, 11 March 1916, NT Archive SMNT/2/1. 37 Calvo, ‘Shakespeare as War Memorial’, p. 199. 38 Evidenced in generally positive press but also in the archive of many Shakespeare Hut donation letters surviving in the NT Archive, SMNT/2/1. 39 Anon., ‘Our Outlook’, YM, 14 April 1916, p. 335. 40 Letter from Basil I. Yeaxlee to Israel Gollancz, 3 March 1916, SMNT/2/1. 41 Allyson Booth, Postcards from the Trenches: Negotiating the space between modernism and the First World War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 127. 42 Anon. (‘a London Correspondent’), ‘A Woman Traveller: Mrs Alec Tweedie Interviewed’, Brisbane Courier, 27 October 1928, p. 21. 43 Anon., ‘The NZ Press Delegates at Home: The YMCA’, The Northern Advocate, 13 December 1918. 44 For example, in his seminal manual recognizing and suggesting treatments for shell shock, War Neuroses and Shell Shock,

NOTES233

Frederick Walter Mott uses Shakespeare’s presentation of the dream to dispute uses of Freudian dream analysis in shell shock treatment (London: Henry Frowde/Oxford University Press and Hodder & Stoughton, 1919), p. 116 and p. 128. 45 An example, presented to Private John Peel, 27 Northumberland Fusiliers, can be found in the collection of the Imperial War Museum, LBY 86/784. 46 Carole Blair, Greg Dickinson and Brian L. Ott, Places of Public Memory: The Rhetoric of Museums and Memorials (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2010), p. 23. 47 Anon., ‘Shakespeare Memorial: Professor Gollancz and the Fund’, The Daily Graphic, 21 February 1913. 48 Blair, Dickinson and Ott, Places of Public Memory, p. 23. 49 For example, the article ‘Shakespeare Memorial’, The Daily Graphic, 21 February 1913, documents these controversies and provides responses from Israel Gollancz. Copy held in Gollancz’s papers at NT Archive, SMNT/7/3/1. 50 Letter from Israel Gollancz to Sir Arthur Yapp (secretary of the YMCA), 13 May 1918, National Theatre Archive, SMNT/2/1/14. 51 The annotations are assumed to be written by Sir George Alexander based on the following evidence: (a) the initials ‘G.A.’ are signed under the inscription; (b) the formal hand used in the annotations correlates with the informal hand in a letter from Sir George Alexander to Sir Israel Gollancz, dated 18 November 1916 (National Theatre Archive SMNT/2/1/12); (c) these pieces of evidence are complemented by the depth of organizational knowledge displayed in the lists of volunteers and players, which is consistent with Sir George Alexander’s Tercentenary Committee position in running the event. 52 At the time of writing, this copy of ‘A Tribute to the Genius of Shakespeare’ has been newly acquired and is not yet entered into the catalogue but is being held at the National Theatre Archive, London. 53 For example, some survive in Ellen Terry’s papers, such as 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.

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54 ‘New Shakespeare Movement: A Notable Alliance in London and Stratford’, The Observer, 27 April 1919, p. 3. This article does not give an author, though we may assume the author to have been Sir Israel Gollancz as the article writes of ‘the great Shakespeare hut, which it was my privilege to found’ (p. 3). 55 Marvin A. Carlson, The Haunted Stage: The Theatre as Memory Machine (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003), p. 2. 56 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. 57 Such as the inscription on a memorial bench in Warwickshire: ‘The men whose names are inscribed on the neighbouring monument gave their lives for that England “which never did, and never shall lie at the proud foot of a conqueror”’, Imperial War Museums War Memorials Database Ref. 38528. 58 Gordon Williams, British Theatre in the Great War: A Re-Evaluation (London and New York: Continuum, 2003), pp. 248–9. 59 Surviving poster images show that only Allied servicemen were admitted to Shakespeare Hut performances. For example, see poster for Macbeth (Hoover Institution Political Posta Database Ref 3943). 60 Andrew Shail, Cinema and the Origins of Literary Modernism (London and New York: Routledge, 2012), p. 178. 61 Anon., ‘The Shakespeare Celebration’, The Observer, 16 April 1916, p. 13. 62 Elizabeth Robins Pennell, ‘The Pedigree of the Music Hall’, Contemporary Review, vol. 63 (April 1893), p. 583. 63 Williams, British Theatre in the Great War, p. 148. 64 Ibid., p. 151.

Chapter 3 1 Caption: ‘A Fit Theme for Shakespeare: Anzacs on their way to Westminster’, YM, 28 April 1916, front cover. 2 Foucault, ‘Of Other Spaces’, pp. 22–7.

NOTES235

3 For an extensive exploration of Shakespeare and Anzac in this poem and the Sidney events, see Philip Mead, ‘Lest We Forget: Shakespeare Tercentenary Commemoration in Sydney and London, 1916’ in Coppélia Kahn and Clara Calvo (eds), Celebrating Shakespeare: Commemoration and Cultural Memory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), pp. 225–44. 4 The whole poem, from the programme of the ‘Historic Shakespeare Tercentenary Matinee’, 3 May 1916, is reproduced in full in Mead, pp. 234–5. 5 Mead, ‘Lest we forget’, p. 236. 6 Ibid., p. 235. 7 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. 8 See Chapter 2 for details of Stoll’s donation. 9 Noel Monkman, Quest of the Curly-Tailed Horses: An Autobiography (Sydney: Angus Robertson, 1963), p. 23. 10 Anon., ‘The NZ Press Delegates at Home’. 11 Letter from Basil I. Yeaxlee to Israel Gollancz, 3 March 1916, National Theatre Archive SMNT/2/1. 12 It is difficult, especially writing as a non-New Zealander, to identify the most appropriate term for non-Māori New Zealanders. Some now prefer New Zealand Europeans, but this can be non-inclusive of non-white non-Māori New Zealanders. Pākehā can mean any non-indigenous New Zealander, so is preferred by some New Zealanders, especially in recognition of it being a Māori, rather than a settler word. For an in-depth exploration of the politics of naming and identity in non-Māori New Zealanders, see Sarah Dugdale, ‘Chronicles of Evasion: Negotiating Pākehā New Zealand Identity’, in John Docker and Gerhard Fischer (eds), Race, Colour and Identity in Australia and New Zealand (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2000), pp. 190–202. 13 Anon., The Dominion, 21 March 1917, p. 7. 14 Anon., Feilding Standard, 28 April 1917.

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15 Anon., (‘With the Compliments of the New Zealand YMCA’) (c.1916–17), Blighty, p. 1. National Army Museum Archive 1992.696 NAM.NZ. 16 Anon., Blighty, p. 3. 17 Letter from Basil Yeaxlee to Israel Gollancz, 3 March 1916, National Theatre Archive, SMNT/2/2/55. 18 Anon., ‘A Shakespeare Hut’ . 19 Julia Thomas, Shakespeare’s Shrine: The Bard’s Birthplace and the Invention of Stratford-upon-Avon (Philadelphia: The University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), p. 5. 20 Harry Fredrick Hall, Diary and Letters of 2nd Lieutenant Harry Frederick Hall. National Army Museum. Accession No. 2002.534. MSS-074. This reference to the visit was discovered in the archive by Mark Houlahan, while researching his chapter, ‘From the Shakespeare Hut to the Pop-up Globe: Shakespeare, Memory and New Zealand, 1916–2016’, in our team-authored book, Gordon McMullan and Philip Mead, with Kate Flaherty, Ailsa Grant Ferguson and Mark Houlahan, Antipodal Shakespeare: Remembering and Forgetting in Britain, Australia and New Zealand, 1916–2016 (London: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2018), pp. 117–44. 21 Hodgdon, The Shakespeare Trade, p. 195. 22 Ibid., p. 193. 23 Bennett, A Canterbury Tale, p. 89. 24 Ibid. 25 Ibid., p. 49. 26 Ibid., pp. 89–90. 27 It is not easy to tell the identity of this ‘elderly whitehaired scholar’, though it is possible Bennett is referring to Richard Savage, who retired as secretary and librarian of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust in 1910 and went on to volunteer there during the war. I am grateful to Nick Walton and the archive staff of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust for their help in identifying this possible identity for Bennett’s guide. 28 Bennett, A Canterbury Tale, pp. 89–90. 29 Hodgdon, The Shakespeare Trade, p. 195. 30 Bennett, A Canterbury Tale, pp. 89–90.

NOTES237

31 Damien Fenton, with Caroline Lord, Gavin McLean and Tim Shoebridge, New Zealand and the First World War, 1914–1919 (Auckland and London: Penguin Books, 2013), p. 99. 32 Bennett, A Canterbury Tale, pp. 90. 33 I would like to thank Nick Walton at the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust for their help in identifying the signature as described in Bennett’s account. 34 Nicola Watson, The Literary Tourist (London: Palgrave, 2006), p. 60. 35 Houlahan, ‘From the Shakespeare Hut to the Pop-up Globe’, p. 129. 36 Letter from Oswald Stoll to Israel Gollancz, 11 March 1916, National Theatre Archive SMNT/2/1. 37 Margaret Chute, ‘The Eighteenpenny Hotel: A Description of the Shakespeare Hut’, The Graphic, 16 December 1916, p. 772. 38 Anon., ‘Our Outlook’, YM, 14 April 1916, p. 335. 39 Anon., ‘Our Outlook’, p. 335. 40 Chute, ‘The Eighteenpenny Hotel’, p. 772. 41 Anon., ‘The NZ Press Delegates at Home’. 42 Anon., ‘With the New Zealanders’, The Feilding Star, vol. 15, no. 3794, 22 May 1919, p. 2. 43 The YMCA were then well known by their triangle symbol, representing the three aspects of their users’ wellbeing that they hoped to support: mind, body, spirit. 44 ‘Triangle’, ‘Shakespeare Y.M.C.A. Hut: Making the Home Atmosphere’, The Evening Post, 9 October 1917, p. 2. 45 ‘Triangle’, p. 2. 46 Ibid. 47 Letter from Basil Yeaxlee to Israel Gollancz, 3 March 1916, National Theatre Archive, SMNT/2/2/55. 48 Anon., ‘A Shakespeare Hut’. 49 Anon., ‘Heroes All’, Wanganui Chronicle, 28 August 1917, p. 5. 50 Anon., ‘Heroes All’, p. 5. 51 Ibid.

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52 Anon., Hawara and Normanby Star, 15 March 1917. 53 S. R. Littlewood, ‘The Mummers’ Play at the Shakespeare Hut’, YM, 29 December 1916, p. 1236. 54 Letter from S. R. Littlewood to I. Gollancz, 11 November 1916, National Theatre SMNT 1/1/1/6/33. 55 Letter from S. R. Littlewood to I. Gollancz, 11 November 1916, National Theatre SMNT 1/1/1/6/33. 56 Leaving behind the greatest work ever collected on Mummers’ Plays, Tiddy was hit by a shell as he tried to look for and aid injured men. In 1923, Tiddy’s two friends, Logan Pearsall-Smith and Rupert Thompson, would publish his work posthumously, mirroring, four hundred years later, another two friends publishing an anthology of plays in 1623, after their friend’s untimely passing in 1616. Tiddy had thrown himself into his passion for folk performance, both academically, in his scholarly work on the subject at Oxford University, and practically, performing himself in morris dances and folk plays in rural villages. He formed a key part of the folklore revival. 57 Gollancz’s correspondence address in summer 1918, National Theatre Archive/SMNT2/1918. 58 For example, a programme for a Red Cross Fete, Middle Temple, 1916, reveals a Shakespearean programme arranged by Dolmetsch Ellen Terry and Edith Craig Archive, British Library, ms125/23A/5 ET/D506. 59 Tiddy, p. 64. 60 Francois Laroque, trans. Janet Lloyd, Shakespeare’s Festive World: Elizabethan seasonal entertainments and the professional stage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 70. 61 Laroque, Shakespeare’s Festive World, p. 5. 62 Littlewood, ‘The Mummers’ Play at the Shakespeare Hut’, p. 1236. 63 Laroque, Shakespeare’s Festive World, p. 53. 64 Letter from S. R. Littlewood to I. Gollancz, 11 November 1916, National Theatre SMNT 1/1/1/6/33. 65 Laroque, Shakespeare’s Festive World, p. 51.

NOTES239

66 Ton Hoenselaars, ‘Great War Shakespeare: Somewhere in France, 1914–1919’, Actes de Congres do la Societe Francaise, 33, shakespeare.revues.org/2960 (2015), accessed 1 November 2017. 67 Album of photographs of the Shakespeare Hut, Cadbury Research Library YMCA/Q11 Acc 2002/62 pt. 68 Letter from S. R. Littlewood to I. Gollancz, 11 November 1916, National Theatre SMNT 1/1/1/6/33. 69 Littlewood, p. 1236. 70 Littlewood, ‘The Mummers’ Play at the Shakespeare Hut’, p. 1236. 71 Rupert Brooke, ‘The Soldier’, in George Walter (ed.), The Penguin Book of First World War Poetry (London: Penguin, 2006), p. 108. 72 Littlewood, ‘The Mummers’ Play at the Shakespeare Hut’, p. 1236. 73 Tiddy (1923), p. 232 74 Tiddy, p. 81 75 Tiddy, p. 237 76 Tiddy, p. 236 77 Littlewood, ‘The Mummers’ Play at the Shakespeare Hut’, p. 1236. 78 Ibid. 79 Ibid. 80 Ibid. 81 Papers of the Master of the Revels of the Shakespeare’s England Exhibition (undated, presumably 1912) for Lady Randolph Churchill, Churchill archive CHAR 28/82/16-26. 82 Littlewood, ‘The Mummers’ Play at the Shakespeare Hut’, p. 1236. 83 Ibid. 84 Jo Perry, Christmas in Germany: A Cultural History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), p. 91. 85 C. E. W. Bean, The Official History of Australia in the War of 1914-1918, Volume IV: Australian Imperial Force in France,

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1917 (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1933, eleventh edition 1941), p. 21–2. 86 Bean, The Official History of Australia in the War of 1914–1918, Volume IV, p. 22. 87 Littlewood, ‘The Mummers’ Play at the Shakespeare Hut’, p. 1236. 88 Ibid. 89 Ibid. 90 Ibid. 91 Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare and Modern Culture (New York: Pantheon, 2008), p. 178. 92 Gollancz, ‘Epilogue’, pp. 40–9. 93 Garber, Shakespeare and Modern Culture, p.179. 94 Drake, Blind Fortune, p. 34. 95 Ibid., p. 36. 96 Anon., Feilding Star, 29 January 1919. 97 Gary Taylor, Cultural Selection, p. 78.

Chapter 4 1 Anon., ‘The Lady of the Shakespeare Hut’, The Era, 30 April, 1919, p. 8. 2 Anon., ‘The Lady of the Shakespeare Hut’, p. 8. 3 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. 4 Ibid. 5 For this service, he was awarded the MBE in the Birthday Honours, 1918. Anon., ‘Order of the British Empire Birthday Honours: List of New Members’, The Times, 12 June 1918, p. 2. 6 Letter from G. W. W. B. Hughes (dated April 1918) to his wife, from the private collection of the Hughes family, with deepest thanks to Margaret Chipperfield, granddaughter of G. W. W. B. Hughes, for generously allowing and assisting access to Hughes’s letters at home.

NOTES241

7 ‘Triangle’, ‘London at Midnight’, The Dominion, 21 September 1917, p. 7. 8 Letter from G. W. W. B. Hughes (dated April 1918) to his wife, from the private collection of the Hughes family. 9 Anon., ‘Man Traps of London: YMCA’s work for Soldiers’, Northern Star, 3 July 1917, p. 4. 10 John A. Lee, Civilian into Soldier (London: T. Werner Laurie, 1937), pp. 264–5. 11 Hampton C. Thorp, A Handful of Ausseys (London and New York: John Lane Co., 1919), p. 162. 12 Lena Ashwell, Modern Troubadours: A Record of the Concerts at the Front (London: Gyldendal, 1922), pp. 210–11. 13 Anon., ‘Heroes All’, p. 5. 14 Chute, ‘The Eighteen-Penny Hotel: A Description of the Shakespeare Hut’, p. 772. 15 Ibid. 16 ‘H. H.’, ‘The Shakespeare Hut’, The British Journal of Nursing, 16 September 1916, p. 234. 17 Stated on all surviving posters and programmes from the Hut. 18 Charlotte MacDonald, ‘Suffrage, Gender and Sovereignty in New Zealand’, in Irma Sulkunen, Seija-Leena Nevala-Nurmi, Pirjo Markkola (eds), Suffrage, Gender and Citizenship – International Perspectives on Parliamentary Reforms (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2009), pp. 14–33. 19 Secretary of the Hut, G. W. W. B. Hughes (NZYMCA) wrote to his wife frequently of the need for the distraction of ‘good’ women at the Hut to, ‘rescue our men from the harpies who infest the streets’ (April 1918, from private collection, by kind permission of the Hughes family). 20 Anon., ‘Heroes All’, p. 5. 21 See Susan Carlson, ‘The Suffrage Shrew: The Shakespeare Festival, “A Man’s Play” and New Women’, in Jonathan Bate, Jill L. Levenson and Dieter Mehl (eds), Shakespeare in the Twentieth Century (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1998), pp. 85–102 and ‘Politicizing Harley Granville Barker: Suffragists and Shakespeare’, New Theatre Quarterly, vol. 22, no. 2 (May 2006), pp. 122–40.

242 NOTES

22 See Sophie Duncan, Shakespeare’s Women and the Fin-de-Siecle (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), pp. 168–221. 23 For a new history of the AFL that includes wartime activities, see Naomi Paxton, Stage Rights: The Actresses’ Franchise League, activism and politics, 1908–58 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018). 24 Anon., ‘Literary Notes’, British Medical Journal, 12 February 1910, p. 393. 25 Suffragette Exhibition Stand, May 1909, Museum of London, image number 004267. 26 Suffragette, Dir. Sarah Gavron, UK, 2015. 27 With thanks to Anna Thomas for confirming the details of this reconstruction. 28 Hamlet, Dir. E. Hay Plumb, UK, 1913. 29 E. S., ‘Hamlet the Reformer’: Mr Forbes-Robertson in his Greatest Part’, Votes for Women, 4 April 1913, p. 381. 30 Sheila Stowell, ‘Suffrage Critics and Political Action: A feminist Agenda’, in Michael Richard Booth and Joel H. Kaplan (eds), The Edwardian Theatre: Essays on Performance and the Stage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 166–84. 31 Carlson, ‘Politicizing Harley Granville Barker’, p. 127. 32 Ibid, p. 133. 33 Ibid, p. 134–5. 34 Anon., ‘Shakespeare as Suffragist’, p. 180. 35 For example, Ellen Terry’s lecture, ‘A Shakespearean Discourse on Some of the Heroines of Shakespeare’ was given at the Theatre Royal, 25 May 1911 (programme, Ellen Terry Archive, British Library mss ET-D476). 36 The programme surviving in Ellen Terry’s papers gives only a date of 21 April but for this to be a Saturday night (as the main productions were at the Hut in all extant accounts), this must have been 1917. Ellen Terry Archive, British Library MSS ET/D439. 37 Calvo, ‘Shakespeare as War Memorial’, pp. 198–211. 38 Calvo has also explored the idea of Portia as a ‘New Woman’ directly after the war, in ‘Portia and the Suffragists: The Merchant of Venice as a “New Woman” play’, Litteraria Pragensia, vol. 24, no. 47 (2014), pp. 48–71.

NOTES243

39 Letter from A. M. Hendy to Mrs Robinson, 30 June 1912, Women’s Library archive, LSE, Box FL373. 40 Naomi Paxton (ed.), ‘Introduction’, in The Methuen Book of Suffrage Plays (London: Methuen Drama, 2013), pp. vii–xx. 41 Katherine Newey, Women’s Theatre Writing in Victorian Britain (London: Palgrave, 2005), pp. 161–2. 42 Katherine E. Kelly, ‘‘The Actresses’ Franchise League Prepares for War: Feminist Theatre in Camouflage’, Theatre Survey, vol. 35 (1994), pp. 121–37. 43 Ashwell, Modern Troubadours, p. 48. 44 Ashwell, Modern Troubadours, p. 212 45 See for example Kelly. 46 Elliott says as much herself, in a post-war interview for the Sydney Morning Herald, anon. ‘Gertrude Elliott: Rapid Rise to Fame’, 25 June 1923, p. 5. 47 National Theatre Archive SMNT2/2/35. 48 For example, a review in the Stage (3 March 1919, p. 3) places Inez Bensusan acting at the Hut. 49 Kelly, ‘‘The Actresses’ Franchise League Prepares for War’, pp. 121–2. 50 Anon., ‘Actresses Found a Women’s Theatre’, New York Times, 13 April 1913, p. 4. 51 Anon., ‘Actresses Found a Women’s Theatre’, p. 4. 52 Newey, Women’s Theatre Writing in Victorian Britain, pp. 161–2. 53 Kelly, ‘‘The Actresses’ Franchise League Prepares for War’, p. 131. 54 Letter from Gertrude Forbes-Robertson to Edith Craig, 26 April 1917, Ellen Terry & Edith Craig Archive, National Trust, British Library: BL 125_1_6_Z3258_LETTER. 55 Katharine Cockin, Edith Craig (1869–1947): Dramatic Lives (London: Cassell, 1998), p. 123. 56 Maurice Willson Disher, The Last Romantic: The Authorized Biography of Sir John Martin Harvey (London: Hutchinson, 1948), p. 252. 57 Cockin, Edith Craig (1869–1947), p. 93. 58 Cockin, Edith Craig (1869–1947), p. 93.

244 NOTES

59 Letter from Ellen Terry to Maud Warrender, dated September 1917, reproduced in Maud Warrender, My First Sixty Years (London: Cassell, 1933), p. 232. 60 ‘To mark the tercentenary year of Shakespeare’s death, the [Shakespeare] Hut also hosted performances of extracts for the plays – which were given by amateurs’, Michael Dobson, Shakespeare and Amateur Performance: A Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), p. 92. Dobson’s comments are well-founded on the historic misreporting of the Hut that preceded recent research. 61 Anon., ‘Christmas at the Shakespeare Hut’, The Times, Monday, 18 December 1916, p. 9. 62 Macbeth poster, Hoover Institution Political Poster Database, 3943. 63 Ellen Terry Archive BL/125/25/2/ ET/D438. 64 Ellen Terry Archive BL/125/23A ET/D510. 65 Anon., ‘Actreses Found a Women’s Theatre’, p. 4. 66 Carlson, ‘Politicizing Harley Granville Barker’, p. 124 67 BL mss/additional/62699, Knight & Forbes-Robertson papers vol. vi, p. 431. 68 Anon., Oakland Tribune, 10 November 1919. 69 Mary Anderson de Nevarro, A Few More Memories (London: Hutchinson, 1936), p. 160. 70 Newey, Women’s Theatre Writing in Victorian Britain, pp. 161–2. 71 Votes for Women, 24 December 1908. 72 Ellen Terry Archive BL/125/25/2 ET/D849. 73 Drake, Blind Fortune, pp. 36–7. 74 Ibid., p. 37. 75 Unidentified clipping, labelled only ‘1916’ in an anonymous scrapbook in the Folger Shakespeare Library collection, Scrapbook B.67.1. This Scrapbook was the subject of a blog post by Sarah Werner the Folger’s The Collation online articles, to which I am indebted for the reference. 76 Folger, Scrapbook B.67.1. 77 Harriet Walter, quoted in Nick Curtis ‘Harriet Walter on the Donmar’s All-Female Shakespeare Trilogy’, Evening Standard

NOTES245

online edition, 14 September 2016, https://www.standard. co.uk/goingout/theatre/harriet-walter-on-the-donmarsallfemale-shakespeare-trilogy-we-didnt-want-to-be-coy-aboutaddressing-a3344456.html, accessed 30 January 2017. 78 Williams, British Theatre in the Great War, p. 250. 79 Unidentified clipping, labelled only ‘1916’ in an anonymous scrapbook in the Folger Shakespeare Library collection, Scrapbook B.67.1. This Scrapbook was the subject of a blog post by Sarah Werner the Folger’s The Collation online articles, to which I am indebted for the reference. 80 Kelly, ‘The Actresses’ Franchise League Prepares for War’, p. 122. 81 Carlson, ‘Politicizing Harley Granville Barker’, p. 136. 82 Williams, British Theatre in the Great War, p. 250. 83 Alison Oram, Her Husband Was a Woman!: Women’s GenderCrossing in Modern British Popular Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 2013), p. 4. 84 C. A. L. Treadwell, Recollections of an Amateur Soldier (Avery: New Plymouth, 1936), p. 174. 85 Kelly, ‘The Actresses’ Franchise League Prepares for War’, p. 122. 86 RSC online production database http://collections.shakespeare. org.uk/search/rsc-performances/henry-v-1144/search/rsc_ person:drake-fabia-39026/page/1/view_as/grid, accessed 10 October 2017. 87 Anon., ‘Shakespeare Day’, The Stage, 28 April 1921, p. 16. 88 The Sydney Morning Herald, 25 June 1923, p. 25. 89 Anon., ‘Lady Forbes-Robertson Entertained’, Brisbane Courier, 16 May 1924, p. 17. 90 Anon., ‘Lady Forbes Robertson’, Brisbane Courier, 13 May 1924, p. 14.

Chapter 5 1 K. T. Paul, ‘The First Decade’, in N. G Joseph (ed.), A Brief History of the YMCA Indian Student Hostel, London (pamphlet printed and distributed by the YMCA, London, 1970), p. 1.

246 NOTES

2 An image of these Tudor Huts is easily accessible on the Institute of Historical Research’s website at http://www.history. ac.uk/ihr90/gallery/premises (accessed 6 October 2017). 3 F. M. L. Thompson, University of London and the World of Learning (London: Bloomsbury, 1990), p. 77. 4 Paul, ‘The First Decade’, p. 1. 5 Edwin Bevan (speaking in 1921), quoted in Joseph, A Brief History of the YMCA Indian Student Hostel, London, p. 9. This process is also detailed in Ved Parkash Mehta, Daddyji (London: Secker and Warburg, 1972), p. 80. 6 Joseph, A Brief History of the YMCA Indian Student Hostel, London, p. 4. 7 It was originally planned that the Hut would be ‘opened’ by the then Minster for Education, H. A. L. Fisher, who had to cancel and was replaced by Binyon (Joseph, A Brief History of the YMCA Indian Student Hostel, London, p. 4). 8 Joseph, A Brief History of the YMCA Indian Student Hostel, London, p. 6. 9 Bevan quoted in Joseph, A Brief History of the YMCA Indian Student Hostel, London, pp. 8–9. 10 Joseph, A Brief History of the YMCA Indian Student Hostel, London, p. 7. 11 St Nihal Singh, Ruling India by Bullets and Bombs: Effect of the Doctrine of Force upon the Future of Indo-British Relations (London: Saint Nihal Singh, 1920), self-published. 12 St Nihal Singh, ‘A Little India in London’, The Graphic, 11 August 1921, p. 197. 13 Singh, ‘A Little India in London’, p. 197. 14 Ibid. 15 Anon., ‘Personal and Incidental’, The Northern Whig and Belfast Post, 19 April 1921, p. 4. 16 Anon., ‘Shakespeare Worship’, Morning Bulletin, 16 July 1921, p. 12. 17 Rabindranath Tagore, poem and letter among tributes and submissions for A Book of Homage to Shakespeare, edited by Israel Gollancz [manuscript], ca.1916 Folger Shakespeare Library, y.d.85/56.

NOTES247

18 Tagore in Tributes, Folger y.d.85/56. 19 This nickname is found in press articles on the Hut as well, such as ‘The Clubman’, ‘Indian Delegate’s Tragic Death’, The Pall Mall and Globe, 5 September 1921, p. 3. 20 Singh, ‘A Little India in London’, p. 197. 21 Anon., ‘Echoes From Town’, Nottingham Evening Post, Wednesday, 11 July 1923, p. 3. 22 Letter from Basil Yeaxlee to Israel Gollancz, 3 March 1916, National Theatre Archive, SMNT/2/2/55. 23 Anon., ‘A Shakespeare Hut: Use of the National Theatre Site Offered to the YMCA’, The Observer, 15 March 1916, p. 5. 24 P. S. Sivaswami Aiyar, edited and selected by K. A. Nilakanta Sastri, A Great Liberal: Speeches and Writings of Sir P. S. Sivaswami Aiyar (Mumbai: Allied Publishers, 1965), p. 686. 25 Anon., ‘Indian Students in Britain: Report of the Committee of Inquiry’, The Scotsman, 16 October 1922, p. 8. 26 Anon., ‘Indian Students in Britain’, p. 8. 27 Ibid. 28 Ibid. 29 Anon., ‘Ideals and Work’, Northern Daily Mail, 24 July 1922, p. 6. 30 Singh, ‘A Little India in London’, p. 197. 31 Anon., ‘India’s Influence on Japan’, The Scotsman, 6 February 1922, p. 9. 32 Anon. (reporting Lord Morris’s speech), ‘Future of Ireland: Lord Morris’s Prophesy’, The Scotsman, 30 January 1922, p. 8. 33 Anon., ‘New Viceroy’s Ideals: Dramatic Declaration after Hearing Indian Poetess’, The Daily Herald, 18 February, 1921, p. 5. 34 ‘Introduction’ (uncredited), in Sarojini Naidu (ed.), Words of Freedom: Ideas of a Nation (Penguin Books India, this collected edition 2010), p. 1. 35 Anon., ‘New Viceroy’s Ideals: Dramatic Declaration after Hearing Indian Poetess’, The Daily Herald, 18 February 1921, p. 5. 36 Singh, ‘A Little India in London’, p. 197. 37 Geraldine Forbes, Women in Modern India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 113.

248 NOTES

38 His legacy was permanently damaged as he would later join forces with Nazi Germany against the Allied force in the Second World War in a bid for complete Indian independence. See Romain Hayes, Subhas Chandra Bose in Nazi Germany: Politics, Intelligence and Propaganda 1941–1943 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). 39 Renuka Ray, My Reminiscences, p. 41. 40 Ibid., p. 43. 41 Sukhbir Choudhary, Indian People Fight for National Liberation (Non-Co-Operations, Khilafat and Revivalist Movements), 1920–22 (New Delhi: Srijanee Prakashan, 1972), p. 227. 42 Choudhary, Indian People Fight for National Liberation, p. 229. 43 Anon., ‘Indian Students’ Regret’, p. 5. 44 Anon. (ed.), Foreword, in Babu Bhagawan Das, The Historic Trial of Mahatma Gandhi (A. C. Kanchan, National Book Depot, 1922), p. 126. 45 Anon., Foreword, p. 126. 46 Choudhary, Indian People Fight for National Liberation, p. 210. 47 Ibid. 48 Joseph, A Brief History of the YMCA Indian Student Hostel, London, p. 13. 49 Sundar Kabadi, ‘What I know of M. N. Roy’ (Part I), The Radical Humanist, vol. 42, no. 8 (article dated 1929–31) (November 1978), pp. 5–9. 50 Anon., ‘Social Record’, The Daily Mail, 17 December 1919, p. 4. 51 Advertisement, ‘YMCA Music Section’, The Musical Times, 1 October 1920, p. 651. 52 J. D. McClure, ‘Letter to the Editor’, The Musical Times, 1 January 1920, pp. 47–8. 53 Anon., ‘Stratford-on-Avon Conference’, The Stage, 4 September 1919, p. 11. 54 Letter from Martin Harvey to Israel Gollancz, 19 August 1918. National Theatre Archive, SMNT/2/1/14. 55 Letter from Martin Harvey to Israel Gollancz, 31 August 1918. National Theatre Archive, SMNT/2/1/14.

NOTES249

56 Anon., ‘The New Shakespeare Movement: London and Stratford Allied’, Royal Leamington Spa Courier and Warwickshire Standard, 9 May 1919, p. 3. 57 Letter from F. R. Benson to I. Gollancz, 27 February 1919, National Theatre Archive, SMNT/2/1/15. 58 Letter from F. R. Benson to I. Gollancz. 59 Letter from Johnston Forbes-Robertson to Israel Gollancz, 19 August 1919, National Theatre Archive, SMNT/2/1/15. 60 Anon., ‘Stratford-on-Avon Conference’, p.11. 61 Ibid. 62 The newspaper appears to say 1913 but this is clearly a printing error, as the proposals could not have been raised in that year, which was three years before the Shakespeare Hut’s existence, and Martin Harvey’s letters and all minutes of the SMNT support the proposal first being made in summer, 1918. National Theatre Archive, SMNT/2/1/14. 63 Anon., ‘Stratford-on-Avon Conference’, p.11. 64 Ibid. 65 Ibid. 66 Ibid. 67 Adrian Woods Frazier, Behind the Scenes: Yeats Horniman, and the Struggle for the Abbey Theatre (Oakland: University of California Press, 1990), p. xiii. 68 Horniman is now best remembered for her feud with W. B. Yeats over control of the Abbey Theatre, Dublin but also for her occultism and latterly for her ownership and management of the Gaiety Theatre in Manchester. The Gaiety staged a range of drama, including Shakespeare, and had been successful before the war; it did not fare well during wartime but in 1919 hosted the Manchester Season of the New Shakespeare Company before finally having to be sold altogether in 1922, after which disappointment Horniman ‘sever[ed] all links with theatre’ (G. Rowell, ‘Annie Horniman’ entry in Colin Chambers (ed.), The Continuum Companion to Twentieth Century Theatre (London and New York: Continuum, 2006), p. 364). 69 Anon., ‘Stratford-on-Avon Conference’, p. 11.

250 NOTES

70 Sally Beauman, The Royal Shakespeare Company: A History of Ten Decades (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), p. 68. 71 McMullan, ‘Goblin’s Market’, p. 185. 72 Minutes of the Meeting of the Executive of the Shakespeare Memorial National Theatre Committee, 20 February 1919, Appendix. National Theatre Archive SMNT/1/3/12.

Chapter 6 1 Israel Gollancz, ‘A National Theatre: Efforts Delayed by the War’, The Times, 12 March 1924, p. 14. 2 Gollancz, ‘A National Theatre’, p. 14. 3 Ibid. 4 Ibid. 5 Ibid. 6 Ivor Brown and George Fearon, Amazing Monument: A Short History of the Shakespeare Industry (London and Toronto: Heinemann, 1939), p. 299. 7 Whitworth, The Making of a National Theatre, p. 123. 8 Beauman, The Royal Shakespeare Company, p. 69. 9 Michael Dobson, Shakespeare and Amateur Performance, p. 92. 10 Emma Smith, Shakespeare in Production: King Henry V (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 43. 11 Calvo, ‘Shakespeare as War Memorial’, pp. 198–211. 12 Antonio Moreno Hernandez, Julio César: Textos, Contextos y Recepción: De la Roma Clásica al Mundo Actual (Madrid: UNED, 2010), p. 505. Audiences at the Hut often comprised around 400 to 500 soldiers. 13 Disher, The Last Romantic: The Authorized Biography of Sir John Martin Harvey (London: Hutchinson, 1948), p. 252. 14 Connerton, ‘Seven Types of Forgetting’, Memory Studies, vol. 1, no. 1 (2008), p. 59. 15 LSHTM Timeline http://timeline.lshtm.ac.uk (accessed 10 January 2012).

NOTES251

16 This project, to compare the commemoration of Shakespeare in 1916 in London and Sydney, was conceived, developed and led by Philip Mead (UWA) and Gordon McMullan (KCL). It ran from 2010 to 2013, funded by the Australian Research Council, with Ailsa Grant Ferguson as Research Associate. The existence of the Shakespeare Hut was discovered by Gavin Clark, then National Theatre Archivist, via architectural drawings held (at that time uncatalogued) in the National Theatre Archive, in early 2011. The Anzac connection of the Hut was verified soon after and placed the Hut in a position of particular relevance to the ‘Monumental Shakespeares’ project’s wider aim to explore the idea of ‘Antipodal Shakespeare’ in 1916. 17 LSHTM Timeline http://timeline.lshtm.ac.uk (accessed 1 February 2014). 18 LSHTM Timeline http://timeline.lshtm.ac.uk (accessed 1 October 2017). 19 Anon., ‘Lady Forbes Robertson’, p. 14. 20 Booth, Postcards from the Trenches, p. 147. 21 Ibid, p. 129. 22 Jock Philips, ‘The Quiet Western Front: The First World War and New Zealand Memory’, in Santanu Das (ed.), Race, Empire and First World War Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 231–48. 23 Philips, ‘The Quiet Western Front’, p. 233. 24 Ibid. 25 Anon., Feilding Star, 29 January 1919. It appears that this scheme was never realized, probably due to funding problems and with some acrimonious public debate at the time about YMCA spending decisions. 26 Booth, Postcards from the Trenches, p. 127. 27 Foucault, ‘Of Other Spaces’, pp. 22–7. 28 Joint statement by Gregory Doran, Catherine Mallyon and Erica Whyman on the Arts Council England’s ‘Power Through Diversity Event’ held in Manchester on 12 December 2016, ‘Diversity in the Arts’, https://www.rsc.org.uk/news/archive/ diversity-in-the-arts (accessed 1 October 2017).

252 NOTES

29 Robert McCrum, ‘Shakespeare Live! Was a Bold and Innovative Tribute’, The Observer (online), 23 April 2016, https://www. theguardian.com/culture/2016/apr/24/shakespeare-live-rscstratford (accessed 1 October 2017). 30 Disher, The Last Romantic, p. 252. 31 ‘Particulars of a competition open to sculptors and architects for a design for the proposed memorial to Shakespeare, May 1908’, National Theatre Archive SMNT/1/6/1. 32 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. 33 E. S., ‘Hamlet the Reformer’, p. 381. 34 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. 35 Hodgdon, The Shakespeare Trade, p. 191. 36 ‘Triangle’, ‘Shakespeare Y.M.C.A. Hut’, p. 2. 37 Sir Lockwood Smith’s comments are reproduced by his kind permission from private correspondence between Sir Lockwood Smith, Jennifer Matuszek (Public Diplomacy Manager, New Zealand High Commission, London) and Ailsa Grant Ferguson. These comments are dated 7 December 2017. 38 Bed Ticket at the Shakespeare Hut 1917, National Army Museum 1986.2081 NAM.NZ. 39 Shakespeare Hut: Writing Room. Auckland War Memorial Archive, EPH-2007-2-2. 40 Bennett, A Canterbury Tale, pp.89–90.

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INDEX Actresses’ Franchise League  15, 17, 131, 138–65, 208, 221 Aiyar, Sivaswami  177 Albert Hall. See Shakespeare Costume Ball (1911) Alexander, Sir George  80 Anderson, Mary  83, 153–4 Anzac Day  87, 126–7 Ashwell, Lena  135, 145, 155 Askew, Frederick  63–4 Astor, Nancy Witcher Langhorne, Viscountess Astor 185 Barrie, J. M.  35 Beale, Simon Russell  209 Bennett, Francis  97–100, 220 Benson, Frank  188–9 Bensusan, Inez  15, 145, 147–9, 153 Bevan, Edwyn  171–2 Binyon, Lawrence  170–1 A Book of Homage to ­Shakespeare. See ­Gollancz, Sir Israel Bridges-Adams, William  189 ‘By me, William Shakespeare: A Life in Writing’ exhibition 214–15 Calvo, Clara  13, 28, 62, 71, 73, 143, 200 Carlson, Marvin  6, 81–2

Chesterton, G. K.  39–40, 178 Choudhary, Sukhbir  181, 183 Churchill, Lady ­Randolph  33–4, 44, 46–52 Churchill, Sir Winston  50 Colmer, Francis  64–8 Connerton, Paul  4–5, 200–1, 206 Cornwallis-West, Mrs ­Jennie. See Churchill, Lady Randolph Craig, Edith Ailsa  1, 3, 15, 31, 130–1, 140, 145–53, 156, 163 Craig, Edward Gordon  39 David Garrick (play by Thomas William ­Robertson)  151, 153 Deamer, Dulcie  88–90, 92 Dench, Dame Judi  209 Dobson, Michael  29, 200 Dolmetsch, Arnold  113 Doran, Gregory  207 Drake, Fabia  1, 33, 129, 156–62, 163, 200, 209, 217 Eliot, T. S.  69 Elliott, Gertrude  15, 80, 129–30, 139–40, 143–65, 190, 203–4, 208

262 INDEX

feminism 138–65 festivity  11–12, 34, 45–7, 109–27, 159, 161–2, 215 Fiennes, Joseph  207–8 Forbes-Robertson, Lady. See Elliott, Gertrude Forbes-Robertson, Sir Johnston  6–8, 80, 58–9, 130–1, 141–8, 153–5, 165, 189–90, 196, 214 Foucault, Michel  8–12, 184, 217. See also heterochronia; heterotopia Gandhi, Mohandas Karamchand (Mahatma Gandhi) 172, 180, 182–3 Globe Theatre, 1912 reconstruction  40, 45–9 Globe Theatre, London. See Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre Gollancz, Sir Israel  7–8, 13, 16, 20, 26–7, 42–4, 108, 111, 131, 167–9, 174, 206, 212–13, 219 A Book of Homage to Shakespeare  27, 30, 36, 71, 174, 206 and demolition of the Shakespeare Hut  195–9, 201 and founding of the New Shakespeare ­Company  185–94 and founding of the ­Shakespeare Hut  70–8 Greet, Ben  152–3

Habicht, Werner  62–3 Hamilton Fife, H.  37–8 Harvey, Martin  63–4, 80, 151–3, 186–8 heterochronia 11. See also Foucault, Michel heterotopia  8–12, 22, 34, 45–6, 59–60, 87, 96–102, 133, 159, 165, 168, 172, 175, 178, 184, 208, 216–18. See also Foucault, Michel Hodgdon, Barbara  27, 97–8, 213, 215 Horniman, Annie  191–2 Hughes, George W. W. B.  132–3, 219 Igorot Village exhibit  53–6 Indian nationalism  168–84 Jonson, Ben  28, 30, 48 Junior Players  156–7 Kahn, Coppélia  14, 28, 42 King George V  35 King’s College London  20, 71, 202, 212–15 Kinnear, Rory  208 Kirwan, Patrick  48–9, 121 Lally, Gwen  157–8, 1 Laroque, Francois  114–16 Lee, John A.  134 Littlewood, S. R.  109–25 London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine  16, 197–8, 201–2, 215–17, 219–21

INDEX263

Lutyens, Edwin  35–6, 46–7, 213 Lyttelton, Edith Balfour, Mrs Alfred  23, 72, 49, 191 Lytton, Earl of (Victor Alexander George Robert Bulwer-Lytton), Lord Lytton  4, 28–9, 177 McCarthy, Lillah  33, 208 McMullan, Gordon  14, 26, 43, 192, 212 Mead, Philip  89–90 Mummer’s Play  1, 14, 17, 27, 109–27, 151 music hall  84 Naidu, Sarojini  179–80 National Theatre  7, 13, 146, 168, 213–14, 221. See also Shakespeare Memorial National Theatre and the memory of the Shakespeare Hut 196–202 and the New Shakespeare Company 184–93 and pre-war fundraising events 19–60 the Shakespeare Hut as the precursor of  151–2 New Shakespeare Company  16, 164, 169, 185–94, 197, 199 Old Vic Theatre  21, 81–2 Olivier, Sir Laurence  21, 45 Ordish, Fairman  112, 116

original practices  39, 159 Paul, K. T.  169 Pinero, Arthur  146 Pioneer Players  146–7 Poel, William  39–40, 71 Ray, Renuka  180–1 Red Cross  71 Robins, Elizabeth, Votes for Women 142 Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC)  16, 168, 192, 207–11 Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford 25 Sackville-West, Vita  31–3 Scary Little Girls theatre company 218–19 Shakespeare400 212 Shakespeare, William and Anzac  88–91 fragmentation of  64–9 and modernism  68–9 and patriotism  40–5, 62–70, 75–8, 85, 143, 164 quatercentenary of  206–21 Tercenentary of (1916)  2, 5, 20, 61–80, 79–85, 158–9, 174, 212 and wartime morale  77 in wartime recruitment  68–70, 77 and women’s suffrage  57–9, 139–65 works and publications of Antony and Cleopatra  208

264 INDEX

As You Like It  32, 130–1 Cymbeline  67 First Folio edition  27–8 Hamlet  39, 130, 153, 165, 208 Henry V  1, 12, 14, 33, 67, 81–2, 129, 156–64, 209, 216–17 Henry VI  67 Julius Caesar  83, 153, 189, 200, 209 King John  67, 81–2 King Lear  67 Love’s Labour’s Lost  67 Macbeth  68–70, 153 The Merchant of Venice  31–3, 129, 142–3, 153, 165, 209 The Merry Wives of Windsor  189 A Midsummer Night’s Dream  32, 111 Much Ado About Nothing  209 Richard II  62–3, 209 Sonnet 18  28 Sonnet 55  28 Troilus and Cressida  67 Twelfth Night  32, 109, 121, 142 The Winter’s Tale  83, 189 Shakespeare Costume Ball (1911)  4, 13, 21–2, 34–45, 49–50, 52, 61, 71, 83, 147, 162, 212 Shakespeare exhibition (1964) 213 Shakespeare Live! (2016)  207–11, 215

Shakespeare Masque  11, 12, 21–2, 23–34, 38 Shakespeare ­Memorial ­National Theatre (SMNT) Committee  7, 14, 19, 21, 162, 212–15. See also ­National Theatre post-war  167–9, 185–94 pre-war events  23–60 Shakespeare Memorial Theatre, Stratford 25, 163, 187 Shakespeare’s Birthplace Trust  10, 14, 17, 95–101, 208, 213, 215, 220 ‘Shakespeare’s England’ exhibition  13, 21–2, 38, 40–1, 45–60, 71, 76, 121, 147, 162, 192, 212–213, 215 Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre  210, 213 Shakespeare Tercentenary Gala, Drury Lane (1916)  14, 70, 79–85, 157, 188, 208–10, 212, 217 Shaw, George Bernard  33–4, 71–2, 50–1 Singh, St Nihal  172–5, 178 Slade, Marie  159–61, 163–4 Smith, Sir Lockwood  218 SMNT Ladies’ Committee  34, 38 Souvenir of the Shakespeare Ball  28, 36–7, 42–5 spectacular production  22, 39–40, 71, 83, 85, 130, 157

INDEX265

Stoll, Sir Oswald  73, 90 suffragism  3, 15, 32–3, 57–9, 119–20, 129–30 and the Hut performances 138–65 Syal, Meera  209

Walter, Harriet  159, 208–9 Warrender, Maud  131, 152 Waymouth, W. Charles  94 Woman’s Theatre  11, 15–16, 131, 138, 145–53, 164

Tagore, Rabindranath  173–4 Terry, Dame Ellen  1, 15, 31–3, 80–3, 131, 142–3, 152–3, 155, 190, 196, 208–9, 219 Thorndyke, Sir Russell  81–2 Thorpe, Hampton C.  134–5 Tiddy, Reginald  112–19 Tree, Sir Herbert Beerbohm  39, 157 Tweedie, Mrs Alec  75–6

YMCA  16, 36, 70–8, 87–109, 145, 152, 168–87, 196–7, 198 Aldwych Hut  90, 198 Indian Students’ Hostel  1, 168–85, 199 Music Section  185–6, 193 NZYMCA 87–109, 131–9, 171 and women volunteers  131–9