The Afterword considers the ways the Chorus to Henry V focalizes the temporal and representational resonances of Shakespeare at war, in his own time and across the succeeding centuries.

In January 1917, the Red Cross Shakespeare Exhibition, which opened at the Grafton Galleries in London, was advertised with two different posters. One displayed an oversize red cross on a white background – the Red Cross emblem and the English national flag. The other depicted Shakespeare’s coat of arms. The exhibition, described in the press as the most comprehensive show of Shakespeareana ever exhibited, was originally curated in Manchester as part of the celebrations of the 1916 Tercentenary, the commemoration of the three hundred-year anniversary of Shakespeare’s death. In London, it became part of the war effort, the way civilians at the ‘Home Front’ did their bit to help the British Army in the trenches. The exhibition, a successful charity venture, moved to London thanks to the collaboration of actor-manager Martin Harvey and the British Red Cross, one of several wartime collaborations between the British NPO and the theatrical profession to bring relief to Western Front soldiers. The poster portraying Shakespeare’s coat of arms aimed to present Shakespeare as an English gentleman, to counteract the influence of the Baconians who questioned Shakespeare’s authorship. This exhibition was one of several ways in which Shakespeare’s cultural capital was enlisted to raise funds in wartime.

In 1939 John Gielgud visited Denmark to perform Hamlet at Kronborg Castle in Elsinore, a location closely associated with the setting of Shakespeare’s famous play. A photograph of Gielgud and Fay Compton, who played Ophelia in the production, shows the two actors posing in front of a stone relief of Shakespeare, which was unveiled at Kronborg during their visit to mark what was clearly intended as both a cultural and a diplomatic exchange between Denmark and the UK at this tense moment in European history. This essay suggests that Gielgud’s performance in Elsinore and the events that surrounded it were ‘haunted’ in different ways, both by the memory of the previous war and by the fear of the war rapidly approaching. It shows how several factors – the location, the play, the historical moment between two world wars – would have created a particularly resonant intersection between ‘Shakespeare’ and ‘war’.

Since 9/11, a striking number of Shakespeare productions have appropriated the distinctive colours of desert camouflage. The print – marked by faded tones and an overall impression of dry and earthy environs – has become almost the standard choice for productions of Macbeth, Othello, and Henry V. Yet there has been little, if any, discussion of desert camouflage as a costuming decision. Examining productions ranging across two decades – from Nicholas Hytner’s Henry V (2003) to Max Webster’s Henry V (2022) – this essay argues that the use of the print synopsizes the ways in which productions refract contemporary understandings of global conflict. Camouflage costuming ignites a nexus of Shakespearean meanings around the brutality of the protagonist, war-crimes, PTSD, veteran-ship, and spectacular violence. The newly cynical readings that result render irrelevant traditional debates about the pro- or anti-war stance of Shakespearean theatre. In representing – via desert camouflage – a new kind of warfare, theatre in the post-2001 era envisages conflict as self-defeat. Finally, then, these productions speak to incompleteness, irresolution, regret, and a never-ending cycle of global violence.

At the outbreak of war in 1914, the journal The Sphere published a two-page spread showing the ‘Shakespeare Cliff’ with the well-known ‘This England’ speech from Shakespeare’s Richard II, alongside other images connecting England to Shakespeare’s work. Related to the image are many writings of the First World War, including editions of the plays, the life of Shakespeare, Shakespeare and warfare, the Tercentenary of his birth, and the relation between Shakespeare and German literature. An article in the popular John O’London’s Weekly argued that Shakespeare had been a soldier, and suggested that Englishmen should follow his example and fight for their country.

This essay concentrates on the practice and significance of parodying Shakespearean speeches during wartime, which reached a height during the French Revolutionary-Napoleonic Wars. At a particularly pivotal moment – the renewal of war in 1803 – a spate of parodies of Hamlet’s ‘To be or not to be’ soliloquy appeared in print, most of which adapted the speech for Napoleon, who debates the merits of invading Britain. This essay examines these overlooked parodies, paying particular attention to George Woodward’s ‘Buonaparte’s Soliloquy at Calais’ published by Rudolph Ackermann and circulated widely, including in the Weimer-based journal London und Paris. While these confident parodies express unambiguous support for Britain’s war effort and condemn Napoleon, they do not testify to united public opinion about the necessity of war or to untrammelled optimism about its outcome. This essay establishes their wider significance: they draw attention to a politically and culturally astute readership that was not limited by national or conflict lines, and they reveal the fractures beneath confident wartime propaganda. Hamlet’s famous soliloquy becomes a malleable rhetorical template for carrying out topical wartime debate, facilitating political discourse that could draw attention to the divisive debates underlining this period of conflict.

Contra readings of Harlequin’s Invasion that characterize the play as a patriotic call to arms during the Seven Years’ War, this essay argues that David Garrick constructs a different myth for Shakespeare than the myths of bellicose nationalism, celebrating a Harlequin Shakespeare over a nationalist one. The play suggests that comedic variety is more crucial to Shakespeare, to his ability to draw a plethora of characters who all seem true to life, than any nationalist zeal rooted in an unruly masculinity. Just as the play calls attention to the fluidity of citizenship, it calls attention to other fluidities that valorize nature and Harlequin as polymorphous. Garrick’s myth is predicated on a celebration of difference that is united in the same way that natural fecundity is harmonious. While nationalist myths yearn for unity as a totality that regulates, suppresses, and subsumes difference via antagonism, Harlequin’s Invasion valorizes nature’s spontaneity, its transformations and improvisations, more so than glory or self-sacrifice. The play uses Harlequin and his marvellous transformations to restore theatrical play and the daily enjoyments of theatre as a force for national unity that can accommodate the many differences that exist in a nation.

This essay focuses on a programme of a Shakespearean revue entitled ‘This Sceptred Isle’ (1941) in the possession of the Wolfson Centre for Archival Research, Library of Birmingham. Billed as a ‘Dramatisation of Shakespeare’s Call to Great Britain in Time of War’, the show was a brainchild of eminent Shakespeare scholar G. Wilson Knight (1897–1985) and featured such warlike set pieces as ‘This England never did, nor never shall, / Lie at the proud foot of a conqueror’ (King John) and John of Gaunt’s ‘this sceptred isle’ oration (Richard II). Knight performed all the main roles. He was convinced of Britain’s imperial destiny and of the central importance of Shakespeare (‘a national prophet’) in it. Indeed, Knight’s interpretation of the playwright informed his wartime assertion about Britain’s imperial mission and the significance of the monarchy. ‘This Sceptred Isle’ was, however, hardly a typical piece of British wartime propaganda, considering that its creator was an admirer of Nietzsche, whose ideas were appropriated by Nazism. This essay aims to explore Knight’s idiosyncratic thinking underlying the programme of ‘This Sceptred Isle’ in order to clarify how the admirer of Nietzsche and Nazism created a polemics of British patriotism with recourse to Shakespeare.

The outbreak of the First World War presented the German Kaiserreich’s cultural elite with a major dilemma. Should they jettison the output of poets and playwrights, artists and musicians from the newly hostile Entente countries from programmes for public consumption? Or should they claim them as part of the common cultural stock of humanity, and continue to enjoy them as before? These debates rose to an especially acute pitch over the works of Shakespeare, which by 1914 had become a much-loved staple of the Wilhelmine dramatic canon. Rather than abandoning Shakespeare, German elites began an intensive campaign to reframe Germany as his ‘true’ home, rooted in his apparent closeness to the essence of the ‘German spirit’ – with correlative contempt for his supposedly inadequate reception in the Anglosphere. Shakespearean texts and cultural institutions were also co-opted systematically into the Kaiserreich’s war effort: to boost the morale and lionize the calibre of the German soldiery, to mark milestone events in the war’s trajectory, and as part of German diplomatic offensives abroad, especially in neutral countries. Overall, this essay casts wartime Shakespeare in a new and unusual light, illustrating the potential for state military propaganda to engage in projects of cultural reclamation.

The Introduction establishes the distinctive focus and range of contributions within Shakespeare at War. This transhistorical material history prioritizes how Shakespeare is used at times of war from the mid-eighteenth century to the present, and shows how this focus sheds light on some of the core political issues dominating a conflict, the wartime role played by the arts, and the shifting cultural capital of Shakespeare for different communities. The Introduction argues for the importance of a ‘material’ emphasis: all contributions use a significant archival object as their starting point in order to establish how these items can help us recover different wartime stories, voices, and perspectives. In place of a single, linear history, our aim – through the structure, content, and material focus of the collection – is to embrace a plurality of histories. The Introduction also contextualizes the diversity of its twenty-six contributions: nineteen are essays by Shakespeare scholars, war historians, or public figures who have served in the British Army, while the remaining seven are by theatre directors who have directed Shakespeare while the UK was at war or have set their productions at times of war to encourage audiences to think critically about the complexities of major conflicts.

This essay tracks the conflicts that have taken place in Ireland over a period of several centuries, examining the ways in which Shakespeare has, himself, engaged with these conflicts, and the ways in which his work has been recruited by those participating in the conflicts – on both sides. The importance of Shakespeare to the identity formation of the colonial community in Ireland is noted, and the increasing appropriation of Shakespeare by nationalists from the end of the eighteenth century onwards is registered. A particular point of focus here is the nineteenth-century nationalist militant and land-rights activist Michael Davitt. Davitt’s possession of several photographic images relating to Shakespeare is noted, as is his general acquaintance with the playwright’s work. The essay also discusses the importance of Shakespeare to later nationalists, such as Patrick Pearse, executed for leading the 1916 uprising against British rule in Ireland. That one contemporary unionist commentator unexpectedly offered a cautious celebration of Pearse’s self-sacrifice by drawing a comparison between the militant and Julius Caesar’s Brutus is a telling sign of the extent to which Shakespeare served as a kind of common cultural reference point over the course of Ireland’s fraught, conflictual history.

This essay establishes a link between Garrick’s operatic adaptation of The Tempest, which opened at Drury Lane on 11 February 1756, and the imminent escalation of the French and Indian War (1754–63) into the Seven Years’ War (1756–63). In this essay, Massai argues that Garrick’s Tempest, generally dismissed as a flop and as an embarrassing misjudgement on his part, takes on greater topical significance and political resonance if reconsidered alongside the ‘Dialogue’ that Garrick wrote to be performed as prologue to the opera. By means of a close analysis of both texts, alongside Dryden and Davenant’s earlier adaptation of The Tempest (1667), Massai shows how Garrick’s opera and ‘Dialogue’ are in fact representative of wartime uses of Shakespeare, which, as this collection shows, often served as an important platform for the fashioning of current attitudes towards military conflict.

The Nazis could not ignore or suppress Shakespeare without alienating members of the educated middle classes. But to present him on stage involved directors and actors, many of whom were not friendly to the regime. Shakespeare posed a more fundamental conundrum because he encourages audiences to look beyond and above the divisions between protagonists and resist unalloyed support for either side. Through an exploration of the staging of The Merchant of Venice in Venice in 1943, this essay explores this conundrum and Nazi efforts to cope with it.