This is the first book-length, interdisciplinary study of how Shakespeare has been mobilized in performance at times of conflict spanning the eighteenth to the twenty-first century. It sets out a brand-new critical methodology that recognizes how wartime theatre is mediated by networks of production and reception that control its meaning and impact. Performances of Shakespeare's plays, like the texts themselves, do not have single or fixed meanings, and one production context often brings together conflicting agendas and responses. Amy Lidster explains how differing productions of Shakespeare shed light on issues at the heart of conflicts and negotiate concepts such as patriotism, commemoration, and propaganda. With wide-ranging transhistorical coverage, she argues that wartime Shakespeare is defined by its malleability and plural (mis)understandings, which determine its power to shape the experience of war, the political issues at stake during a period of crisis, and the construction of narratives of conflict.

‘Amy Lidster convincingly demonstrates how production and reception agents create a wartime Shakespeare more ideologically contested, and less consistently jingoistic, than we have recognized. Leading us from the Essex uprising in 1601 to the Iraq War at the dawn of the twenty-first century, Lidster is an able guide to a history of Shakespeare productions as open to interpretation as are the plays themselves.'

Garrett Sullivan - Liberal Arts Professor of English, Pennsylvania State University

‘Amy Lidster uniquely transforms the history of wartime Shakespeare into a narrative that convinces due to its apt emphasis on the fragmented, provisional, and multi-layered nature of this complex phenomenon.'

Ton Hoenselaars - Professor of Early Modern English Literature and Culture, Utrecht University