A tale of two Henries

In 1944 Laurence Olivier produced, directed and starred in a movie version of Shakespeare’s play ‘Henry V’. Shot in bright primary colours it dealt in bright primary patriotic emotions and 30 years later my Dad and his best friend could remember seeing it in the cinema as 12-year-old kids and being stirred by its patriotic fervour, its stirring invocation of England’s valour and fortitude, at a time when German V rockets were falling on London and the south-east. (A V2 rocket fell on the house next door to my Dad’s, killing the occupants. The one time he mentioned it was the only time I ever saw him cry. Britain needed all the patriotism and determination it could muster.)

Installation view of ‘Shakespeare and War’ at the National Army Museum showing posters, cartoons, photos and programmes from the Second World War including a poster for Olivier’s Henry V

Those ardent schoolboys will have noticed that the film was ‘dedicated to the ‘Commandos and Airborne Troops of Great Britain the spirit of whose ancestors it has been humbly attempted to recapture’ because this appears as a caption at the start of the film, but won’t have known that the production was partly funded by the British government as a form of soft propaganda.

Forty five years later, in 1989, the actor widely seen as inheriting Olivier’s mantle, Kenneth Branagh, directed and starred in a new movie version of ‘Henry V’. Much was made of the fact that, instead of stylised sunny sets, the play went for a darker, grittier look, most notably in the battle of Agincourt scenes, filmed on a lovely sunny day in the Olivier version, but in a downpour of rain in the Branagh, which turns the battlefield into a quagmire, spattering all the characters with mud and also gore from the countless bodies which have been hacked and stabbed. Critics weren’t slow to point out that it was made in the aftermath of the Falklands War and so carried a strong message against war and warmongering.

Poster for the original 1984 Royal Shakespeare Company production of Henry V directed by Adrian Noble and starring Kenneth Branagh, as featured in ‘Shakespeare and War’ at the National Army Museum

The same play, the same author, the same plot, the same characters, the same stage directions and the same words – and yet supporting two very different productions, reflecting very different societies, mindsets and values.

These are just two examples of the way Shakespeare’s plays about war – the causes of war, the preparations for war, the experience of war, wartime emotions from terror to exhilaration – and the greatly varying opinions of his many different characters about war and warfare, have been quoted, adapted, distorted, illustrated and recycled, used both to support and attack Britain’s wars, in the 400 years since his death.

Shakespeare and War

The National Army Museum in Chelsea is currently holding a FREE exhibition titled ‘Shakespeare and War’ which sets out to review the huge history of the national playwright’s role in Britain’s many wars and conflicts and how his words, stories, characters and scenes have been used in widely different times and situations.

The exhibition sets out to document how the plays, characters and speeches have been excerpted and exploited propagandists, governments, commentators, satirists and anti-war activists, soldiers and civilians – during the turbulent 400 years since Shakespeare’s death, in 1616. As the curators put it:

The plays have been used to rally the nation at times of crisis and to reflect on the human cost of conflict. But they have also been used to critique war and to consider the more challenging aspects of the military experience. They have inspired soldiers and civilians alike, helping people face adversity on the battlefield and at home.

After Shakespeare

Thus the exhibition starts after Shakespeare’s death. There’s none of the usual fol-de-rol about his biography or the Globe Theatre or the parabola of his career, just the blunt facts that he was a very successful actor-dramatist-manager, who died in 1616, before the British Army even existed.

Instead we are thrown straight into the first major conflict which occurred after his lifetime, the civil war or wars of three kingdoms which broke out 23 years after his death, in 1639, and lasted until Cromwell’s pacification of Scotland in 1653.

The exhibition is divided into six broad historical sections, each of which is introduced by a wall label and then features all sorts of bric-a-brac from the period in question – broadsheets, posters, cartoons, pamphlets which cite or reference, quote or parody scenes, characters or speeches from the plays to suit the purpose of polemicists and propagandists of the moment, paintings or photos of Shakespearian actors or patrons, posters for productions through the ages, and then – in the modern era – recordings of radio and TV productions and so on. At the most basic level, it’s a curiosity shop of historical Shakespeariana.

1. Royal Shakespeare: The Civil War and Beyond

During the English Civil War Shakespeare was often associated with the monarchy. While in prison awaiting trial, King Charles I read Shakespeare’s (Second) Folio (the First and Second Folios were the first attempts to publish all Shakespeare’s works in one volume). The King made notes on its pages and the exhibition has his copy on show. This did not go unnoticed by the great poet and Puritan propagandist, John Milton, who is represented here by a first edition of his pamphlet, Eikonoklastes.

Installation view of the civil war part of ‘Shakespeare and War’, showing, on the left, engravings of Charles I (above) and Cromwell (below) along with Charles’s copy of the Second Folio beneath an English mortuary sword (photo by the author)

This little collocation of objects overflows with meanings. Eikonoklastes was written and published late in 1649 to justify the execution of King Charles which took place on 30 January 1649. It was a point-by-point rebuttal of a pamphlet titled Eikon Basilike, a Royalist propaganda work, which purported to be a spiritual autobiography of the saintly king. The Basilike set Charles up as the type of a perfect enlightened monarch who ruled by the Divine Right of Kings and through the ancient constitution. Milton refuted all these points and more, claiming that Charles’s rule had degenerated to a tyranny over a people who could only be free by executing him and abolishing the monarchy altogether.

Where does Shakespeare come in all this? Well, he was part of the culture wars between the two sides. Theatre was encouraged and sponsored by the King, the Court and aristocrats. Shakespeare’s younger contemporary, Ben Jonson, ended up writing masques – elaborate ritualistic performances, accompanied by music – for the King and Court, which reinforced the ideology of royalty and monarchical rule and in some of which the king himself took part.

In the eyes of radical Puritans all this was blasphemy. Representing people on stage came close to breaking the commandment about not worshipping images. Plays diverted people’s minds away from the only thing they should be contemplating, the glory of God. Playhouses were notorious sites of crime and prostitution. Shakespeare’s plays, even the sternest tragedies, are littered with outrageously rude puns and euphemisms, the kind of thing Parliamentary Puritans had in mind when they accused the theatre of staging ‘spectacles of pleasure, too commonly expressing lascivious mirth and levity.’

For all these reasons and more the Puritans protested against the theatre in the years leading up to the war, and this explains why, when Parliament took control of the capital in September 1642, they promptly shut down all the playhouses. Which explains why there’s an engraving of Cromwell in this exhibition showing him wearing a suit of armour above a pile of discarded theatrical bric-a-brac, such as masks and disguises. For 18 long years the theatres were dark. Shakespeare’s Globe was torn down in 1644 and turned into ‘tenements’.

The Restoration

In 1660 the monarchy was restored and Charles II assumed the Crown. His 25-year reign was troubled by political and religious issues along the old civil war schism, at its most fundamental the clash between devotees of the Protestant cause and Charles’s Court which became tainted with accusations of Catholic sympathy, especially after he married the Catholic princess Catherine of Braganza in 1662.

Like his father Charles was a great patron of the arts, including theatre, and his rule saw the flourishing of the movement referred to as Restoration Comedy. The theatre once again became associated with all the vices of Londoners at play, and this, like the theatre of his father, became the target of religious criticism. The ongoing schism between Catholic-leaning court and Protestant nobles came to a head during the three-year reign of Charles’s brother, James II, who with typical Stuart arrogance, not only took a Catholic wife but made it clear that the new infant son she bore him would be raised a Catholic. The Protestant aristocracy rebelled and overthrew him in what their propagandists named The Glorious Revolution, inviting the Protestant Prince of Orange (in modern Holland) to come and be our king.

The curators skimp a bit on this period, displaying just one work, a copy of a book by the playwright John Crowne adapting Henry VI parts 2 and 3 and titled ‘Misery of Civil War’.

Shakespeare’s history plays

The thing is, Shakespeare’s history plays amount to a sustained investigation of the nature of authority and ‘good’ rule. All of them are named after the English king they focus on and ask questions like, What makes a good king? What makes a bad king? Are nobles, or ‘the people’, ever justified in overthrowing a king? If two noble houses fight for the crown, what are ordinary people to do? Follow their conscience, try to avoid the conflict, or fight for their local lord and master? Is there such a thing as a ‘just’ war in which case, how do you define one?

Questions like these echo throughout the obvious plays i.e. the ones about English history, but are also central to the Roman plays and three of the four great tragedies.

The history plays are usually divided into three groups:

• the series depicting the Wars of the Roses, being: Henry VI parts 1, 2 and 3, and Richard III (4 plays)
• the second tetralogy – including Richard II, Henry IV parts 1 and 2, and Henry V
• the standalone plays King John, Edward III and Henry VIII

The Roman plays which discuss the nature of authority and leadership focus on Julius Caesar and its sequel, Antony and Cleopatra. Both cover wars and include battle scenes.

The tragedies all feature war, in different ways. Macbeth is about a successful soldier and includes actual battle scenes. King Lear and Hamlet feature the invasion of their respective countries (England by the French and Denmark by the Swedes) but no actual fighting. And Othello is all about a highly successful mercenary general, which features no battles but is drenched in reminiscences of fighting and the rhetoric of battle.

What I’m trying to convey is that these 17 or so plays are rarely about war as such, but but are far more about the nature of power and authority and what happens when authority collapses.

The eight classic history plays are about the collapse of authority in one country and civil war among the English. The two Roman plays are the same: in both the Romans aren’t fighting any external enemy, but among themselves. Similarly, the three tragedies (excluding Othello) are about the collapse of royal authority in one country – the French only invade England in Lear and the Swedes invade Denmark in Hamlet once the native rulers have made a complete horlicks of trying to rule themselves.

And again, although the English come to the aid of the rightful heir to the throne at the end of Macbeth, they only have to do so because, yet again, the ruling class of the country in question (this time Scotland) have made a total mess of ruling themselves, as a result of all the murders Macbeth finds himself voodooed into committing.

Thus, the seventeen or so plays about history are almost entirely about the collapse of political authority in one country leading to civil war. The fifty years from the collapse of Charles I’s power in the 1630s through to the Glorious Revolution in 1688 are, therefore, the most relevant or applicable to Shakespeare’s concerns. It is, therefore, strange and intriguing that contemporaries, apparently, according to this exhibition, made so little application of the huge amount Shakespeare wrote on this subject to the one era in the past 400 years which most suited it.

This little survey of Shakespeare’s history plays also explains something else. Henry V is the only one in which is not about a civil war. Henry V is the only one in which we are not fighting among ourselves, but go abroad and fight somebody else. This explains why Henry V crops up in this exhibition as the spearhead for patriotic fervour more times than the ten other history plays put together – because once we’d sorted out our own political problems via the civil wars and rebellions of the seventeenth century, we turned our warlike energies against foreigners.

2. Revolutionary Shakespeare: Change and Political Debate

The late eighteenth century saw a major global war (against France) and two revolutions (in America and France) which changed the world. In each of these conflicts Shakespeare’s plays, characters and the Shakespeare brand were used to define, critique and support both a patriotic war and new political movements.

The Seven Years War

By the start of the eighteenth century Shakespeare had become established by numerous writers, critics and commentators as a national icon. The exhibition skips over the wars of the early 18th century, in Europe and India:

• War of the Spanish Succession 1701 to 1714
• Great Northern War 1717 to 1720
• War of the Austrian Succession 1740
• Carnatic Wars 1744 to 1763

Instead it jumps to the Seven Years’ War (1756 to 1763), the war against France which saw British victories on the Continent, in India, in the Caribbean and North America. The exhibition includes a number of interesting mementoes from the war.

David Garrick, the leading figure in London theatre by the mid-century, wrote a Dialogue to preface a 1756 production of The Tempest, in which two characters debate the rights and wrongs of the new war. It reminds us that for hundreds of years actors, managers and playwrights felt perfectly free to preface Shakespeare productions with prologues like this, tailoring the play to the issues of the day, or even cutting and rewriting bits of the plays to reflect current concerns.

In 1768 Edward Capell produced an edition of the plays in which he states what had, by then, become orthodoxy, that the 38 or so plays amount to ‘a part of the kingdom’s riches’. Not only this, but Britain’s standing ‘in the world’ depended on ‘the esteem within which these are held.’

The fact that Shakespeare’s one play which takes a foreign enemy is directed against the French did not escape numerous writers and commentators as Britain embarked on a global struggle against…the French. There’s a playbill for a production of Henry V staged in Covent Garden in 1761 which has two significant aspects. 1) For this occasion, the play was unsubtly subtitled ‘the Conquest of France’ and 2) each of the 23 productions were followed by a lavish recreation of the coronation of King George III which had just taken place (22 September 1761).

If Shakespeare’s association with kingship had been deeply problematic for Milton in the 1640s, long before a century had passed the name of Shakespeare, the Shakespeare brand, had become indissolubly linked to celebration of the solidly Protestant and anti-French monarchy.

The American War of Independence (1775 to 1783)

Following on from, and partly a result of, the Seven Years War, came the American War of Independence. Unsurprisingly, American patriots seeking to break from Britain drew on Shakespeare’s classical histories. Plays like ‘Julius Caesar’ and ‘Coriolanus’ helped support the idea of republican government and liberation from imperial rule.

The two sides (British and American) both staged plays and the curators display playbills from both sides, which use Shakespeare texts to propagandise for their cause. So there’s a playbill for an American production of Julius Caesar which applauds the ‘noble struggles for Liberty by that renowned patriot Marcus Brutus.’

There are rather more relics from the British side and the curators display pictures focusing on New York. This is because early on in the war, the British Army under the command of Lieutenant-Colonel Henry Clinton occupied New York City and turned it into a garrison town. Members of the Army staged regular productions of Shakespeare at the newly-renamed Theatre Royal, confirming the by-now well-established link between drama and royalty. the performances were staged ‘with permission’ of Clinton, who was also a patron of the performances. Plays were staged to raise funds for wounded soldiers. The British tended to favour Shakespeare’s monarchical plays, whilst American Patriots used plays with a republican ethos (such as Julius Caesar and Coriolanus) in their satirical prints and posters.

Lieutenant-Colonel Henry Clinton, 1st Regiment of Foot Guards, 1758 (National Army Museum)

The French Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars (1789 to 1802, 1805 to 1815)

As explained above, Shakespeare’s plays can be used to provide examples of resistance to oppression and corrupt politics and so justify insurrection against corrupt rulers. The French Revolution amounted to a massive ideological upheaval in the thinking of all Europe. In the three years after the initial overthrow of the monarchy in 1789, politicians and intellectuals all across Europe took the sides of either the revolutionary liberators or the rule of monarchy, hierarchy and order. But in 1792 revolutionary France declared war on Austria and Prussia and the conflict became military in nature. Many former sympathisers retracted their support, especially after the situation in Paris descended into The Terror of 1793 to 1794.

The French Revolutionary War lasted from 1792 to 1802, when it was terminated by the Treaty of Amiens. Fighting broke out a year later in what came to be called the Napoleonic Wars which were to last from 1803 to 1815.

During this long period of ideological and military conflict, Shakespeare plays, characters and lines were mobilised to justify both sides of the ideological and military divide. In Britain, politicians, public figures, actors, and the Army drew on the playwright’s characters and speeches to justify their reasons for going to war, and to criticize rebellions against royalty.

This 25-year period also happened to be a golden age of political satire, featuring two of the greatest British caricaturists and cartoonists, James Gillray (1756 to 1815) and Isaac Cruikshank (1764 to 1811). Amid the many visual jokes and references they and many cartoonists and commentators like them used to pillory the politics of the day, Shakespearian references loomed large.

So the exhibition has some excellent cartoons by both men, which invoke Shakespearian references for the purposes of mockery and exaggeration. This print by Cruikshank uses The Tempest to praise the patriotic Tory Prime Minister William Pitt and ridicule his chief political opponent, Charles James Fox, an opponent of the British monarchy who was an initial supporter of the French Revolution.

Prospero and Caliban in the Enchanted Island by Isaac Cruikshank (1798)

Smoothly dressed Pitt is depicted as the wonder-working magician Prospero, telling his creature:

Hence! – fetch us fewel and be quick
Thou wert best – shrugst thou malice?
If thou dost unwillingly what I command
I’ll rack thee with old cramps –

While Fox, portrayed as big ugly Caliban, and wearing a tricolour scarf (symbol of the revolution) shrugs with savage disgust, saying:

I must obey! his art is of such power
It would control a Setebos,
And make a vassal of him.

There’s a brilliantly vivid print by Gillray titled ‘A phantasmagoria – conjuring up an armed skeleton’ which depicts contemporary politicians as the three witches from Macbeth. The print criticises the Treaty of Amiens which was widely seen as a capitulation to France. In the picture the witches are replaced by three leading supporters of the treaty, Henry Addington, Lord Hawkesbury and William Wilberforce and their magic spells for peace have, it is implied, reduced Britannia to a skeleton. Note the sack of gold at bottom left implying that these ‘traitors’ were bribed to betray their country and the French cockerel at bottom right, mockingly standing astride a skinned British lion.

‘A Phantasmagoria; — Scene – Conjuring-Up an Armed-Skeleton’ by James Gillray (1803)

The exhibition includes probably Gillray’s most famous image, ‘The Plumb-pudding in danger; – or – State Epicures taking un Petit Souper’. The image depicts British Prime Minister William Pitt and French Emperor Napoleon carving up the world between them. I’ve seen it many times but didn’t realise that the epigraph directly under the title, at top right, is an adapted quote from The Tempest, namely ‘”The great globe itself and all that it inherits” is too small to satisfy such insatiable appetites’.

The Plumb-pudding in danger; – or – State Epicures taking un Petit Souper by James Gillray (1805)

In these cartoons you see something interesting happening. Many of the previous objects (from the Seven Years or American Revolutionary Wars) indicated that Shakespeare was best promulgated via productions of entire plays. Here, in these cartoons, you can see the way that Shakespearian tags and clichés now lend themselves to much more pithy and succinct visual media.

Satirical prints had been around all through the 18th century, in fact they go back to Shakespeare’s day and even earlier. But somehow the Gillray and Cruikshank feel new. They demonstrate how Shakespeare, as well as representing the ‘the kingdom’s riches, according to high-minded editors such as Edward Capell, could also be the source of popular jokes and gags.

From now on, alongside all the stirring patriotic stuff, the exhibition features a strand of often very funny works using Shakespeare for comic purposes.

3. Imperial Shakespeare: The Victorian Army

After Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo in 1815, the British Army’s role began to change. Rather than fighting major campaigns on the Continent, it was regularly used to protect and expand Britain’s imperial possessions, to fight Queen Victoria’s ‘small wars‘. But further to what I just mentioned about comedy, my favourite bits from what amounts to the Victorian section of the exhibition, were comic.

It must be said that some of the exhibits in the show seem to bear a pretty slender relationship with its supposed subject, Shakespeare and War. For example, the eighteenth century section has a set of images around the death of General James Wolfe at the 1759 Battle of Quebec which have no direct relation to Shakespeare, don’t quote or cite Shakespeare, seem to have no relationship except that Wolfe’s death was made the subject of ‘patriotic plays’.

Less utterly irrelevant is this entertaining print. In 1823 British aristocrats still carried out duels and this print mocks the practice by having the duellers and their seconds portrayed as monkeys. Apparently the title derives from a quote from ‘The Merchant of Venice’ but it’s a pretty flimsy pretext for including it in an exhibition about Shakespeare and War.

Awful Moments or Monkeys of Honour, colour print by John Lewis Marks after an unknown artist (1823)

More directly relevant if irreverent are the excellent prints taken from a later book, the Military Misreadings of Shakespere by Major Thomas Seccombe. It contains 31 beautifully delineated cartoons of military cockups, clumsiness and pratfalls, each offset by an ironically serious Shakespeare quotation. In this one a beautifully dressed member of the Life Guards has just been thrown by his horse to the accompaniment of a grand quote from Titus Andronicus: ‘That what you cannot, as you would, achieve, you must perforce accomplish as you may’ which thus acquires a completely comic meaning.

‘That what you cannot, as you would, achieve, you must perforce accomplish as you may’ from Military Misreadings of Shakespere (1880)

The Crimean War (1853 to 1856)

It wasn’t all lolz. The great exception to the century of generally small colonial wars which the British Army fought was the Crimean War, the one major conflict we were involved in in the century between the end of the Napoleonic Wars (1815) and the start of the Great War (1914). This famously highlighted significant problems with the Army’s organization, notably in the famous and futile Charge of the Light Brigade. Newspapers reported on the poor conditions in which soldiers found themselves, leading to demands for improvements and reforms to the Army’s culture and structure.

Only one exhibit relates to this badly managed and bitter war, a watercolour done by the Swedish artist Egron Sellif Lungren which depicts a kind of cinematic reimagining of a production of Henry V (what else?) staged by Charles Kean at the Princess’s Theatre in 1859 i.e. a few years after the war ended. Queen Victoria attended the play and commissioned Lundgren to do a watercolour version of it for her Theatre Album. Of all the scenes in the play Lundgren chose to depict the siege of Honfleur which is not only the setting for Henry’s famous speech ‘Once more unto the breach dear friends’, but will have reminded many people of the long and gruelling British siege of Sebastapol.

Installation view of ‘Shakespeare and War’ at the National Army Museum showing Egron Sellif Lungren’s watercolour plastered across one wall, with Gillray and Cruikshank cartoons on the left

Imperial Shakespeare

Obviously the nineteenth century was the one in which Britain cemented its grasp over the largest land empire the world has ever known, as well as almost total control of the world’s oceans. This is a very big subject indeed and it is not really properly explored. Take just India. Were there no British theatres in India, Shakespeare productions in India? Did the growing Indian middle class every stage Shakespeare productions with Indian casts? Was Shakespeare’s name, plays or quotes never invoked to justify British rule in India? Were there comic or satirical pamphlets or prints using Shakespeare quotes to mock British rule in India? Not in this exhibition, nor anything about the British Army’s involvement in Africa, the Caribbean, the Middle East or Far East.

Instead, as I’ve already pointed out, some of the exhibits have only a tenuous or oblique connection to the exhibition topic. For example, a picture caption tells us that amateur theatricals were often staged by regiments and soldiers as peacetime entertainments, which we might well have guessed. And that’s the fairly flimsy pretext for sharing a photo of members of the East Yorkshire regiment staging a production of Hamlet at their barracks in Cheltenham in 1895.

The Cast of Hamlet, Winter Gardens, Cheltenham, 1895 (National Army Museum)

Meanwhile, there’s nothing about the second war of the period which shook British confidence, the Boer War of 1899 to 1902. Were there no Shakespeare productions mounted here in England to raise funds or stir patriotic fervour? Did the besieged populations of Ladysmith, Mafeking or Kimberley put on productions to keep their spirits up? Didn’t domestic commentators or cartoonists use Shakespeare quotes or characters as material? If so, none of it is displayed here.

4. Patriotic Shakespeare: The First World War (1914 to 1918)

During the First World War great service and sacrifice were required of both the Army and the civilian population. As in the last great campaign in Europe a century before, Shakespeare was used in Britain to rally the troops and the country behind a sense of national duty.

As mentioned above, some exhibits are included on pretty flimsy grounds: for example, there’s no real reason to include some of Lord Kitchener’s recruitment posters (Your country needs You) except for the fact that, after Kitchener drowned when the ship he was sailing in hit a German mine (HMS Hampshire, 5 June 1916) the League of the Empire started publishing and presenting special editions of the ‘Complete Works of Shakespeare’ to wounded and disabled soldiers in his name, an edition which quickly became known as ‘the Kitchener Shakespeare’ – but there’s nothing at all about Shakespeare in the famous posters.

‘Lord Kitchener’s Appeal’, recruiting poster, 1914 (National Army Museum)

More tenuous examples include: a sketchbook by a John Henry Jenkins, a front line soldier, which depicted not only trench life but the watercolours of amateur theatricals which the soldiers put on, although Shakespeare is nowhere mentioned; or a 1915 recruitment poster which includes the image of St George and the dragon and so, the curators suggest, might have reminded some viewers of Henry V’s famous call, ‘God for Harry, England, and Saint George!’ Pretty tenuous.

Much more relevant is a book of Shakespeare quotations arranged under themes or headings relevant to the war and distributed to soldiers, ‘Shakespeare in Time of War: Excerpts from the Plays arranged with Topical Allusions’, edited by the artist Francis Colmer and published in 1916.

Another apparently random object is this photo of Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps personnel packing boxes in a factory in 1918. Spot the Shakespeare connection? No, because there isn’t one…

Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps personnel packing boxes in factory, 1918

…until you look at the photo beneath it, which is a photo of Maggie Smale’s all-women production of Henry V, staged in a munitions factory in Leeds which had been operated by the ‘Barnbow Lasses’ during the Great War. Is this to do with feminism? Or pacifism? Or a celebrating of provincial grit? I wasn’t sure.

Still from Maggie Smale’s all-female production of Henry V as featured in ‘Shakespeare and War’ at the National Army Museum. Photo by Mike Oakes

Amateur productions of Shakespeare were mounted across the country, sometimes to raise morale, to entertain wounded soldiers, for the benefit of the public. Three hundred years after his death Shakespeare was not only a well-known brand but possibly the only literary writer a lot of working class people had heard of. As in his own time, he catered for an audience of elite intellectuals, the educated middle classes, and illiterate workers. You can see why Shakespeare productions abounded because he was 1) possibly the only playwright everyone had heard of and 2) safe –unlike more recent troubling playwrights of the previous generation (Shaw, Ibsen etc).

There’s a clip from an official film showing wounded soldiers watching open air production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Scenes like this 1) the British heritage which the soldiers were fighting for 2) to a wider audience demonstrated the care the government was taking of its fighting men. This clip appeared alongside footage of scenes of artillery and war preparation, thus dovetailing Britain’s cultural heritage into the war effort.

in my own life I’ve met plenty of people who don’t give a toss about official culture, art or theatre. You’ve got to wonder how many of the sock and maimed soldiers forced to watch this kind of thing actually enjoyed it or even understood it. Because that’s a thing about Shakespeare – unless you’re pretty familiar with the play beforehand, it’s impossible to get the most out of a theatrical production, in fact it’s often impossible to understand what’s going on and especially difficult to get any of the comedy in his plays.

It’s fascinating to learn about the Shakespeare Hut. In February 1916, to commemorate 300 years since his death, this mock-Tudor retreat was opened on a plot of land in Bloomsbury. The hut was built on a site cleared for a planned Shakespeare Memorial Theatre, which was abandoned because of the war.

The aim was to provide shelter for wounded Australian or New Zealand troops. Over the next two years it would welcome in more than 100,000 soldiers far from their New Zealand homes. Queen Mary visited in 1917, took up her post behind the tea counter, and poured cups for all the men.

The troops were subjected to regular Shakespeare productions, including an all-female Henry V starring Ellen Terry, one of the most famous actors of her day. Hah! So the Maggie Smale production was following in venerable footsteps.

The exhibition features photographs and playlists from the Hut and you can read more and see photos in an interesting Guardian article about it. Interesting to learn that it the site is now occupied by the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.

One of the most interesting learnings from the exhibition is about the role of theatricals among British prisoners of war held in Germany. The exhibition focuses on the Ruhleben Camp in Germany which housed some 5,000 POWs. Prisoners were allowed to construct a theatre and, for the same tercentenary which prompted the Shakespeare Hut, staged a series of productions, including Twelfth Night and Othello. The exhibition features photos and a programme from a 1915 production of As You Like It.

In a similar spirit, the British Red Cross mounted a Shakespeare Exhibition at the Grafton Galleries in 1917. Quite clearly, if you go looking for Shakespeariana during the First World War, you’ll find it.

Installation view of ‘Shakespeare and War’ at the National Army Museum, showing a poster for the Red Cross Shakespeare Exhibition of 1917 (photo by the author)

5. Democratizing Shakespeare: The Second World War

Same goes for the Second war. Once again Shakespeare was trotted out as the exemplar of the culture and values that were under attack from Nazi Germany, that we were fighting to preserve. The motives and means were very similar to the first war – am dram productions across the country to entertain wounded troops or raise money, leading actors of the day giving patriotic productions in London to stir patriotic fervour, footage of productions shot to be show in cinemas and raise morale.

With the new angle of radio. For the first time productions could be broadcast, to a large radio audience which steadily grew throughout the six war years. As part of the government’s attempt to mobilize society to support the war effort, British theatre was sponsored by the state for the first time in its history.

The Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts (CEMA) was created to promote and maintain the fine arts and British cultural life. It later became the Arts Council of Great Britain. The Entertainment National Services Association (ENSA) provided for the forces, organising shows and performances by well-known actors, singers, and comedians.

Photo of an ENSA production staged in a London underground station in 1942 (National Army Museum)

Despite the challenges of wartime, both theatre and Shakespeare thrived. Once again, his words helped to frame the experience of conflict both in Britain and across the world. The exhibition features a recording of a radio programme originally broadcast by the BBC Overseas Services on Shakespeare’s birthday on 23 April 1942. It included extracts from ‘As You Like it’, Henry IV part 1 and, of course, Henry V. It was introduced and performed by leading Shakespearean actors Peggy Ashcroft, Robert Donat, Edith Evans and Ralph Richardson. You can listen to it on headphones and marvel at their phenomenally posh plummy English voices.

There’s a section devoted to the Laurence Olivier production of Henry V described at the start of this review.

And once again there’s a section devoted to British prisoners of war staging Shakespeare productions in camps in Germany. The exhibition includes a list of plays staged at Stalag 383 in Hohenfels, which included ‘The Merchant of Venice’.

6. Just Shakespeare: Adapting After 1945

After the Second World War the patriotic tone of Laurence Olivier’s Henry V lingered throughout the 1950s. But the second half of the 1960s saw radical changes in all aspects of art and culture, with a variety of new approaches to all the arts including theatre. This included the anti-war movements triggered by Vietnam, as well as new attitudes to sex and nudity, which now began to appear in Shakespeare productions.

For 200 years the name and plays of Shakespeare had acted as a kind of recruiting sergeant for the British Army and rallying point for the nation in times of real threat (particularly during the Napoleonic, First and Second World Wars). From the late 60s onwards, Shakespeare’s relationship with the state, the Establishment and the Army came under increasing critical scrutiny. Not in every production, but in an increasing number.

Hence Kenneth Branagh’s 1984 RSC production. Unlike earlier productions it shows the execution of French prisoners onstage and then left the bodies and corpses from the Battle of Agincourt at the back of the stage, behind a gauze curtain, for the later, supposedly reconciling scenes between the English king and his French bride-to-be.

The last section of the exhibition, in the central booth of the (fairly small) exhibition space, takes the Branagh production as setting the tone for productions which followed the Falklands War (1982), the Gulf War (1990 to 1991), and the Iraq War (2003 to 2011).

It includes video clips of stage productions including:

• a 2013 production of ‘Othello’ which depicts the characters in the modern-day Army uniform used during the Iraq War
• a 2015 production of ‘Othello’ which features graphic scenes of waterboarding Iraqi suspects
• ‘Days of Significance’, a play by Roy Williams based on ‘Much Ado About Nothing’ which looks at the impact of British troops who fought in the Iraq War

The strong anti-war flavour of these productions and the pretty intense criticism of the British Army and its techniques, could hardly be more unlike the innocent patriotism of the Shakespeare Hut or the brightly colours optimism of Olivier’s Henry V. If we go to war with Russia I wonder if Shakespeare will be trotted out to inspire patriotic spirit as it was 100 and 70 years ago. I doubt it. Shakespeare hasn’t changed, that’s to say the texts remain pretty much what they were 400 years ago. But our understanding of war, gained in the brutal conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, has made any thoughts about the glamour or heroism of war impossible to modern Brits.

Availability bias

This is a fascinating premise for an exhibition and I thoroughly enjoyed working my way through the wealth of objects and their captions. It proves that Shakespeare is like the Bible, so compendious and diverse that you can find words to justify more or less any opinion on any subject (as demonstrated by the opposing sides in the American War of Independence using Shakespeare to bolster their arguments).

However, it throws up an obvious issue which is to do with the availability of objects to display. The exhibition was curated by – and is based on the scholarly books by – two Shakespeare scholars, Amy Lidster and Sonia Massai, namely Wartime Shakespeare: Performing Narratives of Conflict. Just from the synopsis on Amazon you can see how a book-length work like this is free to range over all and any productions it likes because words are easy. On the other hand, an exhibition in a museum is severely limited by the objects it can get its hands on.

In fact, like every exhibition at every gallery or museum, this one is an exercise in the art of the possible. Objects which denote important productions or topics may not be available (or may not even exist) while other topics throw up a glut of barely relevant artefacts.

In addition, it’s difficult and expensive to get objects on loan from other collections whereas it’s cheap and easy to get them from your own storeroom, so all exhibitions in all galleries are biased towards the host institution and its collection.

Plus there’s the common problem with any historical overview which is that objects from three or four hundred years ago are rare whereas, as you get closer to the present day, the number of objects rapidly increases, until you are drowning in a surfeit of stuff.

These imbalances in the real world threaten to unbalance or distort the picture painted by any exhibition, an imbalance which is easily managed in books and articles where issues and ideas can be easily conveyed by text alone.

So, at various points, I couldn’t help feeling that the curators had included some objects more because they were just related to one of the conflicts during the period in question than for their Shakespearian relevance. As mentioned above I couldn’t see any Shakespeare connection to the three or four pictures of General Wolfe and the capture of Quebec except that the event was turned into patriotic plays and prints. To put it another way, some of the links between specific conflicts and Shakespeare were pretty tenuous. I still don’t understand why there was an English mortuary sword in the Civil War section except that maybe the curators felt they just needed a physical object, any object, to go alongside the half dozen books and pamphlets.

All the objects (photos, pamphlets, diaries and whatnot) are interesting, it’s just that I was left scratching my head why some of them were included.

Shakespeare and conflict

There’s another, more scholarly, issue. This, as I touched on earlier, is that taken together, Shakespeare’s dozen or so history plays, plus the relevant Roman plays and the tragedies, build up into a subtle, sophisticated, multifaceted meditation on the themes of power, authority, legitimacy, insurrection, rebellion, revolt and overthrow.

Arguably, to really address the topic which this exhibition sets out to explore, you would need a really sound grasp of how all these issues are dramatised and explored in the 20 or so relevant plays, before you even started your review of how they’ve been applied to Britain’s wars and Britain’s Army.

But this, of course, is a massive task – after a lifetime reading Shakespeare I still haven’t read all the history plays and have nothing like a complete grasp of the issues of legitimacy and political power which they raise.

And an exhibition like this has to be practical, finite and manageable. This one achieves what it sets out to do, in a relatively small space, as well as it probably could do. But, in my opinion, the ghost of the larger political, social and cultural issues raised by the plays hover over it, unmentioned and undiscussed.

To take just one aspect of what I’m driving at, many of the characters in the history plays (the ones I’m familiar with) describe and discuss the horror of war, the fear experienced by soldiers, the terror of innocent civilians, the horrific injuries, killing and massacres involved, the fields strewn with bodies, the devastated landscapes and ruined economies. Descriptions of these kinds of things are commonplace in the plays and yet, somehow, hardly occur anywhere in this exhibition.

At some point I realised that this is not an exhibition about Shakespeare and War as about Shakespeare and the British Army. This explains why it’s divided into chronological periods based entirely around conflicts the British Army engaged in right up to the present day, rather than the themes of war encountered in the plays which I have just listed. And this is why, although it’s a very enjoyable trot through British military history, with an emphasis on how Shakespeare’s name, characters and words have been exploited in times of war – it feels, ultimately, despite being packed with shiny objects, intellectually thin.

You can see how an exhibition about Shakespeare and war would actually be something quite different: instead of taking a chronological approach it would take the topics I’ve mentioned several times now – the collapse of authority, civil war, rebellion, interstate war – and then the aspects of war – recruitment, training, fighting, sieges, inspirational rhetoric, the exhilaration of fighting, the horror of wounding, the devastation of the countryside, the mourning of widows – and explore how all of these are described and critiqued in Shakespeare’s multifaceted dramas. It would be something completely different from this exhibition. But then again, maybe what I’ve got in mind would be so wordy and text-heavy that it couldn’t be staged as an exhibition at all.

What this exhibition does, it does very well. It is small but beautifully staged and is FREE.

Related link

• Shakespeare and War continues at the National Army Museum until 1 September 2024

Related books

• Wartime Shakespeare: Performing Narratives of Conflict by Amy Lidster
• Shakespeare at War: A Material History (editors Amy Lidster and Sonia Massai)

Shakespeare reviews

• Julius Caesar
• Antony and Cleopatra

National Army Museum reviews

• More National Army Museum reviews