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"During the dark days of World War Two, British actors, politicians, writers and cultural commentators turned to Shakespeare in order to articulate both their national identity and the values for which their country was fighting. According to the literary critic G. Wilson Knight, Shakespeare is "the authentic voice of England"; to the actor Donald Wolfit, "[he] represents more than everything else the fighting spirit of our country"; and for the statesman and future prime minister Anthony Eden "our history is enacted, our philosophy as a people is given expression, in plays which are the greatest gift of English genius to mankind." In these formulations, Shakespeare and his works capture essential qualities of the nation; they serve as a principle of unity, a marker of what binds its people together. It is against this cultural backdrop that we can place Laurence Olivier's Henry V (1944). As Jennifer Barnes has noted, Shakespeare "could be made to function as a trope for the imagined community of the nation in wartime Britain," and Olivier's film, with its depiction of English, Irish, Scottish and Welsh soldiers coming together to form a "band of brothers," represents an important cinematic articulation of that trope, which I term the wartime Shakespeare topos (WST)"--
List of contents
1. 'Hamlet's a loser, Leslie!': Pimpernel Smith, Hamlet and film propaganda; 2. 'What we all have in common': Fires Were Started, Macbeth and the people's war; 3. The Black-White Gentleman: The Man in Grey, Othello and the melodrama of Anglo-West Indian relations; 4. 'Bottom's not a gangster!': A Matter of Life and Death, A Midsummer Night's Dream and post-war Anglo-American relations.
About the author
Garrett A. Sullivan, Jr., Liberal Arts Professor of English, teaches at Pennsylvania State University. He is author of The Drama of Landscape: Land, Property and Social Relations on the Early Modern Stage (1998), Memory and Forgetting in English Renaissance Drama: Shakespeare, Marlowe, Webster (Cambridge University Press, 2005), and Sleep, Romance and Human Embodiment: Vitality from Spenser to Milton (Cambridge University Press, 2012). With Mary Floyd-Wilson, he co-edited Environment and Embodiment in Early Modern England (2007) and The Geographies of Embodiment in Early Modern England (2020). He co-edits, with Julie Sanders, the book series Early Modern Literary Geographies. He is a past trustee of the Shakespeare Association of America.
Summary
Illuminating for students and researchers of Shakespeare, film and World War Two Britain alike, this book expertly draws on the theory and practice of adaptation and appropriation to demonstrate how the British cinema presented Shakespeare as both an emblem of national unity and a marker of internal division.
Foreword
Garrett Sullivan offers a new approach to cinematic adaptation and appropriation of Shakespeare at a watershed moment in British history.
