Schedule / Horaire
Tuesday 22 April 2014, 9h-10h30.
Room: V106A.
Leader / Organisateur
Gordon McMullan, King’s College London (UK)
Participants
- Ailsa Grant Ferguson, King’s College London (UK)
“Under strange conditions”: Shakespeare at the Front - Clara Calvo, University of Murcia (Spain)
Shakespeare and the Red Cross: The 1916 Grafton Galleries Exhibition - Gordon McMullan, King’s College London (UK)
Goblin’s Market: Commemoration, Anti-Semitism and the Invention of “Global” Shakespeare in 1916 - Philip Mead, University of Western Australia (Australia)
Antipodal Shakespeare
Abstracts / Résumés
1. Ailsa Grant Ferguson, King’s College London (UK)
“Under strange conditions”: Shakespeare at the Front
During the First World War, Shakespeare was utilised as a powerful tool of British and ‘English-speaking’ patriotism for morale-boosting and recruitment. With the Tercentenary of 1916, it was inevitable that ideas of commemoration and performance formed before the outbreak of war were reimagined. One new context was the exportation of Shakespearean production to entertain troops at the front lines. Concert parties convened by the actress and suffragist Lena Ashwell provided music and sketches for troops, and in 1916 Ashwell added Shakespearean performances to the repertoire. This paper explores the exportation of Shakespeare to the troops, both in terms of performance practice and of the politicisation of Shakespeare.
2. Clara Calvo, University of Murcia (Spain)
Shakespeare and the Red Cross: The 1916 Grafton Galleries Exhibition
The 1916 Tercentenary failed to provide a permanent site of memory for Shakespeare in London, but it did offer a non-permanent memorial through the 1917 Red Cross Shakespeare Exhibition in the Grafton Galleries. Unlike statues or buildings, an exhibition is a portable site of memory which may be reproduced at different locations and times. The Shakespeare Exhibition was more clearly inscribed in modernity’s cultures of commemoration than the failed attempts to create a statue or a theatre. This paper argues that the Tercentenary Shakespeare exhibitions contributed to the development of today’s cultures of commemoration, constituting an intermediary step between the Victorian ‘Salon’ exhibition and the modern ‘white box’.
3. Gordon McMullan, King’s College London (UK)
Goblin’s Market: Commemoration, Anti-Semitism and the Invention of “Global” Shakespeare in 1916
Sir Israel Gollancz – founding member of the British Academy, and Hon. Sec. of the Shakespeare Memorial National Theatre Committee – was a ubiquitous figure in the culture of literary memorialisation at the time of the Tercentenary, yet his own memorialisation has been less than glowing. Reflecting on his reworking of the rhetoric of imperialism as internationalism and on the relationship between his penchant for Shakespearean commemoration and his own identity as London’s first Jewish professor of English literature, this paper maps his accumulation of Shakespearean capital at the time of the Tercentenary and the anti-semitism he faced to argue that the legacy of Gollancz’s commemorative entrepreneurship is the invention of ‘global Shakespeare’.
4. Philip Mead, University of Western Australia (Australia)
Antipodal Shakespeare
Up until 1916, Shakespeare played a traditional role in Australian settler culture as the King of imperial English, and the rhetorical face of English racial consciousness. In 1916 historical forces are changing Shakespeare’s world radically, especially in the southern hemisphere: with the reality of Australia and New Zealand’s involvement in the European war, and the antipodal tercentenary Shakespeare’s life in Australia is both intensified – in the conjuntion of Anzac Day and the anniversary of Shakespeare’s death – and problematised, in the meaning of his heritage. This paper focuses on the moment of 1916 and the cultural and historical forces that are changed through the figure of the antipodal Shakespeare.