Chapter 10 Performing Commemoration in Wartime: Shakespeare Galas in London, 1916-19 Ailsa Grant-Ferguson London Celebrations for Shakespeare’s Tercentenary in 1916 were barely to resemble those discussed before the outbreak of war. Proposals for commemorating Shakespeare would be completely reassessed in a wartime context; the new plans should be frugal and patriotic, selective and pertinent, “a very simple observance of the Tercentenary in a manner consonant with the mood of the nation under present conditions”1. As a result, the gala revue format, selecting as it could the smallest of textual fragments or the stylised ‘Shakespeares’ expressed in sketches, extracts, songs and pageants, was bound to flourish. On May 2nd 1916, a flamboyant, yet tactfully inexpensive, Shakespeare Tercentenary commemorative gala, ‘A Tribute to the Genius of Shakespeare’, took place at Drury Lane. In August 1916, the commemorative Shakespeare Hut, a YMCA respite Hut for Anzac troops on leave was erected. In its purpose-built performance space, this Hut held modest gala commemorations, for audiences of servicemen, annually from 1917 to 1919.2 The fragmented Shakespeare at the Hut and, by contrast, the elaborate spectacle presented at Drury Lane offer two very different versions of Shakespearean commemoration in wartime. Yet a recursive pattern of commemoration 1 Israel Gollancz, The Times, ‘The Shakespeare Tercentenary’, 23rd November 1915, 9. 2 See Ailsa Grant Ferguson ‘“When Wasteful War Shall Statues Overturn”: Forgetting the Shakespeare Hut’, in Shakespeare, 10 (3), (2014), 276-292 and ‘Lady Forbes-Robertson’s war work: Gertrude Elliott and the Shakespeare Hut performances, 1916-1919’, in Gordon McMullan, Lena Cowen Orlin & Virginia Mason Vaughan (ed.s) Women Making Shakespeare, (London: Bloomsbury, the Arden Shakespeare, 2013), 233-242. emerges in both, in which commemoration reflects commemoration and public memory of Shakespeare interacts with both public and private memories of war and its losses. In these productions, too, can be found varying attitudes to cultural value and the treatment of Shakespeare on stage in wartime. Legitimate and popular modes are transgressed. Gender roles are challenged. The two cases present a contrast between the disappearing spectacle of late-Victorian Shakespeare at Drury Lane and the new, minimalist style represented, through both necessity and design, at the Hut. The Shakespeare being ‘remembered’ in London in 1916 is a deconstructed one, often fragmented to fit wartime agendas and sensibilities. Recruitment posters featured Shakespearean quotations, morale boosting postcards boasted Shakespearean phrases, plays were performed to bolster injured soldiers. In this context, the fragmented revue format of the Shakespeare Hut performances would not have seemed out of place; the pageant of Drury Lane, too, would have fitted both within this context and a longer tradition of Shakespearean pageantry and tableaux, especially of the late Victorian and Edwardian period.3 Yet, critically, the fragmentation of Shakespeare tends to be viewed as forming a definitive aspect of modernist treatments of his texts post First World War. As Julia Briggs articulates, The modernist project of demythologising Shakespeare has continued to the present day with occasional pauses or backlashes, moments when a more dignified or a more patriotic version was called for. Oppressed by ancestral voices (among which Shakespeare’s was the most pervasive), modernism had to 3 Michael Dobson, ‘The Pageant of History: Nostalgia, the Tudors, and the Community Play’, in SEDERI, 20 (2010): 5-25, p20. confront the too-familiar words it had inherited.⁠4 Critical views of Shakespeare’s relationship to the Modernist project post Great War centre around a notion of deconstruction, on the act of fragmenting Shakespeare representing either a conversation or a struggle (Bloom’s “anxiety of influence”5) ⁠ with that ancestral Shakespearean voice. Yet the deconstruction and fragmentation of Shakespeare’s texts was the pervasive treatment of Shakespeare during both the War and the preliminary Tercentenary commemoration debates, especially after the turn of the century. The Shakespeare inherited by modernists – woven, for example, into Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway or Elliott’s The Wasteland – was already widely fragmented. The version of Shakespeare experienced by wartime audiences, especially those in military service, was more often than not fragmented and reconstructed into a suitable ‘whole’ for wartime consumption. While Briggs characterises those post-modernist lapses of the more interrogative “demythologising” of Shakespeare as “moments when a more dignified or a more patriotic version was called for”, one of these moments came before the emergence of some of the most definitive modernist appropriations of Shakespeare. In these unique circumstances, how best to mark the Tercentenary in wartime conditions was debated and agreed by a new Tercentenary Committee, whose leading light, Sir George Alexander (acting star and, later in 1916, member of the Shakespeare Hut Committee), was to organise the main theatrical event: a lavish gala performance at 4 Julia Briggs, Reading Virginia Woolf, (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006), 11-12. 5 Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (second edition), (Oxford University Press, 1997) 13-16. Drury Lane on 2nd May 1916.6 Meanwhile, Sir Israel Gollancz,7 Honorary Secretary of the Shakespeare Memorial National Theatre (SMNT) Committee and a Shakespearean academic, mooted a plan to use land in Bloomsbury bought for the erection of a new National Theatre to construct, instead, a temporary memorial to Shakespeare in the form of a mock-Tudor style YMCA hut for active soldiers on leave from the front (Figure 10.1).8 The Shakespeare Hut would provide, above all the usual conveniences of the YMCA huts elsewhere in the capital, a dedicated performance space and a programme of education to include Shakespeare’s works. [Insert Figure 10.1 here] Figure 10.1. The Shakespeare Hut. To commemorate the commemoration, as it were, a lavish Souvenir Programme for the Drury Lane gala, in the form of a large hardback book, was produced, featuring sixty diverse illustrations.9 Sir George Alexander’s10 annotated copy of this volume11 provides an insight into this performance both as a moment in theatre history and for its 6 The Tercentenary would have fallen on 23rd of April but was, in 1916, measured by exact reference to the Old Style date of his death (thus conveniently avoiding the Easter weekend). 7 Gollancz’s involvement in the Tercentenary is explored by Gordon McMullan in Chapter 9. 8 Ailsa Grant Ferguson (2014). 9 A Tribute to the genius of William Shakespeare (London: Macmillan1916). 10 Annotations are assumed to be written by Sir George Alexander based on the following evidence: a. inscription is initialed “G.A.”; b. the formal hand used in the annotations correlates with the informal hand in a letter from Sir George Alexander to Sir Israel Gollancz, dated 18th November 1916 (National Theatre Archive SMNT/2/1/12); c. depth of organisational knowledge displayed in lists of volunteers and players, consistent with Sir George Alexander’s Tercentenary Committee leadership. 11 At the time of writing, this copy of ‘A Tribute to the Genius of Shakespeare’ has been newly acquired and is not yet entered into the catalogue but is being held at the National Theatre Archive, London. own commemorative purposes. In the pages of his copy, Alexander undertook the completion of all the missing lists of performers and volunteers involved in this huge production, an omission for which the printed copy carries an earnest apology. The book also contains handwritten Shakespearean quotes and an inscription expressing Alexander’s thoughts on war losses and Shakespeare in wartime (which appeared in print in a less expensive incarnation of the programme). By contrast to the Drury Lane tome, programmes for the Hut galas were ephemeral. Nevertheless, a few rare copies do still survive and, through these simple one-sheet programmes, we can learn much about the Shakespeare Hut performances.12 The Hut’s modest annual Shakespeare galas configured Shakespearean fragments into a production which would ostensibly build morale, showcase the war work of theatrical superstars (Ellen Terry, Martin Harvey, Johnston Forbes Robertson, his wife, Gertrude Elliott, Mary Anderson and more) and revive, each year, the Tercentenary ‘spirit’ that the Hut was built to represent. It would also become a stage on which modes and expectations of Shakespearean transmission were quietly transgressed. The Drury Lane gala comprised a full performance of Julius Caesar, followed by a Shakespeare-themed musical programme, itself no small affair, performed by the London Symphony Orchestra. Finally, an ambitious pageant of “all the characters”⁠13 from Much Ado About Nothing (directed by Sir George Alexander), The Merry Wives of Windsor, As You Like It, Romeo and Juliet, The Winter’s Tale, Coriolanus, Macbeth 12 E.G., programme for entertainments at the Shakespeare Hut, Ellen Terry & Edith Craig Archive, National Trust, held at British Library: BL/125/25/2/Ellen Terry Archive/ET/D439. 13 ‘The Shakespeare Celebration’, The Observer, 16th Apr 1916, p13. (planned but not performed),14 Twelfth Night and The Merchant of Venice. Despite wartime austerity, the Drury Lane gala was genuinely spectacular. With a cast of hundreds, scenery and costumes were borrowed from the tsar of