shakespeare and the great war hostility centres precisely on the presence of Shakespeare.^6 Seizing on Jones’s
wondering whether an officer adjusting his gas mask ‘can be equated with that the
poet envisaged in ‘‘I saw young Harry with his beaver on’’ ’, Fussell insists that it
cannot. The very act of locatingIn Parenthesiswithin a tradition of war writing
shows Fussell that Jones has misunderstood a fundamental truth about the Great
War, which is that it was a war unlike any other before it.^7 The Great War, put
simply, is a war outside tradition, a founding moment in a century of crisis and
rupture. Shakespeare, as the greatest exemplar of tradition, is the last person who
should be mentioned.
The mix of a modernist narrative of twentieth-century history with a neoclassical
sense that the poet must tell the truth as it should be, and not as it is, is a
little peculiar; yet one should still be grateful for Fussell’s recognition of the
Shakespearean aspects of the experience of the war. For, since Fussell, the silence
on Shakespeare has been remarkable. One could argue that Modris Eckstein’sRites
of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age, published in 1989, is
concerned particularly with what the war led to, and would therefore be unlikely to
mention Shakespeare.^8 Similarly, Samuel Hynes’sA War Imagined: The First World
War and English Culture, published in 1990, is interested primarily in the forms
of radical discontinuity that went to make up the ‘Myth of the War’, and which
helped to bring to a close the patterns of thinking and behaviour which constituted
the Victorian and Edwardian eras.^9 But that neither of these long books which
consider how the war was experienced mention Shakespeare even once is, at the
very least, surprising. Sarah Cole’sModernism, Male Friendship, and the First World
War, published in 2003, is, as its title suggests, a more subtle and detailed account
of a particular area of war experience, male friendship, and its portrayal in literary
works.^10 Often when Cole describes the troubled and complicated nature of such
organizations of intimacy, one is reminded of Shakespeare’s Sonnets. Indeed, can
any good male poet write a sonnet to or about another man or group of men,
without being conscious of the play between male friendship, sexual love, and the
threat of loss that animates the Sonnets? Certainly, the title of one of Owen’s most
famous, ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’, reads like a compressed paraphrase of the
subject of the sonnets to the young man, and gains pathos by doing so. Within
‘Anthem’, ‘The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells’ of the second quatrain
asks to be compared to the ‘Bare ruin’d choirs where late the sweet birds sang’
of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 73, itself a sunset lament for the passing of youth, and
(^6) Ibid. 144. (^7) Ibid. 153.
(^8) Modris Eckstein,Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age(Boston:
Houghton Mifflin, 1989). 9
Samuel Hynes,A War Imagined: The First World War and English Culture(London: Bodley Head,
1990), p. xi.
(^10) Sarah Cole,Modernism, Male Friendship, and the First World War(Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2003).