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possibly for the dissolution of the civilization represented by the monasteries.^11
Moreover,one may hear Ophelia’s ‘orisons’ in those of the stuttering rifles, and see
in that allusion Owen’s typical feminization of his soldiers at work, and wonder
if the ‘no prayers nor bells’ of the next line is meant to lead one’s thoughts on
to the ‘maimed rites’ of Ophelia’s funeral.^12 Such allusions would certainly be
apt, but one cannot be sure; for there is a real sense in which no one escapes
the influence of Shakespeare. The ‘sad shires’ in Owen’s sonnet, for example, may
have a Housmanesque ring to them, but it is difficult to read the Housman ofA
Shropshire Ladwithout hearing ‘Fear no more the heat o’th’ sun’ fromCymbeline,
a song sung over what is imagined to be the dead body of a young boy, although
it is in fact the drugged body of a young girl: ‘Golden lads and girls all must|As
chimney-sweepers, come to dust’.^13 More biographically, Robert Graves’s earliest
recollection was of a fear of Shakespeare; his first memory was of the despondent
terror he felt when a nursery cupboard was accidentally opened to reveal octavo
volumes of Shakespeare piled to the ceiling. Given that this anecdote comes in
Goodbye to All That, it may well not be true; yet it is still significant that Graves
chose to tell it.^14 Edward Thomas held thatHamlethad been written expressly for
him; and Ivor Gurney, sadly, came to believe that he was William Shakespeare.^15
Cole, one feels, might have mentioned Shakespeare at least once in a book on the
literary depiction of male friendship.
The modernist narrative of the Great War, forward-looking, posited on an abrupt
break with the past, became something of a cultural truth in the last quarter of the
twentieth century. Over the same period, however, that modernist narrative has
begun to be challenged in a variety of other fields. In social history, studies have
increasingly argued that the imagery of remembrance and mourning with which
English cultures responded to the Great War was overwhelmingly traditional, and
that these traditional languages were remarkably successful in mediating grief and
sustaining bonds of community. On this view, the Great War perhaps represents
the apotheosis of classical and Romantic understandings of war and sacrifice. Jay
Winter, in his 1995Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European
Cultural History, describes the Great War as the last nineteenth-century war, seeing
the Second World War as far more distinctively ‘modern’.^16 Perhaps the sharpest
(^11) Wilfred Owen, ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’, inThe Complete Poems and Fragments,i:The
Poems, ed. Jon Stallworthy (London: Chatto & Windus, Hogarth Press, and Oxford University Press,
1983), 99.
(^12) Shakespeare,Hamlet,v.i. 213. (^13) Shakespeare,Cymbeline,iv.ii. 259–60.
(^14) Robert Graves,Goodbye to All That: An Autobiography(London: Jonathan Cape, 1929), 14.
(^15) The detail about Edward Thomas is from William Cooke,Edward Thomas(London: Faber,
1970), 189. It is quoted in David Gervais,Literary Englands: Versions of ‘Englishness’ in Modern Writing
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 53. For Gurney, see Michael Hurd,TheOrdealofIvor
Gurney(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), 158.
(^16) Jay Winter,Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 178.