shakespeare and the great war attack on the modernist myth and its effects, though, has come from military and
politicalhistorians. InThe Unquiet Front: Britain’s Role in Literature and History
(2002), Brian Bond draws together recent work to argue for a picture of a war
fought, on the British side, by skilled commanders, leading men whose morale
always remained generally high. In a short time this army emerged as the most
capable in British history, winning a remarkablevictory. Such a picture reverses
the view of the vast majority of modernist literary studies, but then that view,
among military historians, is generally regarded as hopelessly inaccurate.^17 Of
course, the failure of the social and political claims of the modernist narrative does
not undermine that narrative’s literary claims, which were, in any case, much the
most interesting and important. But perhaps it may also be the time to return
Shakespeare, and so the literary past, to the mental landscape of a less exceptional
Great War.
Then came the War; and the dream of the world’s brotherhood to be demonstrated
by its common and united commemoration of Shakespeare, with many another fond
illusion, was rudely shattered.^18
The year 1916 was meant to have been Shakespeare’s year. A committee had been
formed as far back as 1904, in order to consider appropriate ways to commemorate
the tercentenary of Shakespeare’s death. Israel Gollancz was the committee’s
secretary; as he wrote, the committee sought a memorial that would ‘symbolize the
intellectual fraternity of mankind in the universal homage’ accorded to the genius
of Shakespeare, the greatest Englishman (BHS, p. vii). The committee decided on
the building of a new theatre. Plans were drawn up, and a site purchased; and
‘then came the War’. The year of 1916 would be remembered instead as one of
the years of the Great War and especially, from a British perspective, as the year
of the Battle of the Somme. Neither celebrations of international brotherhood nor
the raising of funds for theatres were suitable for the changed times. Yet, while
future dreams of world brotherhood might be in crisis, there was no rupture with
the past; the need to commemorate the tercentenary was still felt, and so Gollancz
took on the reduced aim of editing a commemorative volume of prose and verse, to
be representative of the ‘ubiquity of the poet’s mighty influence’—if only among
allied and neutral nations (BHS, p. viii). The result wasA Book of Homage to
Shakespeare: To Commemorate the Three Hundredth Anniversary of Shakespeare’s
(^17) Brian Bond,The Unquiet Front: Britain’s Role in Literature and History(Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2002), 13. For an example that may be taken as representative of the problem with
modernist accounts, see Robin Prior and Trevor Wilson, ‘Paul Fussell at War’,War in History,1/1
(1994), 63–80. 18
Israel Gollancz, ‘Preface’, inidem(ed.),A Book of Homage to Shakespeare: To Commemorate
the Three Hundredth Anniversary of Shakespeare’s Death MCMXVI(Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1916), p. vii; subsequently abbreviated in the text asBHS.