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Death MCMXVI.Gollancz assembled 166 more or less distinguished contributors
from around the world, whose contributions were published in more than thirty
languages (BHS, p. viii).
Within this collection lies one of the very earliest anthologies of war poetry,
and perhaps the first such international anthology. For, as is suggested by the
title given within the book— 1916 |A Book of Homage to|Shakespeare—many of
the contributions, and most of the poetry in English, were more concerned with
Shakespeare’s relationship to the events of the Great War than with the arrival of
the tercentenary itself. In this very conscious meditation on the uses of Shakespeare
and literature in times of war, a number of tropes quickly become apparent in the
writings of English poets. Typically, Shakespeare is cast as a repository and guarantor
of moral value. Laurence Binyon’s‘England’s Poet’ has the ‘world-winning music’
of Shakespeare’s poetry rising above the chaos and murdering roar of the present
time (BHS, 21). G. C. Moore Smith and Ronald Ross both write sonnets reworking
Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116, ‘Let me not to the marriage of true minds’: Shakespeare’s
works have become the ‘ever fixed mark` |Thatlooksontempestsandisnever
shaken’.^19 For Moore Smith, Shakespeare is seen as a force for international good,
the mutual love of his works offering a way of holding nations together when
‘bonds of statecraft snap and cease’ (BHS, 237). John Drinkwater’s ‘For April 23rd,
1616–1916’ strikes a more realistic note, hoping that the future will show the war to
have been fought to guarantee ‘the happy-willed|Free life that Shakespeare drew’
(BHS, 30). Such a prayer for retrospective justification betrays an uncertain and
doubting quality in Drinkwater’s patriotism. Others use Shakespeare to question
wars in general. Alfred Noyes, in a story entitled ‘The Shadow of the Master: 1916’,
has Shakespeare appear to him in a dream, reading a history book whose account
runs up to modern times. Noyes asks him if he sees ‘any light in those pages’: ‘I
am a shadow,hesaid,and I see none’(BHS, 116). Shakespeare then goes on to
condemn the ‘dark book’ of history he loved as a young man, but which he now sees
as tending to the glorification of war: in place of his childish love of the ‘glorious
colouring of each pictured age’ has come his recognition of ‘how thumbed with
innocent blood is every page’ (BHS, 117). What there are not, however, amongst
English poets, are poems that question Shakespeare’s ability to survive or be present
inthewar.ItislefttoanAmericanacademic,FrederickMorganPadelford,to
question Shakespeare’s continued relevance. In ‘The Forest of Arden’, he imagines
that wood fallen on evil days, filled with the ‘shriek of shell’, the birds having ‘ceased
to haunt the air’ (BHS, 361). That the war could take over the Shakespearean
landscape, it seems, is an imaginative leap that English minds were not willing to
make.
The poems discussed so far are of interest more for their conscious meditation
on the use of Shakespeare in time of war than for their poetic qualities; one would
(^19) The titles are, respectively, ‘1916’ and ‘Shakespeare, 1916’ (BHS, 237 and 104).