johnlee
unlike Shakespeare, did have his identity discs, and was happy to boast of killing
Spaniardsin the Low Countries—is in large part a sign of his madness. Yet, Gurney’s
imaginative world had always been largely Elizabethan. His great success as an artist
lies in music, where he has always held a very high reputation as a setter of songs.
Here he made his name before the war, in a setting of five Elizabethan songs, some
from Shakespeare, which he called his ‘Elizas’.^37 In this Elizabethan imagination he
was not atypical in kind, if he was in degree. The British world of the early twentieth
century was dominated by Shakespeare and other Elizabethan figures in a way that
is hard to comprehend now. That the clerk in Virginia Woolf’sMrs Dalloway,
Septimus, goes ‘to France to save an England which consisted almost entirely of
Shakespeare’s plays and Miss Isabel Pole in a green dress walking in a square’ is
comic but not incredible.^38 This was a time of mock-Tudor country houses. Lady
Randolph Churchill (by this time Mrs Cornwallis-West) had, in 1912, managed to
secure guarantees for £50,000, a huge sum, in order to mount an exhibition entitled
‘Shakespeare’s England’. An early example of a theme park, the underlying interest
of this was seen to reside in the notion that the Edwardian present relied on a past
of Elizabethan enterprise and exploration.^39 Rudyard Kipling, inPuck of Pook’s Hill
andRewards and Fairies, had used Shakespeare’s ‘merry wanderer’ as the figure
through which to bring together and offer a vision of the British past to sustain the
Britain of the future.
Kipling’s sense of England as a single, if complex, entity was at this time
unusual, as David Gervais has argued.^40 Yet the shadow of Kipling’s Shakespearean
England may lie more heavily on Great War poetry than has been recognized.
Edward Thomas is typically a regional poet of a fragmented England, distinguished
by his refusal to employ the vague pastoral conventions of which his Georgian
contemporaries made use to conjure up a notion of England and Englishness. His
poetry is above all a poetry of accurately observed places and times, leavened with
the chronologically unspecific magic of place-names, or with the actions of seasons.
The war, however, often pushed him towards larger, more unifying statements; this
is perhaps most obvious in ‘This is no case of petty right or wrong’, where Thomas
offers England as his explanation for why he fights: ‘She is all we know and live
by...And as we love ourselves we hate her foe.’^41 Offered as an explanation, the
simple assertiveness of this is unsatisfactory; the reader wants to know what England
(^37) The songs are ‘Opheus’, ‘Tears’, ‘Under the greenwood tree’, ‘Sleep’, and ‘Spring’. They are
available on a CD—titledSevern Meadows: Songs by Ivor Gurney.
(^38) Virginia Woolf,Mrs Dalloway(London: Hogarth Press, 1925), 95.
(^39) These details concerning ‘Shakespeare’s England’ are taken from Marion F. O’Connor, ‘Theatre
of the Empire: ‘‘Shakespeare’s England’’ at Earl’s Court, 1912’, in Jean E. Howard and Marion F.
O’Connor (eds.),Shakespeare Reproduced: The Text in History and Ideology(New York: Methuen,
1987), 68–98.
(^40) Gervais,Literary Englands,8.
(^41) Edward Thomas, ‘This is no case of petty right or wrong’, inCollected Poems, ed. R. George
Thomas (London: Faber, 2004), 93.