johnlee
Rosenberg had studied at the Slade School of Fine Art. Francis Colmer raises the
obviousquestion in his tercentenary contribution,Shakespeare in Time of War.In
the preface, Colmer declares Shakespeare to be the ‘one and onlynational poet’
of England; but he also believes that this is not generally recognized. Noting that
all the brave schemes to celebrate the tercentenary have come to nothing, bar a
few performances of the plays, he wonders whether this is ‘altogether a matter for
regret’, since ‘to the great mass of his fellow-countrymen Shakespeare is little more
than a name’.^44 To Colmer, Shakespeare’s works are the possession of a narrow
educatedelite; in such a situation, any large-scale celebration would be a hollow ́
mockery.
Modern critics tend to share Colmer’s view of Shakespeare’s popularity. George
Parfitt, for example, finds Wilfred Owen’s attempt to write as from the ranks
unconvincing. The judgement is correct, but the particular evidence he adduces is
not. In Owen’s ‘Inspection’, there is a reference to a ‘damn`ed spot’ which, discovered
on parade, has confined a ranker to camp. Parfitt argues that this reference is to be
understood as the officer’s after-the-fact, literary description of the soldier’s later
explanation that the dirt on his uniform was his blood.^45 I would argue, however,
that this is the only place in the poem where the soldier’s voice may conceivably
be heard at all; the soldier’s directly quoted words, ‘The world is washing out its
stains...It doesn’t like our cheeks so red’,^46 are so transparently Owen’s as to make
the poem’s attempt at dialogue rather embarrassing. To argue thus is to insist on the
popularity of Shakespeare. This is not unreasonable; according to Jonathan Rose,
inThe Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes, nineteenth-century popular
culture ‘was dominated by Shakespeare’, and, as he says, ‘Victorian ‘‘Bardolatry’’
was driven largely by working-class demand.’ Shakespeare’s popularity was such
that theatre companies could go on tour intending to pick up actors for the
smaller roles from amongst their audiences. Moreover, this popularity was not
in deference to middle-class tastes; Shakespeare was a ‘proletarian hero’, and
his plays provided a language of ‘radical political mobilization’. The Shakespeare
Chartist Association of Leicester quickly attracted some 3,000 members after its
constitution.^47
One might well, then, expect a particular private to have a detailed knowledge
of Shakespeare. Colmer may not have known this, because he had little contact
with working-class culture. Underlying much of Bernard Porter’sAbsent-Minded
Imperialists is his argument that Britain ‘was a trulymulti-cultural society’ in
(^44) Francis Colmer, ‘Preface’, inShakespeare in Time of War: Excerpts from the Plays Arranged with
Topical Allusion 45 (London: Smith, Elder & Co, 1916), p. xv.
George Parfitt,English Poetry of the First World War: Contexts and Themes(New York: Harvester,
1990), 64.
(^46) Owen, ‘Inspection’, inComplete Poems and Fragments, i. 95.
(^47) Jonathan Rose,The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes(New Haven: Yale University
Press, 2001), 122–3.