FESTIVITIES
SHAKESPEARE’S TERCENTENARY Staging nations and performing identities in 1916
MONIKA SMIALKOWSKA 320pp. Cambridge University Press. £85 (US $110).
Last autumn the BBC offered a season of Shakespeare-related content to mark the 400th anniversary of the publication of the First Folio. The festivities were something of a postscript to the more extravagant Shakespearean celebrations of 2016, which marked the quatercentenary of the playwright’s death. It will be a while now until the next Shakespeare commemoration rolls around, but any of us still above sea level in 2064 can look forward to marking a dead poet’s 500th birthday.
As Monika Smialkowska’s fascinating new book demonstrates, Shakespeare commemoration often reveals more about the society paying homage than it does about the dedicatee. Shakespeare’s Tercentenar y: Staging nations and performing identities in 1916 is illuminating as a geographically and demographically wide-ranging portrait of a moment in time, showing that Shakespeare was already, a century ago, a mythological entity capacious enough to be recruited for a broad range of ideological positions and, indeed, on both sides of a world war.
Smialkowska begins, perhaps counterintuitively, with the commemorative events held in Germany and Austria before moving to Britain and the Allied nations. This choice highlights the fact that by 1916 Shakespeare was by no means seen as exclusive British property. The book provides a nuanced deconstruction of his putatively “universal” appeal and relevance, showing that the concept of universality was used in Germany to detach Shakespeare from Englishness, in British diplomac y to assert cultural kinship with allied and neutral nations, and in the US to navigate the thorny politics of immigration and assimilation. Shakespeare’s Te rcentenary shows that ideas of the universal are always situated in a complex and shifting relation to local, national and ideological concerns.
The author’s insights are grounded in extensive archival research, particularly in local periodicals that often reveal ambivalent feelings about Shakespeare. The book is refreshingly frank about the ways in which its story is shaped by archival contingencies. When considering a Shakespeare pageant staged by Native American pupils at a school in Pennsylvania, for example, Smialkowska draws attention to the fact that we rely almost entirely on the accounts of white writers.
Shakespeare’s Tercentenary provides the most complete account to date of commemorations in 1916, demonstrating that these events incorporated a much wider ideological range than previously appreciated. This includes dissenting, socialist, anti-imperialist and feminist perspectives as well as narrowly patr
