Ambiguity in Shakespeare’s theatre of war
WARTIME SHAKESPEARE
Performing narratives of conflict
AMY LIDSTER
324pp. Cambridge University Press. £85 (US $110).
SHAKESPEARE AT WAR
A material history
AMY LIDSTER AND SONIA MASSAI, EDITORS
280pp. Cambridge University Press. £19.99 (US $24.95).
THE HOLLOW CROWN
Shakespeare on how leaders rise, rule, and fall
ELIOT A. COHEN
288pp. Basic. £25.
ON JANUARY 8, 1776, an audience of Bostonians loyal to the Crown were treated to a production of a farce, The Blockade of Boston, by General John Burgoyne (1722–92). Burgoyne is now remembered for surrendering his forces to the Patriots in Philadelphia the following year, which was seen by many as a turning point in the Revolutionary War. His play, which does not survive, has an equally ignominious reputation: it is best known for an interruption, when a sergeant ran on stage to warn the actors and spectators that Bunker Hill was under attack. The audience thought that the intervention was part of the play, much to the delight of the Patriots, who took great pleasure in their enemies’ inability to separate truth from fiction, drama from real life.
In her fascinating, meticulously researched book Wartime Shakespeare, Amy Lidster uses this anecdote to demonstrate that the intertwined history of the theatre – specifically, Shakespeare – and war hinges not simply on different interpretations of individual plays, but on larger issues of what a theatre is for and whether there should be performances at all in times of national crisis. Many Americans battling for independence saw the theatre as at best a distraction and at worst a sign of the frivolous waste generated by imperialism (though there was some enthusiasm for Shakespeare’s Roman plays, if performed with a heavy emphasis on the justice of the republican cause). For the British forces the reactions were equally complex and divided. Some wanted good, tub-thumping rhetoric emphasizing the goodness and justice of English history; perhaps surprisingly, Henry V seems not to have been performed, although this might have been because, as Lidster plausibly suggests, it had been overemployed as a moralebooster in England during the Seven Years War. Some, especially in Britain, doubted the motives and purpose of yet another war. One satirical cartoon from 1777, alluding to Shakespeare’s depiction of Jack Cade in Henry IV, Part Two, represented an angry, wooden-legged England desperately trying to control its unruly American children. Others welcomed the performing of Shakespeare’s plays as a diversion from the misery of warfare – a strategy that may have backfired. George Washington deployed fiery rhetoric as the Patriots were pushing for victory,
