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1 Ecole Lemonier An Introduction This book began in the small African nation of Djibouti, a stretch of barren and yet strangely beautiful desert on the shores of the Gulf of Aden north of Somalia. Djibouti’s claims to fame are few, resources for Shakespeare scholarship not among them. It is said to be the hottest continuously inhabited place on the planet and one of the poorest, but the Djiboutian people are proud of their country and its fragile independence, which owes much to the willingness of its two major ethnic groups to cooperate in building (or rebuilding) their part of the postcolonial Horn of Africa. For the past several years Djibouti has hosted a forward antiterrorism base quietly vital to the war in the Middle East that is ongoing as I write. It was because of that war that I came to be in Djibouti at all. I was one of the thousands of what I like to think Shakespeare would have called “warriors for the working-day,” recalled to military service in support of a war without borders and scarcely a name.1 I began writing this book there in that ancient desert. To pass the time of my deployment more constructively I offered to teach a Shakespeare class to anyone aboard the camp who wished to take it. Because so many junior enlisted reservists are college students for whom deployment wipes out an academic year, I had no trouble filling the tent that served as our classroom, and my home institution was happy to offer each of the students credit for the class free of charge. Mine—ours—is one of the nicer stories to come out of a war that was up to that point so filled with bad news. One of the most surprising things about the class was how it was more like any other Shakespeare survey course than not.2 The younger students were preoccupied with what they might do 2 English Mercuries after class and with what other young people were doing while they were stuck in class, even though there was almost nothing else to do. The older students were grateful for a reason to put their professional responsibilities aside for an hour and chip away at bachelor’s degrees that had become lifelong projects. Most tried hard to read the plays but entered the Ecole Lemonier, as our tent was called (figure 1), with only a basic understanding of the plot. They were happy enough, most nights, to sit back and listen to me explain it all to them. It could have been any night class in the United States. A “little academe / Still and contemplative in living art” it was not, however.3 The relentless thumping of heavy helicopters and transport planes was our constant companion. Other differences announced themselves—alerts on the public address system, a runner excusing his interruption to call one of the officers back to the operations center, an empty chair whose wonted occupant was “downrange” in support of various activities in the troubled and lawless regions abutting Somalia. This book emerged from one of those articulations of difference, a subtle one. One night we were discussing Henry V. I was asked if Shakespeare ever fought in a war. The question is familiar to anyone who has taught Henry V to people reading it for the first time, and it is informed by Shakespeare ’s sensitive and searching representations of war in that play, from the anxious campfire gossip to the glorious Saint Crispian’s Day speech in which Henry addresses his outnumbered men as “we happy few, we band of brothers” (4.3.60). So strongly does this speech continue to resonate among soldiers that the camp sergeant major had it posted on his office door. The answer I gave will be no less familiar to Shakespeare scholars than the question itself. Fictions succeed when they speak to our cultural realities. The players, as Hamlet says, “are the abstract and brief chronicles of the / time” (2.2.524–25). The stories we read or see performed on stage appeal to us because they comment on the world we live in, sometimes in surprising ways. Shakespeare was good at synthesizing the discourses at large in his society, the conversations through which early modern English people understood the beliefs, practices, and objects that comprised their reality. In short, the answer to the question was no: as far as we know Shakespeare did not take part in...

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