Shakespeare Celebrations in Times of War

GARRICK'S STRATFORD JUBILEE OF 1769 established panegyric and quasi-religious rites for paying tribute to Shakespeare. Subsequent cultic commemorations strove to enact--both theatrically and verbally--the poet's apotheosis, praising his godlike creativity and the universal appeal of his immortal works. Performances of his plays were another matter; these were considered to be--if not altogether unfit for the limitations of the theater--in need of rearrangement, expurgation, refinement, and improvement, especially if more-or-less popular audiences were to be reached, and if the author was to be installed as a worthy representative of his nation--and of other nations as well. For not only England but other countries, too, came to claim him as their national poet. On many levels (theatrical, literary, critical, ideological, etc.) Shakespeare's apotheosis and domestication, his global impact and national appropriation became a curiously simultaneous if not dialectical process that determined the Bard's reception in Britain and elsewhere. Among the most spectacular manifestations of that process were the grand celebrations of the tercentenaries of Shakespeare's birth in 1864 and of his death in 1916, with which this essay will be mainly concerned. Since these anniversaries occurred in times of international tension and war, they generated divided forms of homage and, indeed, dislocations of the dramatist's image. ¹

In 1864 interrelations between cultural, political, and martial activities may have appeared less overt than one would expect today. ² In late April 1864 reports and articles on celebrations of the three-hundredth birthday dominated the front pages of the entire English press for a week. Many papers also had illustrated supplements devoted to Shakespeare's life, career, and influence. Other news, however alarming, was tucked away in marginal columns. This included news about the Civil War in America: the army of the Potomac was being reinforced by the troops of General George Meade in Culpepper, Virginia. Or about the current German-Danish war over Schleswig-Holstein: on 20 April the combined Prussian-Austrian force won a decisive battle at Dueppel. Or news about the presence in London of General Giuseppe Garibaldi, the champion of Italy's freedom and wounded hero of many a battle, who, despite his idolization in Britain, was preparing, for reasons not made public, to cut short his visit.

For a moment all this was eclipsed by Shakespeare. Among the tercentenary observances, which took place in many British cities (including London), those in provincial Stratford-upon-Avon commanded special attention. Here was to be, as one announcement declared, the first full-fledged commemoration in history of the birth of a national poet. ³ Nostalgic memories of Garrick's jubilee of nearly a hundred years earlier were also invoked; the latter had needed no particular occasion but, despite its incomplete success, was a legendary event. One should remember that it, too, had, in 1769, come in the wake of a war, the seven-years' war, which had associated Shakespeare with anti-French sentiments--not only in England but also in Germany, where at that time G. E. Lessing was recommending Shakespeare as an antidote to the tyranny of French culture, including classicist drama, with enormous consequences for subsequent German literature. By 1864, however, such pan-Germanic concord was no longer undisturbed. And yet the Stratford celebrations actually began, on the morning of Saturday, 23 April, with the appearance at the town hall of a German delegation from Frankfurt, the birthplace of Goethe, whose spokesman insisted that his compatriots loved Shakespeare as thoroughly as they did their own geniuses. Hence, he continued, "in this cold and critical age of ours" the Germans "will always be united in strongest sympathy with the truly English, because Shakespearean nation." ⁴

The reference to "this cold and critical age" no doubt alluded to the German-Danish war. Denmark, after the loss of Norway and the accession of a new king, Christian IX, had given itself a new constitution, which practically provided for the annexation of the predominantly German...