Shakespeare at War: A Material History, a new book co-edited by Dr Amy Lidster, Jesus tutor and Departmental Lecturer in English Language and Literature, takes a deep dive into the world of military conflict to investigate how extensively Shakespeare’s cultural capital has been deployed at times of war.

The collection of military stories, which encompasses the Seven Years’ War, the American War of Independence, the Napoleonic Wars, the Russian War, the First and Second World Wars, and the Iraq War, is the first interdisciplinary material history of how Shakespeare has been used at times of war.

 

Amy and co-editor Sonia Massai, Professor of Shakespeare Studies at Sapienza University of Rome, explore how archival objects such as photographs, watercolours, letters, posters, and cartoons as well as theatre programmes, props, and cue scripts, reveal surprising evidence and varied stories of ‘wartime Shakespeare’. They have brought together scholarly expertise from a range of disciplines, including historians, social theorists, theatre directors and public military figures. Each contributor uses an object as their starting point to ask wider questions about how Shakespeare has been used during a specific context and crisis.

In ‘Taking Shakespeare to War’, a blog on Cambridge University Press’s Fifteen Eighty Four website that accompanies the book’s launch, Amy and Sonia explain, “These stories collectively suggest pervasive use and nuanced reception of his works quite beyond what we had expected.

Politicians, propagandists, and governments have often recognised the value in ‘recruiting’ Shakespeare, using, for example, quotations from his plays in enlistment posters. A 1915 Parliamentary Recruitment Committee poster reads ‘Stand not upon the order of your going, but go at once’. Ironically, these words are spoken by Lady Macbeth to dismiss her guests from the banquet after the appearance of Banquo’s ghost, who, invisible to all others, haunts Macbeth, triggering fits of terror in his guilty conscience. Her words acquire a radically different meaning within their new context, but their power is amplified by the recognition factor that attaches to Shakespeare.”  

The collection is also linked to a new public exhibition, Shakespeare and War, which the two researchers have curated at the National Army Museum in London. The free exhibition runs from 6^th October 2023 to 31^st March 2024, and includes some of the objects featured in the book, alongside many other items that expand on the ways in which the playwright has shaped how we think about the military, and how we imagine war and its consequences today.

On 18^th October, Amy and Sonia are hosting a special panel discussion to mark the opening of the Museum’s exhibition and the launch of Shakespeare at War: A Material History, as well as the imminent publication of Amy’s next monograph, Wartime Shakespeare: Performing Narratives of Conflict, which helped to inspire and shape the exhibition. They will be joined by actor and director Hugh Quarshie; Nataliya Torkut, Head of the Shakespeare Ukrainian Centre; and former British Army officer Colonel Tim Collins. The roundtable conversation will consider the diverse ways in which Shakespeare has been deployed during major conflicts with British involvement from the eighteenth century to the modern day. The event is free for NAM members or £5 for general admission, and tickets can be booked here.

 

About Dr Amy Lidster

Amy Lidster is Departmental Lecturer in English Language and Literature at Jesus College, University of Oxford. Her research concentrates on Shakespeare, early modern drama, book history, and historiography, and her work has appeared widely in edited collections and journals. She is the author of Publishing the History Play in the Time of Shakespeare: Stationers Shaping a Genre (CUP 2022), Authorships and Authority in Early Modern Dramatic Paratexts (Routledge, forthcoming), and Wartime Shakespeare: Performing Narratives of Conflict (CUP 2023), a companion monograph linked to the edited collection Shakespeare at War: A Material History. She is preparing the introduction for the new Oxford World’s Classics edition of 1 Henry VI.

About Professor Sonia Massai

Sonia Massai is Professor of Shakespeare Studies at Sapienza, University of Rome, Italy, and a Visiting Professor of Shakespeare Studies at King’s College London, UK. She is the author of Shakespeare’s Accents: Voicing Identity in Performance (CUP 2020) and Shakespeare and the Rise of the Editor (CUP 2007). Besides Shakespeare at War: A Material History, she has edited collections of essays on Hamlet (Bloomsbury 2021), on Ivo van Hove (Bloomsbury 2018), Shakespeare and Textual Studies (CUP 2015) and on World-Wide Shakespeares (Routledge, 2005). She has also prepared critical editions of Paratexts in English Printed Drama to 1642 (CUP 2014) and John Ford’s ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore for Arden Early Modern Drama (Bloomsbury 2011). She is currently preparing a new Shakespeare Arden edition of Richard III, and she has recently been appointed as a General Editor of the New Cambridge Shakespeare (CSE) series.