From Common Reader to Canon: Memorialising the Shakespeare-Reading British Soldier During the First World War

Abstract

In 1916, at the same time as Shakespearean tercentenary addresses were claiming that Shakespeare epitomised British national ideals, numerous press dispatches ‘from the field’ appeared in British newspapers seeming to prove the existence of a large audience of Shakespearean readers among those fighting for those ‘ideals’ in active zones. This chapter examines some of these claims. It asks how the image of the Shakespeare-reading soldier was deployed within book-trade and charity publicity and capitalised upon by educators and other members of Britain’s cultural and intellectual elites. It assesses the ways in which press anecdotes about soldiers reading the classics contributed to larger discourses of national identity and cultural and aesthetic mobilisation. Finally, it asks how these accounts may have contributed to the conflict’s transmutation into a ‘literary war’ in post-war collective memory, one in which literature came to assume an outsized role in how the conflict was subsequently memorialised.