The Shakespeare Hut

A Story of Memory, Performance and Identity, 1916-1923

Ailsa Grant Ferguson

• Publisher: The Arden Shakespeare
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781474295857
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria de Shakespeare

This book tells the forgotten story of the Shakespeare Hut, a vast, mock-Tudor building for New Zealand Anzac soldiers visiting London on leave from the front lines. Constructed in Bloomsbury in 1916, the Hut was to be the only built memorial to mark Shakespeare's Tercentenary in the midst of war. With a purpose-built performance space, its tiny stage hosted the biggest theatrical stars of the age. The Hut is a vivid and unique case study in cultural memory and performance of Shakespeare. One extraordinary building brings together Shakespeare's place in First World War theatre, in emerging new post-colonial identities, the story of Shakespearean performance in the twentieth century and in the struggle for women's suffrage. Grant Ferguson transports you to the Hut and its lively, idiosyncratic world. From a feminist-led stage to a hub of Indian intellectual and political debate, from a Shakespeare memorial to an Anzac social club, this is the story of a building truly at a crossroads.

1

Prologue:

The Shakespeare Memorial National Theatre events, 1910–12: Festivity, bardolatry, (re)constructing Shakespeare

The Shakespeare Hut is, this book argues, a useful case study in how Shakespeare was perceived, utilized and performed in the early twentieth century. However, it is also a unique point of intersection at which diverse issues meet: how Shakespeare was performed and ‘remembered’ and the role of Shakespeare in national identity, in gender politics and in how London dealt with memorialization in the mass-loss effected by the First World War. The Hut, however, did not spring up at this intersection in 1916 without precedential attempts at performing the commemoration and collective worship of Shakespeare. This prologue chapter serves to contextualize the story of the Shakespeare Hut as part of a specific narrative of the Shakespeare Memorial National Theatre committee’s attempts to package Shakespeare for the nation.

London, 1908. After decades of debate, disagreement and disorganization, an uncomfortable alliance was formed. Ever the organizer (and appeaser), Israel Gollancz, professor of literature (Shakespearean and medieval) at King’s College London and leading light in the campaign for a National Theatre and the push to commemorate Shakespeare’s Tercentenary, presided over the merging of two hitherto warring campaigns. The arguments represented what would become modernist rejection of Victorian monumentalism. The situation as it stood in 1908 was this: one group was dedicated to the creation of a National Theatre for Britain, in the vein of others in Europe (not least the Nationaltheater in Munich which had been founded a century earlier) and following the precedent of the Victorian passion for monumentalism. For this faction, the National Theatre might also be dedicated in some way to Shakespeare, the national playwright. The other group, quite separately, wished to commemorate Shakespeare, not only because of the approach of 1916 as a significant date, but also as a statement of Shakespeare’s national cultural status. This group would very much like a beautiful (and expensive) statue or monument dedicated to Shakespeare to be erected in London. The National Theatre people thought this most impractical. The monument people thought the National Theatre was a pipe dream. Israel Gollancz thought the two could combine very nicely indeed.

Gollancz, by all accounts and judging from the extensive writings and private papers he left behind, was an uncommonly personable and principled man, attributes which combined with not only an impressive intellect but also an astute and pragmatic approach. We will meet Gollancz many times throughout this book and get to know him as well as we can.¹ For now, it is enough to understand that bringing these Shakespearean factions together was a feat that required a very impressive set of talents and certainly the best of negotiation skills. But bring them together he did and, in 1908, a new committee, elaborately (and tactfully) named the Shakespeare Memorial National Theatre committee, or SMNT, was inaugurated at a meeting at the Mansion House on 22 June 1908.² The founding of the SMNT, though, was by no means to signal the end of disagreements among its members on what would be the most appropriate memorial to Shakespeare, nor on the viability, form, governance, location or even repertoire of a new National Theatre. Looking back as we now do, we can wonder at how it could possibly have taken fifty-five years from that meeting in 1908 to arrive at the first National Theatre Company performances, led by Sir Laurence Olivier at the Old Vic in 1963, and a further thirteen years before the National Theatre would exist as a building in its own right. Yet many factors, disagreements, changes in the geographical, social, cultural and architectural landscape of London – and most of all, two world wars – were to preserve the National Theatre for all those years as merely notional. The Shakespeare Hut, though, was to represent the flash of substance, of a real stage, a built substitute for the National Theatre, as early as 1916.

Some extraordinary events were held in the committee’s name, events that performed only fragments of Shakespeare’s actual works, presenting elaborate (re)constructions and ‘Shakespeareana’. The most significant of these events are explored in this chapter, starting with the Shakespeare Masque, a purpose-written piece designed to bemoan the lack of the National Theatre, performed in 1910. This slightly lower profile event marked the start of a series of escalating ambitions in the SMNT’s schemes to raise money and engage hearts and minds in their particular branding of Shakespearean homage. The Masque was followed by the ostentatious Shakespeare Costume Ball at the Albert Hall in 1911 and, on an even more enormous scale, the huge Shakespeare’s England exhibition at Earl’s Court in 1912. Given the association of Shakespeare’s name and ‘spirit’, these SMNT fundraising events and documents become commemorations of Shakespeare in their own right, a function that is amplified by the eventual failure of the scheme to produce the tangible memorial for which they were ostensibly raising money.

All three events tell us a great deal of what ‘Shakespeare’ was to mean for the SMNT and how the construction of Shakespeare’s England represented by the Shakespeare Hut was anticipated by the preceding years. In the context, more broadly, of this book’s exploration of Shakespearean commemoration at this time (and beyond) to be festive in nature and, further, the idea that the Shakespeare Hut functioned as a heterotopic space, the Masque, Ball and exhibition are crucial precursors, similarly linking Shakespearean memorialization to festivity, costuming and carnival, while creating a heterotopic temporal and experiential alternative to the realities of late-Edwardian London. The three events also offer context for some of the core issues to be explored in relation to the Shakespeare Hut’s functions and significance. First, the Edwardian age and the subsequent wartime upheavals created a moment of crisis between a spectacular Victorian Shakespeare and new ideas of performance, text and meaning in what were then rather avant-garde minimalist approaches to Shakespearean performance. Second, these events foreshadow the major cultural intersection on which the Hut stood: issues of Shakespeare and race, empire and national identity and the question of women’s suffrage. Finally, but most clearly, these events reveal the preoccupation with material construction – and idea of reconstruction – that was central to the SMNT project both in its awkward marriage of Shakespeare Memorial campaign with National Theatre campaign and in its activities during the 1910s. This manifests a more pervading agenda of (re)constructing Shakespeare for each new generation, which often has less to do with performance approaches and more to do with how we ‘remember’ him in commemorations, artefacts and buildings.

I. The Shakespeare Masque, 1910 (London and Kent, followed by amateur regional tour)

1 July 1910. The heavens have just opened over Regent’s Park. Stars of the stage and society ladies in Shakespearean costumes ‘scamper for shelter’³ while a stoic Falstaff attempts to deliver his few lines over the roar of rain. This is the sad outcome of an ambitious attempt to raise awareness of the campaign for a Shakespeare Memorial National Theatre by means of a curious little play, A Masque: Setting forth the true honouring of our rare and precious poet William Shakespeare. The Masque, a short piece inspired by (but scarcely faithful to) early modern court masques, was written for the SMNT by stalwart campaigner for a National Theatre Edith Balfour Lyttelton and reviewed as an ‘adroit combination of earnest pleading for a Shakespeare Theatre with neat and often amusing opportunities for Shakespeare’s leading characters to appear and quote Shakespeare to her purpose’.⁴ Harnessing Shakespeare’s reputation and most popular characters rather than actually performing the plays was characteristic of virtually all the SMNT attempts to raise money and support for their scheme. While their rhetoric was often embellished with remarks on the greatness of the drama, more often the focus was on the national shame in which everyone partook: that there was neither a National Theatre (when others were springing up across Europe) nor monument to Shakespeare.

The Masque takes the form of a conversation between Fame, Tragedy, Comedy and a Poet, joined by characters from Shakespeare’s plays and actors of the past, such as Garrick and Siddons. The characters speak only their own lines, fragmented and reconstructed into a discussion of the memorialization (or lack of it) of their creator. It was not published per se, but existed in a pamphlet, unaccredited to a publisher or even the author, Edith Lyttelton, in its three performances, from 30 June to 2 July 1910, the first two at Regent’s Park and the final performance at Knole House in Kent. The Masque begins with a most verbose prologue, in mock-antique style:

You are to imagine this sylvan glade the abode of the great Goddess of Fame. A messenger from the earth appears; he is called the Poet, for only the thought of a poet could enter these realms. He has found no fitting monument to Shakespeare in the land, and comes hither in all haste to ask the Goddess for her help. The August Dame meets him, and when she learns the truth, straightway calls for Tragedy and Comedy, and bids them summon up the creatures of Shakespeare’s genius, to confer with them and with the Poet, on this matter.⁵

The stage is thus set for a conversation between Shakespeare’s characters and these muses, which only gets more elaborate as it continues. It is difficult to imagine that this Masque was not a little tongue-in-cheek, given its florid and extravagant style, though perhaps this is wishful thinking. The whole short play moves between decontextualized Shakespearean quotations and this pseudo early modern (cum classical) style.

The Masque insists, as did all of the SMNT campaigning, that Shakespeare’s lack of a memorial is inconceivable and a source of national shame. When Tragedy suggests to Fame that Shakespeare’s characters be summoned to advise, Fame assumes they must be found in some memorial building:

FAME

Call them hither from the marble palace

England hath surely builded for their home.

POET

No home is theirs, and no abiding place,

Where his great characters, from age to age,

Can live, and speak, and charm each age anew.⁶

There are two obvious problems with this ‘party line’ taken here and throughout the SMNT’s early campaigns: the Stratford theatre and the less obvious problem of Shakespeare worship that ignores the actual texts themselves. First, there is a practical and deliberate omission: they appear publicly to ignore the existence of the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon, erected in 1879 (destroyed by fire in 1926 and replaced by what is now known as the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in 1932). The theatre at Stratford was, of course, specifically named as a ‘Memorial’ and erected in Shakespeare’s birthplace town, yet, as the Masque extract above exemplifies, it was largely ignored in the SMNT’s public discourse. The Masque hammers this message home many times. A particularly brazen example seems to deny the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre entirely:

FAME

My Shakespeare needs no monument of stone.

His mind speaks still, his creatures live and move.

POET

True, my august lady, his creatures live, yet for the most part they lie unseen, unheard. They sleep and are unknown, for they have no stage on which to show forth their pageant of life. There should be built a noble Playhouse in the name of the master, where the shadows might dwell, and speak his honeyed words to the listening world.

FAME

Does no such stage exist within the realm?

POET

None. From time to time some player, who loves the master better than his purse, gives breath to these his children.⁷

True, the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre was not a National Theatre; it was not, in any case, run along those lines. However, this is neither here nor there in the claims regularly made by the SMNT and its representatives that England had, to its shame, erected no monument or theatre memorial to Shakespeare. Here, the clear statement is that Shakespeare’s characters have ‘no stage’ and no ‘noble playhouse’. The exaggerated pessimism at Shakespeare’s neglect, the claim that only ‘from time to time’ is Shakespeare’s work performed, rather ignores the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre’s endeavours at Stratford and seems only to be considering London rather than the nation as a whole. The SMNT discourse is always national, as exemplified in the Masque’s prologue, in which the ‘Poet’ ‘f[inds] no fitting monument to Shakespeare in the land’.⁸ While it is true that London lacked both a N...