Edmund G. C. King

“A Priceless Book to Have out Here”: Soldiers Reading Shakespeare in the First World War

The links between the 1916 Shakespeare tercentenary and the global conflict with which it coincided have been the subject of increasing scholarly attention. Recent work has examined the cultural, political, and military contexts of commemoration events and shown how Shakespeare as cultural symbol was mobilized for war. No systematic work has yet been done, however, on the most basic level of Shakespeares cultural mobilization: the individual act of reading Shakespeare in the context of wartime. Utilising the methodologies of the new “history of reading”, this article examines the place of Shakespeares texts in the reading lives of British and Commonwealth soldiers. Drawing upon contemporary letters and diaries, it demonstrates that there are several distinct types of Shakespearean reading practice recoverable from the archives. “Compliant” readers strove to recover conventionally patriotic messages from Shakespeares texts. “Nostalgic” readers used Shakespeare as a form of escapism or a way of asserting a civilian identity separate from military service. Direct evidence for the reading habits of ordinary soldiers is more difficult to recover from the archives than those of officers. Nevertheless, scattered references to Shakespearean texts in the diaries and correspondence of ordinary-ranking soldiers show that Shakespeare could also function as a symbol of cultural literacy for working-class autodidacts at war.

Pope's 1723 - 25 Shakespear, Classical Editing, and Humanistic Reading Practices

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A Captive Audience? The Reading Lives of Australian Prisoners of War, 1914–1918

The lived experience of prisoners of war remains one of the least explored realms of First World War history. Despite the unprecedented numbers of captives that the conflict produced, captivity never became part of the cultural memory of the war. It remains, as Heather Jones has recently put it, a ‘missing paradigm’ in First World War studies.1 The absence of the prisoner of war experience from mainstream narratives about the war has, arguably, been especially acute in writings about Australian and New Zealand forces. In many ways, this is not surprising. The number of ANZAC (Australia and New Zealand Army Corps) troops captured in the First World War was small in both absolute and proportional terms. Unlike, say, the Austro-Hungarian army, for which the number of captives taken amounted to more than one in three of the total number of troops mobilised during the war, Australian forces lost only 4044 servicemen captured between 1914 and 1918.2 The experience of captivity in an ANZAC context was, therefore, very much a minority one. Yet there are also ideological and cultural reasons for the marginal status of ANZAC prisoners of war in post-war writing. Life behind the wire, with its boredom, lack of activity, and its insinuation of shame and defeat, bears little relation to the ‘digger’ legend that has become entrenched in the decades since the conflict.

South Asian writing between the wars: publishers, reviewers, readers

This editorial review essay looks at the culture of publishing and reviewing books about South Asia in Britain in the interwar period.

Fragmenting authorship in the eighteenth-century Shakespeare edition

When, in the early years of the twentieth century, the New Bibliographers started to formulate their arguments about the Shakespearean text, one of their key concerns was to restore the reputation of the 1623 First Folio. This project rested on two evidentiary foundations. Firstly, A.W. Pollard’s division of the early quartos into ‘‘good’’ and ‘‘bad’’ categories seemed to affirm the good faith of the Folio editors. Heminge and Condell had claimed that, prior to the Folio, Shakespeare’s plays were ‘‘maimed and deformed by the frauds and stealths of injurious impostors’’. Since the eighteenth century, most commentators had interpreted this statement as applying to all pre-1623 Shakespearean quartos. Once editors realized that certain Folio texts themselves derived from quarto copy, they concluded that Heminge and Condell were both lazy and unreliable. However, Pollard’s demonstration suggested that the Folio editors had meant to stigmatize only a small subset of texts the ‘‘bad quartos’’ (Greg, Editorial Problem 7 14). As Peter Alexander put it, this promised to ‘‘restore the good name and authority of Heminge and Condell’’ by showing that ‘‘their statements square[d] with the facts’’ (36). The second strand of New Bibliographical revisionism was the suggestion that some of the Folio texts, and many of the ‘‘good’’ quartos, had been set from Shakespearean ‘‘foul papers’’. Eighteenthand nineteenth-century editors believed that the Folio editors had relied on corrupt scribal documents for their texts. In opposition to this, the New Bibliographers saw evidence that Shakespeare’s own manuscripts underlay many of the early editions. Whereas earlier accounts of Shakespeare’s textual history had been sunk in a ‘‘quagmire of . . . despondency’’, these findings suggested new directions for research (Greg, Shakespeare 92). The result, Pollard suggested, would be to replace the pervasive attitude of pessimism in Shakespearean textual studies with one of ‘‘optimism’’ (‘‘Foundations’’ 383 84). As Pollard’s and Greg’s choices of title make clear, the New Bibliography aimed to set Shakespeare’s text on new foundations. Greg was fully aware of the revolutionary import of the movement, and, in a strain of slightly self-mocking hyperbole, he portrayed himself and his allies as a cadre of radical conservatives poised to sweep away the errors of the intervening years and restore Shakespeare to