Wartime Shakespeare

Amy Lidster is Departmental Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Oxford. She is the author of Publishing the History Play in the Time of Shakespeare: Stationers Shaping a Genre (Cambridge University Press, 2022) and Authorships and Authority in Early Modern Dramatic Paratexts (forthcoming). She is co-editor of Shakespeare at War: A Material History (Cambridge University Press, 2023).

• Introduction: a history of wartime production and reception; Part I: 1. Royal Shakespeare: Commemorating conflict during the Seven Years' War (1756-63); 2. Shakespeare as propaganda: British military performances during the American revolutionary war (1775-83); 3. 'Patriotic' Shakespeare and dialectics of conflict during the French revolutionary-Napoleonic wars (1792-1815); Interlude. Nostalgia, nation building and the Russian war (1853-56); Part 2: 4. Fragmenting Shakespeare(s) and the first world war (1914-18); 5. 'What we are fighting for': the state mobilization of Shakespeare during the second world war (1939-45); 6. 'Anti-war' Shakespeare: just war theory, sponsorship, and the impact of theatre during the Iraq war (2003-11); Conclusion: wartime Shakespeare – 'a playable surface'.

'Amy Lidster convincingly demonstrates how production and reception agents create a wartime Shakespeare more ideologically contested, and less consistently jingoistic, than we have recognized. Leading us from the Essex uprising in 1601 to the Iraq War at the dawn of the twenty-first century, Lidster is an able guide to a history of Shakespeare productions as open to interpretation as are the plays themselves.' Garrett Sullivan, Liberal Arts Professor of English, Pennsylvania State University