Introduction: Memorialising Shakespeare, Memorialising Ourselves

This introductory chapter starts by situating Shakespeare commemoration in the context of recent theory on cultural and collective memory. It then examines the relationship between literary memorialisation and the nation state before problematising commemoration events outside Europe in the context of postcolonial and decolonial theory. Commemoration events have become fraught, it suggests, because of a growing tendency to focus on the politics of the present. This presentist position, which typically represents the values and interests of the past and present as radically opposed to one another, presents challenges for traditional modes of memorialisation, which in the past have sought to demonstrate positive links and continuities between the literatures and cultures of past and present. The introduction concludes with a set of detailed summaries of the chapters in the volume.

these moments, each event has also been an occasion for the community commemorating him to celebrate itself. Whatever the scale of these communities-whether they involve empires, nations, towns and cities, clubs, universities, or schools-the act of memorialising Shakespeare enables each collective to register its own significance by connecting itself with his name. To put it in Skemp's terms, 'linking' a date and place in the present with Shakespeare's 'eternity' confers 'honour'-and cultural capital-on the 'selves' who perform the act of memorialisation. 2 As Clara Calvo puts it, 'in rites of remembrance, […] the commemorators often commemorate themselves'. 3 This process, however, is not always straightforward, since it involves not only finding similarities but also smoothing over differences between Shakespeare's period and the groups' own historical realities, as well as reconciling the often conflicting needs of the individuals within the groups themselves.

Shakespearean Commemorations and Collective Identity
As Supriya Chaudhuri argues, commemorations 'negotiate multiple temporalities', bringing together 'different kinds of time-the "universal" time of the classic, the sedimented time of history, and the time of the reformed present'. 4 The purpose of this negotiation or, as Skemp calls it, this 'linking' of temporalities, is to produce another kind of link: a mutual binding of those who participate in the commemorative activity into a cohesive group. Through a collective memorialisation, individual 'selves' become 'ourselves'-us, a unified community. This process has been theorised by the scholars of collective memory, commemoration, and group identity, among them Maurice Halbwachs, Jan and Aleida Assmann, Pierre Nora, Paul Connerton, and Paul Ricoeur. They have demonstrated that a social group's collective memory is constructed through a ritualised performance (memorialisation) of those aspects of the past which are deemed significant to that group's present needs and to its continuing existence in the future. In effect, actualising the past in the present through commemorative activities increases a community's awareness of its 'unity and particularity', resulting in the 'concretion of [its] identity'. 5 Shakespeare has been publicly commemorated in large-and small-scale events across the globe since Garrick's 1769 Jubilee. However, if the key function of memorialisation is the building of a group's collective memory and identity, Shakespeare seems a peculiarly ill-suited object to memorialise. According to Ricoeur, commemorative acts tend to focus on historical events which 'are held to be remarkable, even founding, with respect to the common identity ' (p. 85). For national or ethnic groups, such foundational events include migrations and territorial conquests; the establishment of cities, dynasties, or religions; as well as wars, revolutions, and political treaties, particularly those that led to the group achieving self-determination. As a literary, rather than a political or a military figure, Shakespeare did not directly contribute to any such event. The most commonly celebrated Shakespearean anniversaries-the (presumed) dates of his birth and death-do not mark dramatic changes in any social group's history in the way that a redrawing of borders, emancipation, or a change of the established regime would. Consequently, commemorating Shakespeare must be different from commemorating a significant historical 'fact'.
Joep Leerssen and Ann Rigney address this issue in their recent edited collection Commemorating Writers in Nineteenth-Century Europe. Following the foundational work of Eric Hobsbawm, Terence Ranger, Benedict Anderson, and Pierre Nora, Rigney and Leerssen argue that the proliferation of commemorative activities across Europe in the long nineteenth century was a symptom of 'the self-reflexive cultivation of the past as a resource for collective identity', associated with contemporaneous nation-building movements. 6 Rigney and Leerssen emphasise the prominent role that literary figures played in this phenomenon, with disproportionately large numbers of commemorations centring on exemplary national authors. They maintain that it was writers, more than any other cultural figures, who were able to 'reconcile the state's history with the nation's memories, bringing together different periods and regimes in a timeless sanctuary of collective self-recognition linked to a canon of ever-reproducible texts' (Rigney and Leerssen,p. 10). Literary authors could thus unify the nation's past and present into a coherent narrative of national identity. Moreover, commemorating them in public invested the private pleasure of reading with an aura of not only engaging with high art, but also participating in civic life and fulfilling one's patriotic duty (Rigney and Leerssen,p. 10).
Building on this analysis of the role of writers in nation-building processes, Marijan Dović and Jón Karl Helgason develop their theory of 'cultural sainthood'. In their definition, 'the concept of cultural saint applies to departed artists and intellectuals that have been singled out as leading representatives of their regional or national culture and are made to embody certain elementary cultural and political ideals'. 7 Dović and Helgason convincingly argue that the veneration of cultural saints and their work 'has decisively contributed to fostering a common symbolic imaginarium, stabilizing shared memories, and maintaining social cohesion of the emerging communities' (p. 6). In her recent account of literary tourism and writer's house museums, Nicola J. Watson further explores the quasi-religious dimensions of cultural sainthood in the literary sphere. As she demonstrates, the tendency to associate literary heritage with the physical remains of dead writers has led to a range of commemorative phenomena-literary 'necro-tourism' centred on pilgrimages to writers' graves, the exhumation of the corpses of canonical writers on a variety of pretexts, and the establishment of writer's house museums showcasing a range of dead authors' possessions, as well as death masks, clothing, and (in some cases) body parts. 8 Together with Rigney and Leerssen's insights, these formulations allow us to move the analysis of collective memory away from foundational historical events, leaders, and politicians, towards cultural figures, predominantly artists and writers, whose creative output has come to be seen as embodying the crucial characteristics of a given social group and their essential persistence across time. 9 What they do not explain, however, is the widespread practice of commemorating Shakespeare across the globe, by groups which cannot, in any strict geographical or historical sense, claim him as a representative of their 'regional or national culture'. If cultural saints are canonised predominantly due to their national or ethnic affiliation, how has Shakespeare become an object of veneration in contexts as diverse and remote from the land of his birth as Germany, Russia, or India?

National and Transnational Cultural Saints
Dović and Helgason's principal focus is on 'national poets as paradigmatic cultural saints', and on the ways in which 'they have been idealized and utilized in the context of modern nationalism ' (pp. 2, 5-6). They suggest that one of the key changes that the concept of sainthood underwent when transplanted from the religious to the secular, nation-building context, was 'a certain shift to particularity compared to the universality of the Christian saintly cults ' (p. 6). In other words, Christian saints had traditionally been worshipped by believers across the globe, while 'the national movements along with their cultural saints typically addressed narrower communities: nations ' (p. 6). However, Harald Hendrix argues that commemorating artists cannot be fully explained within the context of nation-building movements alone. His analysis of the celebrations of Petrarch's centenaries in Italy and France leads him to conclude that they 'comprise many elements that transcend the framework of nation-building and denote links with more traditional cultural practices, inspired by cosmopolitanism on the one hand and local competition on the other'. 10 In this account, the nascent nationalist movements of the nineteenth century combined with earlier, pan-European forms of honouring universally acclaimed artists, and with the efforts of smaller localities-towns, cities, or regions-to bolster their own standing by association with such widely recognised cultural icons.
Acknowledging this composite nature of commemorative culture, Dović and Helgason introduce a distinction between the 'national cultural saints' and 'the internationally acclaimed elite of the hypercanon' of world literature (p. 198), that is 'Homer, Petrarch, Shakespeare, and other cultural greats that became international canonical icons before nation-building truly started' (p. 50). They suggest that 'the gap between national and transnational cultural saints is becoming increasingly visible in the globalized world', with the former recognised chiefly at a local level and the latter carrying universally acknowledged cultural capital (Dović and Helgason,p. 202). However, Shakespeare's case indicates that the same cultural figure can function as both a national and a transnational cultural saint: while there can be no doubt of his global prestige, he is also frequently hailed as the 'English' or 'British' national poet. 11 Moreover, his commemorations have attracted not only declarations of universality and competition between local centres, such as Stratfordupon-Avon and London, but also cultural tugs-of-war on an international scale, most notably between Britain and Germany during the First World War. 12 Thus, Shakespeare oscillates between a national and a transnational position, with aspects of each dominating at different historical junctions, depending on specific socio-political contexts. As Rigney and Leerssen point out, in commemorative activities 'the same figure can operate simultaneously within different mnemonic communities ' (p. 17). Analysing Shakespearean commemorations allows us to take this insight even further, since they demonstrate that a single object of commemoration can also function in different ways within the same mnemonic community. For instance, during the First World War both British and German commentators hailed Shakespeare as universal, while simultaneously arguing that their own nations but not their enemies had the right to claim him as their particular property. Clara Calvo summarises this situation as 'expos[ing] a fault-line between Shakespeare the national poet and the universal genius' ('Fighting over Shakespeare',p. 55). To come back to Skemp's formulation, sometimes the specific needs of 'our day' conflict with the more general values of Shakespeare's 'eternity'. Trying to satisfy both at the same time results in internal tensions and contradictions.
In traversing both national and transnational features of cultural sainthood, Shakespeare is a perfect example of an important feature of commemorative practices at large: in Rigney and Leerssen's words, they are 'often both inward-looking (consolidating bonds within the group) and outward-looking (sending signals across national or regional borders) ' (p. 18). In effect, building a group's identity through collective memory entails not only finding and reinforcing the common features within that group, but also comparing it to other groups outside. These ongoing comparisons serve the purpose of confirming the group's uniqueness, but also identifying similarities between the group and the outsiders, similarities that can be used both for building bridges (collaborating, forming alliances) and for seeking competitive advantage (as competition is only possible where there exist some shared terms of reference, a common 'currency'). Recognising this dual, inward/outward nature of commemorations is particularly important in the current age of globalisation. As the cultural geographer Kevin Robins argues, we need to study 'the relation between globalizing and particularizing dynamics', rather than trying to see the global and the local as separate phenomena independent of each other. 13 We cannot ignore the fact that commemorations of cultural saints, including Shakespeare, occur within this globalising-particularising dynamic. To quote Ton Hoenselaars, they happen 'in a world of linguistic and cultural diversity where globalizing action causes antiglobalizing reaction, and where the inadequacies of international structures provoke nationalistic responses, and vice versa, in the never-ending dialectics of human history'. 14 Consequently, interrelating the global and the local aspects of Shakespearean commemorations lies at the heart of this volume.

Commemorating Shakespeare: Hegemony and History
One important issue that we have to address when discussing the interaction between the global and the local dimensions of commemorating Shakespeare is the extent to which what passes for his 'universal' value and appeal is in fact a disguised dissemination of Western cultural hegemony. In this respect, Sonia Massai asks: 'Has Shakespeare become one of the powerful global icons through which local cultural markets are progressively Westernized? Is the dream […] of a super-cultural, universally enjoyable and consumable Shakespeare imposing Western values over other cultural traditions and economies?' 15 These questions echo the concerns raised by postcolonial criticism in relation to the uses of the Eurocentric literary canon, epitomised by Shakespeare, to subjugate colonised peoples. In Michael Neill's summary, 'Shakespeare's writing was entangled from the beginning with the projects of nation-building, Empire and colonization'. Consequently, studying the ways in which Shakespeare was 'simultaneously invented as the "National Bard" and promoted as a repository of "universal" human values' can reveal 'how the canon became an instrument of imperial authority'. 16 This is because local/global literary and artistic exchanges happen within wider political contexts, which involve relations of domination and subordination, underpinned not only by economic or military power but also by cultural assumptions and hierarchies. In effect, promoting a Eurocentric literary canon as universally applicable and naturally superior consolidates the colonisers' power, investing it with an allegedly incontestable aesthetic and ethical authority. Moreover, we can extend the questioning of Shakespeare's 'universal' value beyond the colonial/postcolonial contexts. As Jean Howard and Marion O'Connor point out, allegedly 'natural and unchanging' truths usually coincide with the values of 'those within a traditional pale of privilege'. 17 Needless to say, privilege and discrimination operate in relation to not only racial prejudice and other aftermaths of colonialism, but also other areas, most notably class, religion, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality. Consequently, Shakespeare can and has been used as more than 'a fetish of Western civilization' and 'the instrument of empire'. 18 His authority and cultural capital have frequently been 'incorporated into the dominant ideology and made an instrument of hegemony', regardless of whether that hegemony is maintained along the lines of class, race, gender, or any other entrenched inequality. Graham Holderness has demonstrated how, due to his privileged canonical position, Shakespeare has ceased to be just an author or a body of texts and has become 'a powerful cultural institution'. 20 This institution, sometimes referred to as 'the Shakespeare myth', is associated with the highest aesthetic, intellectual, and moral values, and thus invested with considerable cultural authority, which in turn is often 'appropriated in the service of various ideologies and political interests'. 21 Because many of the ideological appropriations of Shakespeare serve the interests of hegemonic institutions, Holderness warns that the 'Shakespeare myth' can 'operate to delude, to corrupt and to enslave' ('Production', p. 5), helping dominant social groups impose their values on those whom they seek to control. 22 The increasing willingness on behalf of critics to explore Shakespeare's role in the projection of cultural hegemony reflects a larger set of changes in our understanding of the historical and literary pasts. Historian François Hartog argues that a form of 'presentism' has become pervasive in social and cultural thought since the late 1980s, so that present-day observers have become increasingly unwilling to draw any lines of distinction between past and present. Whereas Enlightenment observers viewed the past with a sense of veneration, as a storehouse of superior ideals and examples to be recovered and rejuvenated for present-day imitation, Hartog suggests that, in this new dispensation, the present has become our only source of enlightenment. 23 We have, according to this line of argument, become unable to look at the past without judging it by our own standards (and, inevitably, finding it wanting). Rather than seeing history as a source of inspiration, moral exemplars, and models for future emulation, we are now just as likely to view it with suspicion and resentment-scanning it for adversaries, perpetrators, and culprits. 24 In doing so, we convert the past into what Andrew Hadfield calls an 'allegory of the present' and its abiding concerns and anxieties. 25 In many respects, this kind of presentism is a reaction to the uncritical worship of the past which, as we have seen, often involves selecting certain elements of history and marginalising or even demonising those which do not fit with the official-national, ethnic, or class-driven-narratives. Recently, we have witnessed such uses of the past particularly in the ways in which nationalist and right-wing movements have canonised carefully selected historical periods or events-often ones that involve conflict with a clearly defined enemy-as the foundational moments for specific groups' identity formation. Robert Eaglestone identifies the Second World War as a key example of a historical event being used for these purposes in the current British political discourse. Eaglestone argues that, for the British, the war has become a form of 'affect-memory', which he defines as a particularly 'powerful and visceral' collective memory, one that does not rely on evidence or logical argument but appeals to emotions, making us 'feel things' rather than 'think about things rationally'. 26 Because this affect-memory draws on a sense of 'a shared common purpose' and 'a kind of certainty and pride: that "we" know who "we" are', it can easily be applied to exclude anybody who does not feel the same way as 'not "one of us", not rooted in the same past' (Eaglestone,p. 97, emphasis in the original). Since Eaglestone believes that such a way of defining the nation is harmful to political debate, he dubs it 'cruel nostalgia': a discourse that traps people in the past, blinding them not only to alternative opinions but also to the opportunities of the present and the future (p. 103). 27 In her book-length study of nostalgia, Svetlana Boym calls this phenomenon 'restorative nostalgia': a movement that aims to re-establish an allegedly original community, promising 'to rebuild the lost home and patch up the memory gaps'. 28 Restorative nostalgia, characteristic of 'national and nationalistic revivals all over the world', presents this 'lost home' not only as ethnically pure and culturally homogeneous, but also as being 'forever under a siege, requiring defense [sic] against the plotting enemy' (Boym,. In this manifestation, nostalgia is indeed politically dangerous, as it leads to the suppression of diversity, stifling of debate, and hatred of the 'other' within and without. We might connect the results of this form of nostalgia with what Coppélia Kahn and Clara Calvo call the 'belatedness' of much Shakespeare commemoration. Aiming to connect the present moment with an idealised-if not ossified-literary past, commemorators instead find that what was 'intended to be eternal eventually goes out of date'. 29 However, for Boym, the corrective to such an approach is not a presentism that demonises the past and glorifies the present alone. Instead, she proposes that there is another, more productive way of interacting with history: 'reflective nostalgia', one that recognises 'the imperfect process of remembrance' and consequently focuses 'not on recovery of what is [perceived] to be an absolute truth but on the meditation on history and passage of time' (Boym,pp. 41,49). This type of nostalgia, while cherishing the past, sees it as fragmented, contested, and open to multiple interpretations. In doing so, it 'reveals that longing and critical thinking are not opposed to one another, as affective memories do not absolve one from compassion, judgment or critical reflection' (Boym,. Effectively, the concept of reflective nostalgia allows us to acknowledge the importance of the past while at the same time resisting its hegemonic applications. It opens up the possibility of discussing collective memory and commemoration in a sympathetic yet critical manner, one which admits not only one dominant narrative but a multiplicity of individual voices, some agreeing with the official version of events and some questioning, modifying, or rejecting it. In a recent contribution to the debate that asks, with Hamlet, whether 'time is' indeed 'out of joint' (Hamlet , 1.5.195), Aleida Assmann agrees that the past thirty years have witnessed a legitimate 'crisis' in historical understanding. Unlike Hartog, however, she is less inclined to view this crisis as wholly negative, seeing it instead as reflecting the collapse of a specifically Western-centred, modernisation-focussed understanding of history. In the wake of this collapse, depictions and understandings of the historical past have become more attuned to non-Western cultures and experiences. A 'new ethics of historical responsibility' has emerged, she argues, one that places the 'suffering and trauma' of those exploited by Empire and capitalist development at centre stage. 30 The critical postures towards history that presentism encourages have clear implications for literary commemoration events. While commemorators in Skemp's time may have sought to 'honour themselves' via a connection with what they perceived as a straightforwardly illustrious literary past, it is less apparent that more recent commemoration events have quite the same orientation to history. Contemporary literary commemoration may therefore be more guarded, nuanced, or openly critical than in previous historical regimes, seeking to give room to diverse voices rather than maintaining a single, canonically underwritten party line.
In the light of these insights, we need to question the political neutrality of group self-memorialisation of the kind that Skemp lauds. In performing commemorative acts, do we simply 'honour' ourselves, or do we also select and promote particular values and versions of history, while marginalising others? In other words, the process of forming a collective identity through celebrating figures like Shakespeare may involve imposing the cultural hegemony of one group on an entire community, at the cost of suppressing or devaluing particular aesthetic or political strands within that community. We also have to recognise that, on a broader level, attitudes towards both history and the traditional English literary canon have changed across time. Commemoration events, although superficially 'honouring' the same author, may have significantly different orientations towards the past, as well as different concepts of which collective identities in the present commemorative events serve or benefit.
While dominant groups often employ Shakespeare to underpin their supremacy, it does not follow that those whom they wish to control simply accept and reproduce the official interpretations of his work. Instead, imposing and maintaining cultural hegemony elicits a considerable spectrum of responses, which in some instances enable members of subordinate groups to turn Shakespeare's authority to their own advantage. For instance, in colonial contexts, material and social advancement became available to those among the local population who could demonstrate a good command of the English language and cultural idiom. Accordingly, in British colonies in Hong Kong, India, and Africa, Shakespeare formed an important part of English-language education, which offered native students opportunities to advance materially and socially by giving them access to profitable careers in administration and business. 31 Some postcolonial critics argue that acquiring these advantages constitutes a rapprochement with colonial hegemony, as they stem from the colonisers' efforts to create native, educated elites, who internalise and imitate Eurocentric norms and thus help the colonisers to rule the indigenous masses to the detriment of the local population and local culture. 32 Nevertheless, as Homi Bhabha points out, such colonial mimicry also carries subversive potential. By successfully mastering the colonisers' language and mores, the colonised demonstrate that they are not essentially different-thus, crucially, not essentially inferior-to their colonial rulers. Consequently, mimicry produces a 'double vision which in disclosing the ambivalence of colonial discourse also disrupts its authority'. 33 In effect, imitating and celebrating Western cultural icons like Shakespeare in colonial contexts can produce a variety of often contradictory results: material and social benefits for some members of the colonised populations, devaluing of the indigenous culture, but also the questioning of the very premises on which colonial oppression is built.
Moreover, reading and performing Shakespeare opens up space for multiple interpretations and reinterpretations, some of which allow disenfranchised communities to challenge dominant ideologies. In Craig Dionne and Parmita Kapadia's words, 'there is in Shakespeare's writing the capacity to release voices and agents that exceed the canonical uses to which he is traditionally put'. 34 Readers and performers from a variety of backgrounds adapt his work through such strategies as translation, parody, pastiche, hybridisation, and recontextualisation into settings that reflect the concerns of particular communities. As recent criticism has demonstrated, representatives of colonised nations, ethnic and racial minorities, and women, to name only some disenfranchised groups, have all produced their own versions of Shakespeare that voice their concerns and criticise the established interpretations of his work. 35 Shakespeare is contested ground, at the same time underpinning hegemonic discourses and offering marginalised communities a way to challenge those discourses and appropriate some of their power.
Crucially, the construction and perpetuation of collective memory can also serve multiple functions, situated on a spectrum between hegemonic and subaltern. Discussing the continuing competition between the 'official' and 'oppositional' memories of the Second World War, Lucy Noakes concludes that the established, officially sanctioned versions of the events can never fully suppress alternative, marginalised interpretations. Consequently, rather like Shakespeare's meaning, collective memory is 'never fixed and always open to contestation'. 36 Both Shakespeare and collective memory are entangled in the negotiations between the global and the local, the powerful and the disempowered, the official and the marginal. These conjunctions make the study of Shakespearean commemorations a particularly topical subject at the time when collective identities are hotly debated, and when allegedly 'universal' or 'global' values are increasingly pitted against particular interests, be they defined by nationality, ethnicity, race, wealth, class, gender, or age.
Memorialising Shakespeare: Commemoration andCollective Identity, 1916-2016 As Skemp noted in his 1916 poem, commemorating Shakespeare can be a perfect vehicle for commemorating ourselves: constructing and shoring up our particular group identities. This volume engages explicitly with this process of self-memorialisation through Shakespeare. Deliberately wideranging in geographical scope, it explores the ways in which communities across the world have engaged with Shakespeare commemoration events. Examining Shakespeare-related celebrations in China, Egypt, France, Russia, and Ukraine, as well as within specific communities in North America and Britain, the chapters in this collection foreground the local contexts-cultural, linguistic, political, and institutional-in which these acts of remembrance have been embedded. The authors adopt a broad definition of what constitutes an act of Shakespearean memorialisation, focusing on a wide variety of commemorative activities: exhibitions, different types of performances, academic conferences, public galas, book and newspaper publications, and the promotion of Shakespearean readership. They draw upon a range of methodologies, including postcolonial studies, dance studies, the history of reading, and museum studies, in addition to traditional literary-historical analysis.
Memorialising Shakespeare draws not only on the theoretical insights generated in the field of memory studies, but also on previous investigations of Shakespearean commemorations. The volume is especially indebted to the strand of these studies which explores how celebrating Shakespeare has been used to construct, maintain, or contest various group identities, whether national, local, imperial, ethnic, or class-based. The pioneering forays in this area were Richard Foulkes' 1980s investigations of the Shakespeare anniversary of 1864 in the contexts of local rivalries between London and Stratford and of the working-class movements of the period. 37 In the 1990s and early 2000s, the emphasis shifted towards the role of Shakespeare commemorations in the forging of national and imperial identities. Thus, in his influential Making of the National Poet (1992), Michael Dobson devoted a substantial section (pp. 223-232) to Garrick's Stratford Jubilee of 1769, arguing that the event encapsulates the eighteenth-century beginnings of Shakespeare's 'national cult' in Britain. At the cusp of the twenty-first century, in two separate studies, Thomas Cartelli and Coppélia Kahn examined the ways in which the 1916 Shakespeare Tercentenary commemorations in the United States responded to contemporaneous anxieties concerning the nature of American identity in the face of an influx of immigration from southern and eastern Europe. 38 Kahn then broadened her investigation to consider the role of the 1916 celebrations in the debates surrounding fractured and competing identities within the early twentieth-century British Empire. This important contribution established a paradigm for subsequent exploration of the ambiguities that occur when Shakespearean anniversaries are observed in colonial and postcolonial settings, such as Ireland, South Africa, New Zealand, and Australia. 40 Eventually, research into commemorating Shakespeare came to include wider international, global, and local aspects of identity formation. Among them have been the First World War disputes between Britain and Germany over the right to 'own' Shakespeare; the uses of Shakespearean anniversaries to forge wartime alliances; their political applications during the Cold War; their relevance to class struggles; as well as their value in the increasingly globalised cultural marketplaces of the twentieth and twentyfirst centuries. 41 This gradual expansion of the field led to several international research projects, most notably 'Cultures of Commemoration' and 'Cultures of Commemoration II: Remembering Shakespeare', led by Clara Calvo, and 'Monumental Shakespeare: An Investigation of Transcultural Commemoration in Twentieth-Century Australia and England', led by Philip Mead and Gordon McMullan. The exchanges of ideas within these projects resulted in increasingly integrated investigations, which consider not only individual identities debated through Shakespearean commemorations, but also the complex interactions between local, global, national, class, and gendered aspects. These efforts have borne fruit in a number of important recent volumes, which bring together reflections on Shakespeare, collective memory, and various kinds of identities alongside close readings of the social, cultural, and political contexts of particular commemoration events. 42 While it builds on this rich prior research, the present volume benefits from being able to consider the most recent 'round' of significant Shakespearean anniversaries. The 2016 celebrations of the quatercentenary of Shakespeare's death coincided with identity politics dominating global debates. At the same time, in the wake of the debates in the field of collective memory and Shakespeare reception outlined above, those involved in organising these recent commemorations had at their disposal a more developed theoretical apparatus than the organisers of previous jubilees. Consequently, this volume seeks to include the insights and experiences of participant-observers, as scholars who have organised or been involved in Shakespeare-centred events in 2016 offer reflective and analytic accounts of their own aims and activities.
Part 1, 'War and Nationhood', examines connections between Shakespeare and national identity in the context of the two World Wars. In 'From Common Reader to Canon: Memorialising the Shakespeare-Reading Soldier during the First World War' (Chapter 2), Edmund G. C. King looks at press accounts of the reading habits of British soldiers during the First World War. Initially patronising, journalistic representations of soldier-readers came to focus increasingly on the soldier's potential to be converted into a reader of 'canonical' or classic literature as the war progressed. Enthusiastic press accounts of soldiers reading Shakespeare should not, King argues, be taken at face value as evidence for what was actually being read in trenches and training camps. Instead, the idea that soldiers were turning to Shakespeare and other canonical authors functioned as a powerful myth during the war, one that represented the conflict as a battle for the protection of an idealised national culture. The Shakespeare-reading soldier thereby came to stand in as an idealised image of the nation itself, one coming into possession of its own literary and cultural heritage through the trials of war. Kurt Schreyer, in 'A Greenwich Night's Dream: Shakespeare, Empire, and the Royal Navy in Post-Armistice Britain' (Chapter 3), provides a close reading of the 'Greenwich Night Pageant', a two-hour spectacle of music and theatre that took place at the Royal Naval College, Greenwich, between 16-24 June 1933. Shakespearean lines and characters appeared frequently during the pageant. Rather than being a simple call-back to Britain's early modern past, however, these Shakespearean elements were deliberately juxtaposed against the threats and challenges of the 1930s-militarism, technological change, and the prospect of renewed conflict. In Schreyer's reading, the 'Greenwich Night Pageant' reveals something of the social function of Shakespeare in Britain after the First World War. A token of national cultural identity, Shakespeare also provided a way of articulating (and assuaging) anxieties about Britain's place in rapidly changing world.
The chapters in Part 2: 'Nations and Empires' critically examine the role of Shakespeare commemoration (and those of other canonical writers) in the formation of identities within empires. In 'Culture and Colonialism: The 1916 Shakespeare Tercentenary in Egypt' (Chapter 4), Karma Sami and Monika Smialkowska discuss a series of commemorative events that have so far received little scholarly attention. As Sami and Smialkowska point out, Egyptian land has been occupied by a succession of external empires for millennia, but the First World War represented a particularly difficult moment in Egypt's imperial history. Converted into a British protectorate in 1914, Egypt was subjected to a draconian regime of wartime restrictions and quickly became the staging ground for hundreds of thousands of Entente troops, many of whom behaved disruptively towards the local population. Reflecting this larger context, Shakespeare tercentenary events in Egypt combined anger 'towards imperialist occupation' with an 'appreciation' on behalf of some Egyptian writers and social elites for the 'finer elements of British culture'. Resisting retrospective assimilation into a strict colonial mimicry/anti-colonial resistance framework, Egyptian commemorative events were marked by an underlying ambivalence, in which some participants 'were able to use Shakespeare to present a subtle criticism of the colonial situation, even if they did not produce wholesale anti-colonial reworkings of his plays'. In 'Divergence and Convergence: The "Universal" versus the National Bard' (Chapter 5) Irena R. Makaryk examines the ideologically fraught issue of literary commemoration in the Soviet Union. Focusing on commemorative events involving Shakespeare and the Ukrainian poet Taras Shevchenko (1814-61), Makaryk analyses some of the challenges-and opportunities-posed by memorialising 'national' authors within an international or universal framework. During the 1964 celebrations of the tercentenary of Shakespeare's birth, Soviet authorities sought to co-opt both authors for the official cause. At the same time, however, these events generated resistance. Some representatives of minority ethnic groups in the USSR refused to acknowledge Shakespeare's relevance to their own national cultures, while memorialising Shevchenko became a covert rallying point for Ukrainian nationalists. These fracture lines within memorialisation events indicate the inability of authorities within the Russia-dominated USSR to fully resolve the underlying cultural and linguistic tensions that persisted among the many nationalities and ethnicities that made up the Soviet Union.
Part 3: 'Local Identities' turns to more localised instances of commemoration, examining the role Shakespeare has played in the articulation of location-based identities. Dominique Goy-Blanquet, organiser of the Shakespeare 450 commemorative events in Paris in 2014, examines those commemorations against the backdrop of the evolving attitudes to Shakespeare in France in her chapter 'French Shakespeare: From Victor Hugo to Patrice Chéreau' (Chapter 6). Starting with an account of Victor Hugo's efforts to organise commemorations for the tercentenary of Shakespeare's birth in 1864, she describes in detail the extensive round of events that were mounted during Shakespeare 450. Combining exhibitions, workshops, lectures, and theatrical performances, the Shakespeare 450 celebrations were specifically designed to resonate with the long history of Shakespeare performance and reception in France, drawing connections between past and present. In Chapter 7, 'Canonising Cleopatra? Shakespeare400 and the Library, Lovers, and Saints of Alexandria', Katherine Hennessey likewise places a recent Shakespeare commemoration event in the context of a longer, place-based history. The Shakespeare400 celebrations were organised by the Biblioteca Alexandrina and took place in Alexandria in 2016. Yet, as Hennessey explains, Shake-speare400 was curiously reticent about the one Shakespeare play set in Alexandria, Antony and Cleopatra, and the character of Cleopatra herself.
Taking this gap in the memorialising programme as her starting point, Hennessey draws a series of connections between female figures from Alexandrian history, particularly Saint Catherine of Alexandria and the philosopher Hypatia, and Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra. Shakespeare's play, Hennessey suggests, was its own 'site of memory', in which Shakespeare re-articulated the traditional story of St Catherine's martyrdom (itself perhaps drawing on elements of the murder of Hypatia) in order to write the death of Cleopatra.
The contributors to Part 4, 'Global Transactions', seek to position Shakespeare commemoration within wider economies of exchange, both among nations and between artistic modes of expression. In Chapter 8, 'Citizen of the world, or citizen of nowhere? Shakespeare Lives in China in 2016', Duncan Lees draws on his own experiences as a participant in the British Council-funded Shakespeare Lives in China commemoration events in 2016. Situating those events within the longer history of Shakespeare reception in China, Lees describes the sometimes-conflicting roles Shakespeare was called upon to play during the Shakespeare Lives project. The British Council and the sponsoring GREAT Britain campaign both viewed Shakespeare Lives in highly instrumental terms. For the Chinese events, this meant, among other things, promoting the appeal of British culture-and British universities-via Shakespeare for the lucrative international student market. Lees describes how he and other British participants in the 'All the World's a Stage' tour to five cities in northern and eastern China were at pains to resist traditional approaches to Shakespeare that might fit too neatly into this reductive, soft-powerfocused framework. Nevertheless, they found that many Chinese participants themselves either valued or expected the 'traditional' Shakespeare they had been promised by Shakespeare Lives promotional material. The wider commercial and institutional logics of global Shakespeare commemoration-as well as longer traditions of Shakespeare reception in China-had a way of asserting themselves irrespective of the intentions of individual participants. Elizabeth Klett, in 'Commemorating Shakespeare through Dance andMusic, 1964-2016' (Chapter 9), examines a phenomenon often excluded from accounts of Shakespeare commemoration-the performance of dance adaptation of Shakespeare's works. Klett's chapter analyses the performance choices and reception of Shakespearean dance works in two separate commemorative contexts-the premiere of Frederick Ashton's The Dream in April 1964 for the quatercentenary of Shakespeare's birth and the Birmingham Royal Ballet's triple billing for the 2016 celebrations, which featured José Limón's one-act version of Othello, The Moor's Pavane (1949), David Bintley's 1999 Shakespeare Suite, and the world premiere of Jessica Lang's Wink, an adaptation of the Sonnets. In each of these settings, Klett writes, 'choreographers and dancers reveal "Shakespeare" to be multiply-situated: classical and contemporary, romantic and tortured, homoerotic and heterosexual, textual and choreographic'.
The contributors to the final section of the volume, Part 5: 'Community Shakespeares', were both involved in organising local Shakespearean commemoration events for the 2016 quatercentenary. In these chapters, they offer reflective accounts of their experiences and what they reveal about the functions and dynamics of community-based literary commemoration. Adam Hansen (Chapter 10, 'Curating Shakespeare in the North') looks back on his role as co-organiser of an exhibition and series of Shakespeare-related events at the Literary and Philosophical Society (Lit and Phil) in Newcastle upon Tyne in April-May 2016. The 'Shakespeare in the North' exhibition put on display a diverse range of books and objects in the Lit and Phil's collections. In doing so, Hansen writes, it revealed 'that the uses to which Shakespeare is put are diverse and fascinating-in the items we gathered we saw Shakespeare related to life insurance, ornithology, evolutionary science, elocution, education, satire and songs'. In Chapter 11, '"The Conceit of This Inconstant Stay": Exhibiting Shakespeares in Eugene, Oregon', Lara Bovilsky examines three exhibitions mounted at the University of Oregon in 2016: the Folger Library's touring exhibit, 'First Folio! The Book that Gave Us Shakespeare, on tour from the Folger Shakespeare Library' and two companion exhibits curated by Bovilsky designed to complement it, 'Beyond the First Folio' and 'Time's Pencil: Shakespeare After the Folio'. Exploring the University of Oregon Library's special collections in preparation for the exhibition, Bovilsky discovered an unexpected wealth of Shakespeare-related materials, one that demonstrated 'the variation over time in how Shakespeare's works were understood, published, and performed and in how Shakespeare himself was perceived from the 1640s to the present day'. Reflecting on the varied and highly individual feedback on the exhibitions provided by visitors, she concludes that, while it is vital to examine the 'assumptions and values underpinning our approaches to commemoration', there is no single way in which commemoration provides meaning and significance to those who experience it. Ton Hoenselaars concludes the volume in a reflective Afterword that looks backwards to Shakespeare performances in temporary internment and military camps during the First World War and forwards to some of the complexities and difficulties that accompanied Shakespeare commemorative performances during 2016.
Placing earlier memorialisations alongside the commemorative events of the past decade (2012,2014,2016), the essays in this volume provide a contemporary framework for understanding and contextualising Shakespeare commemoration across time and space. Yet the pace of global and political events has, if anything, accelerated since 2016, instituting a series of changes that promise to have their own effect on both literature and cultural memory. The rise of global networked communication technologies has resulted in rapid, large-scale social and cultural change. A renewed programme to decolonise the literature and history curricula in both schools and universities has risen up alongside the anti-racist protests of 2015-20. Meanwhile, the ubiquity of both digitisation and internetcapable handheld devices has created what Nick Couldry and Andreas Hepp call a condition of 'deep mediatization', in which the production and consumption of all media (including books) are now complexly 'interwoven' with the digital. 43 All of these changes-as well as others emerging-will necessarily mean that Shakespeare commemorations in future decades will take different forms and orientations than those of the past. The purpose of Memorialising Shakespeare has been to take an analytic audit of the field in the wake of the 2016 commemorations, one which provides an account of past events and offers future literary historians a sense of where scholarship on Shakespearean memorialisation stands as the field crosses the threshold of the 2020s.