Negotiating the Memory of the ‘People’s War’: Hamlet and the Ghosts of Welfare in A Diary for Timothy by Humphrey Jennings (1944–45)

Abstract

An excerpt from the 1944 Hamlet performed at the Haymarket Theatre in London featuring John Gielgud appears for about six minutes right in the middle of Humphrey Jennings’s 1945 war documentary A Diary for Timothy.¹ Although announced as an embedded quotation, Jennings’s brief live footage of the graveyard scene disappoints the viewers’ expectations: crosscut with offstage live dialogues, the quotations from Shakespeare are unpacked and broken into fragments. That Jennings should employ this avant-garde Eisensteinian technique comes as no surprise given his credentials as a bold, versatile intellectual engaging in Surrealist experiments since the 1930s, and committed not only to film directing, but also to painting, photography and poetry. What is more striking is that he should choose to disrupt the compactness of what had been conceived as an uplifting patriotic narrative with this Shakespearean outburst. In spite of its brevity, Jennings’s six-minute Hamlet works crucially and subversively upon the 40-minute long A Diary for Timothy and affects the viewers’ response both to previous and subsequent sequences which become ‘Hamletized’ in the process. In its turn, the discursive context of Jennings’s 1945 end-of-the-war film brings about the dismantling of the traditional Shakespearean embedment and therefore points to late twentieth-century Shakespearean remediations.