Work of National Importance: Shakespeare in Dartmoor

Abstract

In the spring of 1916, Bertrand Russell argued that conscientious objectors were at the avant-garde of progress and civilization and constituted ‘the greatest source of progress and moral strength to be found in the nation’.¹ Less than two months before the Shakespeare tercentenary in April and about three months before the battle of the Somme on 1 July, the introduction of conscription through the Military Service Act, enforced on 2 March 1916, divided public opinion. The Great War did not only promote chauvinistic propaganda and absurd patriotism; it also propelled pacifism, often with the aid of socialist and religious ideas, through the figures of those young men who first refused to enlist voluntarily (in spite of the white feather posted or publicly handed to them by overzealous patriots) and later defied conscription through conscientious objection. Bertrand Russell’s visionary opinions took time to gain ascendancy but by the fiftieth anniversary of the 1916 Service Act, the first British men who said ‘no’ to conscription and war were hailed as heroes.² This chapter aims to reconstruct the ways in which Shakespearean drama could speak for those who in 1916 refused to fight and kill and how cross-dressing, at a time in which restrictive definitions of masculinity were dominant, turned out to be liberating. As the cultural history of Shakespeare may benefit from occasionally assuming the garb of a cultural biography of the plays in relation to other artefacts of material culture, this study examines concert programmes, written memoirs and photographs of First World War conscientious objectors.