Essential media about the arts

To King’s College London on Saturday for the stimulating symposium Monumental Shakespeares. ‘Remembering Shakespeare in 1916 and after’ was the subtitle for a day of talks exploring the ways in which the tercentenary of Shakespeare’s death was marked. The discussions felt timely because two very significant dates will soon be upon us: 2014, which is the four hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the poet’s birth, and 2016, the quatercentenary of his death. On the other hand, numerous institutions under the title of the World Shakespeare Festival 2012 are going big on the Bard next year, alongside the Olympics. (Our film of Julius Caesar with the RSC for BBC is a contribution to the WSF.) So what might we learn from events a century ago to help us find appropriate ways to remember Shakespeare in the coming years?

For some general background to the tercentenary, and to associated theatre and film productions, take a look at my September 2009 blog post Towards 2016 [1]: 1916. Saturday was concerned primarily with the material monuments of the year, when the debate was focussed around whether Shakespeare would be best remembered by a statue or a theatre. As Philip Mead, Chair of Australian Literature at the University of Western Australia, told us, it was Sydney that got the statue, although this was not completed until 1926.

From the early 1900s, there was a group in London actively planning the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre, an initiative which many years later brought forth the National Theatre. A plot of land in Bloomsbury was purchased, but further fund-raising was slow and building had yet to start when the cataclysm of the First World War changed everyone’s priorities for memorials. As several of Saturday’s speakers explored, the scholar Israel Gollancz organised the lavish volume A Book of Homage to Shakespeare (copies of which could be carefully leafed through at King’s, thanks to the generosity of the National Theatre Archive), but no progress was made on more concrete projects.

What did get built, as a fascinating paper by Ailsa Grant Ferguson explored, was the Shakespeare Hut. This was a temporary structure erected on the site of the proposed theatre, where the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine stands today on the corner of Keppel Street and Gower Street. As the above sketch indicates, the ‘hut’ was a substantial mock-Tudor bungalow which served as a hostel for soldiers from New Zealand and Australia. Run by the YMCA, it offered accommodation, meals, clean entertainment and even basic education. There were occasional theatricals as well.

The hut was demolished soon after the end of the war, and Dr Ferguson argued that it was quickly forgotten. The online timeline of the LSHTM makes no mention of the structure, although it does note that the site (‘a wilderness of huts and rubble’) was purchased from the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre group in 1923. There was to be an interval of forty years before that project saw the inauguration of the National Theatre in 1963. (For more details of this story, see Richard Findlater’s 1977 article The Road to King’s Reach.)

As was discussed by Ton Hoenselaars, from Utrecht University, London has a history of not building memorials to Shakespeare (although there is a rather fine one in Southwark Cathedral). The most notable ‘missing’ statue is the one that was planned in 1864 for the top of Primrose Hill, which was to be the endpoint of a grand memorial avenue running right across Regent’s Park from the top of Portland Place. It seems unlikely that London in four years’ time will see any comparable project. But what kind of ‘living monument’ might we look for? The discussions at KCL, which are ongoing within the Monumental Shakespeares collaborative research project, are an excellent way to approach this question.

The image above a sketch of the Shakespeare Hut, designed by architect W. Charles Waymouth and opened in London in August 1916; the title is a quotation from Hamlet, Act V Scene 1.