The holiday repeats continue with the three-part series from September about celebrating the centenaries of the death of the Bard. Today's looks back nearly one hundred years to 1916.
'Shakespeare, Drayton, and Ben Jonson had a merry meeting and it seems drank too hard; for Shakespeare died of a fever there contracted.' Thus the vicar of Stratford writing in his diary in 1661, more than forty years after the alleged occurrence. This gossip is regarded with scepticism today, but the date of William Shakespeare's burial -- 25 April 1616 -- has an altogether firmer foundation in an entry in the Stratford parish register (his memorial is above). Which means, gentle reader, that we have just under seven years to the tercentenary of Shakespeare's death. How best to mark that? In particular, can we think that a new complete works of Shakespeare for the screen could be created? What should that look like and how might it be achieved? These are the questions for this three-part post, which starts today with a look back to 1916.

Tomorrow I intend to consider the single (and oft-derided) previous attempt to produce all of Shakespeare's plays -- The BBC Television Shakespeare, 1978-85 (another span of seven years) -- and also to look at what television did for the quatercentenary of the Bard's birth in 1964. On Wednesday we'll think more carefully about a complete works for the twenty-first century. But let's rewind today to Britain in the midst of the First World War.

Looking forward excitedly to the occasion in November 1915, The English Jounal, published for literature teachers, had an idea or two about how -- even in these dark times -- the tercentenary might be marked.

If your town is large enough, why not unite in the Shakespeare commemoration all the activities of all schools, school organizations, clubs, and social and civic organizations of every class ? ... The streets might be filled with Shakespearean characters in costume during the whole of this to-be-memorable day; the morning might be given to a grand parade, the afternoon to a pageant, out-of-door sports, and folk dances, and the evening to the out-of- door presentation of a Shakespearean play.

Official festivities, however, had perforce to be relatively modest. An Executive Committee for the Commemoration of the Shakespeare Tercentenary had been appointed in 1914 but in early 1916, with hundreds of thousands of troops in the trenches, there was doubt about whether its plans should be realised. This is from The Times of 12 January, recording the Committee's deliberations the previous day:

The opinion was generally and strongly expressed that it was the duty of the Committee to proceed, and that a postponement was both undesirable and impracticable. The chairman was able to announce that their majesties the King and Queen had graciously consented to give their patronage to the movement; and abundant other evidence was forthcoming that its fulfilment was the national desire.

Rather inconveniently, the purported date of Shakespeare's death, 23 April, fell in 1916 on Easter Sunday, but ingeniously the Committee decided that in fact 23 April 'Old Style' corresponded to 3 May 'New Style' (taking into account the adoption of the Gregorian calendar in 1752) and so 'Shakespeare Day' was designated for the latter date. By 20 March The Times could report a full programme of planned activities. After all...

Our enemies, the Germans, who have, it is said, organised elaborate celebrations and suites of performances at Weimar, Berlin, and Prague under the auspices of Dr Brandl and others, are in the habit of organizing centenaries with the special object of humiliating their neighbours.

There would, The Times assured its readers, be special sermons preached and lectures given. Julius Caesar would be played in a gala performance at Drury Lane on 2 May with proceeds going to the Red Cross. Rather more ambitiously (but seemingly of less interest to the top people who read the paper) the London Shakespeare League was preparing performances of no less than twenty Shakespeare plays 'for the people at the Victoria Hall in the Waterloo-road'. For the people... Anyway, that's today's Old Vic, which then was managed by the redoubtable Miss Lilian Baylis.

In Stratford there were to be special performances and a procession to Shakespeare's tomb which would be enhanced by 'floral decoration'. Other events were planned for Oxford, Manchester, Norwich, Dublin and elsewhere. Meanwhile, as The Times reported, 'the Baconians' (that is, those who believed Hamlet and the rest to have been written by Sir Francis Bacon)

... are advised to be preparing, not a tercentenary, but a ceremony of elaborate derision, of which, however, no exact intelligence is forthcoming.

Theatres, churches and schools were all mobilised to mark the day -- but not, seemingly, the truly popular artform of the moment, the cinema. There is no mention that I can find in The Times' coverage of the tercentenary celebrations of any special Shakespeare films. Following on, however, from last week's post about the 1913 'silent' Hamlet, I can turn again to Judith Buchanan's book Shakespeare on Silent Film: an Excellent Dumb Discourse.

As well as discussing in a chapter on the 1916 tercentenary three major Shakespeare films produced that year -- a Macbeth and two Romeo and Juliets -- Buchanan highlights The Real Thing at Last, which was subtitled The 'Macbeth' Murder Mystery. Written by J.M. Barrie, author of Peter Pan, this 1916 comedy was unquestionably a response to the official celebrations of the tercentenary.

As a skittish way of pointing out the oversight in omitting moving pictures entirely from these plans [by the tercentenary committee], and perhaps also of puncturing the rather po-faced, reverential approach to Shakespeare of most tercentenary events, the film that Barrie wrote... was self-consciously silly.

The Real Thing at Last seems now to be lost, as is the 1916 Macbeth, which starred the great English classical stage actor Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree, and also the rival Hollywood R&Js. The more prestigious of the latter came from Metro Pictures Corporation and starred screen idols Francis X Bushman and Beverly Bayne ('the foremost stellar combination in motion pictures'). The other was something of a spoiler, made quickly by the Fox Film Corporation, with screen vampTheda Bara playing Juliet as 'no Sunday-school girl' (Bara's words).

Barrie's target in his spoof The Real Thing at Last was in part at least Hollywood's (and by extension, America's) fast and loose approach to Shakespeare. The film contrasted a (fictional) 'proper' version of the Scottish play with an imagined version being made by a Stateside producer called Thunder. Buchanan quotes a description of the film-with-a-film from the Cinema News and Property Gazette:

Immediately you are plunged into a magnificanet feast at King Duncan's palace, where lovely ladies and shaggy thanes engage in the turkey-trot and other delights of the kind. Then come the witches, lovely creatures, working up Macbeth... Duncan seems to have grown cautious with the passage of centuries; he distrusts the climbing Macbeths and spends the night under his bed, but in vain. Lady Macbeth gets a bucketful of blood to smear the pages and sleep-walks as she never did before. Then the screen warns Macbeth that General Macduff is after him. 'If you see a wood moving, it's a cinch!'

You get the idea, and of course in the putative British version Lady Macbeth rubbed only at one 'very small spot of blood'. Also, the American climax had Macbeth and Macduff slugging it out on the top of a sky-scraper while the staging for the Brits was in a muddy ditch. Oh, and in the US version, the final card reads, 'The Macbeths repent and all ends happily.' (Perhaps this is a version we should pitch to Disney today.)

The Real Thing at Last premiered at the London Coliseum on 7 March 1916 at a performance graced by the royals and raising funds for the troops. It's fascinating, of course, to read that the prejudices we have today about transatlantic screen versions of the Bard were prevalent nearly a century ago. But the reviewer for the Cinema News and Property Gazette failed to see the joke.

The type of photo-play that [Barrie] satirizes in this boisterous burlesque of Macbeth, as being characteristic of, and peculiar to, the United States, is in truth peculiar to no country, and is anything but characteristic of screen dramatic art. It is not true that the dominant characteristic of American production is an irreverent modernization of the classics of the British stage. On the contrary, the American feeling for our classics... errs, if it errs at all, on the side of fanatically reverent worship.

Leaving aside the accuracy of his analysis, I guess that this Mark Kermode of his day knew only too well who paid for the advertising in his august journal. He may also have thought it politic to be nice to Uncle Sam when Britain was looking to the USA to help them win the war.

So even when there was a war on, the motion picture industry could come up with at least four major films to mark the tercentenary of Shakespeare's death. Can we do rather better, ideally in the absence of a global conflict, one hundred years on? And if so, how? That's what I intend to consider in the two further parts of this post.