Chapter 2 - “What We All Have in Common”

Summary

The great documentarian Humphrey Jennings is credited with helping to create the iconography of “the people’s war,” a period concept that emphasized how people of all social positions pulled together for the collective good. In Fires Were Started, which focuses on a day in the life of an Auxiliary Fire Service substation, a weary and grief-stricken fireman reads aloud from Macbeth’s speech to Banquo’s murderers. Whereas these lines have (somewhat bizarrely) been taken as evidence of Shakespeare’s status as an emblem of national unity, they articulate a strong sense of class grievance as well as skepticism about the collective ideal of the “people’s war.” In this way, Jennings mobilizes Shakespeare to explore the limits of the model of unity with which the playwright was associated. In doing so, Jennings contends that such unity is not given but in constant need of re-attainment.