Chapter 4 - Hamlet Mobilized

Summary

This essay concentrates on the practice and significance of parodying Shakespearean speeches during wartime, which reached a height during the French Revolutionary-Napoleonic Wars. At a particularly pivotal moment – the renewal of war in 1803 – a spate of parodies of Hamlet’s ‘To be or not to be’ soliloquy appeared in print, most of which adapted the speech for Napoleon, who debates the merits of invading Britain. This essay examines these overlooked parodies, paying particular attention to George Woodward’s ‘Buonaparte’s Soliloquy at Calais’ published by Rudolph Ackermann and circulated widely, including in the Weimer-based journal London und Paris. While these confident parodies express unambiguous support for Britain’s war effort and condemn Napoleon, they do not testify to united public opinion about the necessity of war or to untrammelled optimism about its outcome. This essay establishes their wider significance: they draw attention to a politically and culturally astute readership that was not limited by national or conflict lines, and they reveal the fractures beneath confident wartime propaganda. Hamlet’s famous soliloquy becomes a malleable rhetorical template for carrying out topical wartime debate, facilitating political discourse that could draw attention to the divisive debates underlining this period of conflict.