Vaughan Williams was much involved, as observer and practitioner, with the theatre of the ‘long’ Edwardian age: less with aspects of that theatre we might first think of now (its WestEnd actor-managers, its nascent New Drama) than with its more broadly popular elements.His interest in music hall and musical comedy is evident near the beginning of the London Symphony. He worked for two seasons at Stratford-upon-Avon as musical director of a non-metropolitan troupe, Frank Benson’s touring Shakespeare company. (Sir John in Love would grow from this.) The age’s taste for pageants saw him compiling scores for an episode in the Crystal Palace’s London Pageant and for a Pilgrim’s Progress spectacular: music that connects with Hugh the Drover and his later Bunyan operas. More esoterically, he wrote music for actual and proposed revivals of Ancient Greek comedy and tragedy, also for a resurrected masque (a form he came to love). And he collaborated, or planned to collaborate, with the two most important English theatrical pioneers of the age: Harley Granville Barker, providing music for symboliste drama at his request, and Edward Gordon Craig, readying himself to work with him on a projected (though abandoned) ballet for Serge Diaghilev.

It tends to be assumed that Shakespeare was enthusiastically mobilized as a patriotic figurehead during the First World War. Evidence of this practice can be found throughout the conflict, most often by individuals who had a prior vested interest in Shakespeare; but Chapter 4 exposes the dramatist’s contested position by examining four kinds of fragmentation that clarify his presence on wartime stages: fragmented users, fragmented texts, fragmented appeal, and fragmented evidence. It builds on Chapter 3’s discussion of patriotism, a concept that seems to indicate confidence and unity, but often reveals division. Chapter 4 evaluates the work of passionate theatre practitioners such as Frank Benson and Lena Ashwell who saw the performance of Shakespeare as a national service that could boost morale, raise funds, and educate both civilians and troops. It shows how the memoirs, public statements, and articles authored by these individuals have had an outsized influence in mediating our understanding of Shakespeare’s appeal. This chapter considers Benson’s performances within Britain; Ashwell’s work with the YMCA on the frontline and the provision of entertainment to troops; and, finally, the use of Shakespeare as part of theatre in Ruhleben, a civilian internment camp in Germany.