Shakespeare and British World War Two Film

"During the dark days of World War Two, British actors, politicians, writers and cultural commentators turned to Shakespeare in order to articulate both their national identity and the values for which their country was fighting. According to the literary critic G. Wilson Knight, Shakespeare is "the authentic voice of England"; to the actor Donald Wolfit, "[he] represents more than everything else the fighting spirit of our country"; and for the statesman and future prime minister Anthony Eden "our history is enacted, our philosophy as a people is given expression, in plays which are the greatest gift of English genius to mankind." In these formulations, Shakespeare and his works capture essential qualities of the nation; they serve as a principle of unity, a marker of what binds its people together. It is against this cultural backdrop that we can place Laurence Olivier's Henry V (1944). As Jennifer Barnes has noted, Shakespeare "could be made to function as a trope for the imagined community of the nation in wartime Britain," and Olivier's film, with its depiction of English, Irish, Scottish and Welsh soldiers coming together to form a "band of brothers," represents an important cinematic articulation of that trope, which I term the wartime Shakespeare topos (WST)"--