Shakespeare Behind Barbed Wire

A Cultural History of Internment and Entertainment at Ruhleben Camp, Berlin: 1914-1918, Volume I
Erscheinungsjahr 2026
ISBN: 978-3-032-32011-7
Verlag: Palgrave Macmillan

Buch, Englisch, 342 Seiten, Format (B × H): 148 mm x 210 mm

Reihe: Global Shakespeares

Shakespeare was a vital rallying point for the 4,500 British internees held at the Ruhleben Camp (near Berlin) for the duration of World War I. This book now makes the internees speak through their engagement with Shakespeare. To do so, it examines in detail the collection of plays and poems in the camp library, analyses the surviving Shakespeare lectures at the camp school, and studies the multiple ways in which he was actively read, performed, cited, and rewritten by the internees.

 reconstructs the first Shakespeare production of   in 1915 as a window on the camp theatre, its day-to-day practices, its directors, and their artistic views, as well as the divergent tastes of the audiences. The premiere of  started a theatre war bringing to the fore the internees’ deepest ambitions and frustrations, but the men’s differences did not affect the success of their Shakespeare Tercentenary festival in 1916. The men now displayed a great sense of unity, but as Hoenselaars argues, this attractive image fashioned by the sources should be recognized as part of a complex bilateral propaganda campaign. Exhaustively drawing on formal camp archives, the internees’ diaries, their letters and creative writing, as well as the Ruhleben story that was fashioned in the camp’s numerous magazines and in the press worldwide,  for the first time reconstructs the profoundly individual side to Ruhleben’s Shakespearean culture in both its local and global contexts, and grants the internees a unique voice that had remained silent for over a century.

Zielgruppe

Research

Autoren/Hrsg.

Hoenselaars, Ton

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Theater- und Filmwissenschaft | Andere Darstellende Künste Theaterwissenschaft
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literaturwissenschaft
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Geschichtliche Themen Mentalitäts- und Sozialgeschichte
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Weltgeschichte & Geschichte einzelner Länder und Gebietsräume Europäische Geschichte

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Chapter 1 – Introduction: A Cultural History of Shakespeare and World War I.- Chapter 2 – “The Great Variety of Readers”: Reading, Citing, and Re-writing Shakespeare in Ruhleben.- Chapter 3 – “All the Camp’s a Stage”: and the Theatre War (1915).- Chapter 4 – The Ruhleben Shakespeare Tercentenary, 23-30 April 1916.- Appendix 1 – Shakespeare lectures at Ruhleben: A Brief Survey.

Über Autor(innen)

Ton Hoenselaars is Emeritus Professor of Early Modern English Literature at Utrecht University, the Netherlands. He specializes in the international relations of early modern drama, and Shakespeare’s afterlives.