Introduction: Mobilizing Shakespeare During the Great War

This introduction situates this special issue in the context of ongoing debates surrounding the “cultural mobilization” of Shakespeare during the Great War. The key areas of these debates include the degree to which Shakespeare could successfully be appropriated during the war for totalizing – nationalist and imperialist – purposes; the challenges to such appropriations (for instance, from the colonized nations); ideological fractures produced by seeing Shakespeare, simultaneously, as “universal” and “national”; and tensions between “global” and “local”, “public” and “private” uses of Shakespeare.