Shakespearean fragments to define and mourn englishness in “Mrs Dalloway” and “Her Privates We”

Maria Grazia Dongu

2023-01-01

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Abstract

A substantial corpus of scholarship has been dedicated to the conceptualisation of Englishness in the period preceding the First World War. Additionally, the utilisation of Shakespeare as a cultural icon and the dissemination of extracts from his works have been subjects of considerable research interest. These studies have sought to elucidate the ways in which Shakespearean texts were employed to construct an image of England and masculinity that was conducive to the war effort. Recently, a number of intriguing articles have been published, providing insight into the British state's efforts to disseminate Shakespeare's complete works to the armed forces and examining the reading practices of the soldiers involved at the front. This article, which takes such studies as its foundation, analyses two texts of post-war prose fiction production. The first is written by a veteran who fought the Battle of the Somme (Frederick Manning, 1930), while the second is written by a civilian (Virginia Woolf, 1925). The two novels are Her Privates We (in the unabridged version, The Middle Fortune), and Mrs Dalloway. The degree of intertextuality is considerable. The works of Shakespeare are referenced in the paratext of the novels, specifically in the opening and closing passages of Mrs Dalloway, which serve to construct intratextual references. In this way, the value of the poet-playwright as the author of archetypal narratives that can successfully serve as an interpretative reading of the present is elevated. Our primary objective is to elucidate a process of appropriative reading of Shakespeare. The two novels under consideration are Her Privates We (in the unabridged version, The Middle Fortune) and Mrs Dalloway. The intertextuality of the two novels is particularly noteworthy. Fragments of Shakespeare's work are quoted in them, in the paratext in the first and last, to construct intratextual references in Mrs. Dalloway. In this way, the value of the poet-playwright as the author of archetypal narratives that can successfully serve as an interpretative reading of the present is exalted. Our focus is therefore on elucidating a process that is not so much an appropriative reading of Shakespeare, but rather a conscious use of his work to gloss over the crucial junctures of the pre-war experience on the battlefields and of returning home. In other words, the authors employ Shakespearean techniques to construct their work and imbue it with interpretative echoes. In this instance, the voice of Shakespeare is employed to represent the Englishmen at the front, thereby establishing a sense of identification between the poet and an entire nation. However, the multifaceted nature of this nation is such that it also encompasses the multi-perspective richness of Shakespeare's theatre. In all the novels, the perspective of the soldier, the individual who subscribed to an ideology of Englishness and the courageous Englishman, is reconstructed. This aligns with the perspective espoused by the authorities. Nevertheless, he discovers Shakespeare to still be a comrade in his endeavour to survive his personal inability to represent those ideals. The article will reconstruct the elegy sung by English fiction, or in the English language, to mourn the end of a choral self-presentation to the world. This coincides with the death of the veteran in Mrs Dalloway, but not of Shakespeare, whose verses continue to echo and speak long after Septimus' death.