A Greenwich Night’s Dream: Shakespeare, Empire, and the Royal Navy in Post-Armistice Britain

Abstract

On the nights of 16–24 June 1933, the grounds of the Royal Naval College, Greenwich, were the scene of a two-hour, open-air theatrical spectacle of unconcealed patriotism and nostalgia for Britain’s heritage of naval power, a celebration arguably incongruous with the climate of post-Armistice Britain. More than 100,000 people, including prominent members of the royal family, the government, and the military, witnessed the Greenwich Night Pageant produced by historian and journalist Arthur Bryant under the direction of the College’s President, Admiral Barry Domvile, both of whom, though applauded for their efforts, would be criticised later for Nazi sympathies. While naval heroes such as Sir Walter Raleigh, Sir Francis Drake, and Admiral Nelson predictably take centre stage, it is Shakespeare who supplies the script at several key moments, including the opening scene of the christening of Elizabeth I. This chapter will consider how and why Bryant relied heavily on Shakespeare’s words and world. Shakespeare’s principal role has more to do with the twentieth century than with the sixteenth. For the celebration of British naval hegemony, rooted in Shakespeare and spanning four centuries, must ultimately confront—and poetically overcome—the inhuman face of modern technology and war, dramatised as a goose-stepping army of automata led by a figure of Death seated on horseback, in the pageant’s ominous and surreal Epilogue.