Geopolitical Shakespeare

Abstract Geopolitical Shakespeare examines the entanglement of Shakespearian culture in the geopolitical dynamics of the post-war West. Taking its cue from a speech given by Albert Einstein in London in 1933, in which Shakespeare is cited as an example of the Western value of personal freedom threatened by the rise of Nazi Germany, it explores a series of events across the timeline of 1945–55 featuring key historical figures—scientists, lawyers, diplomats and politicians, writers, actors, and film-makers—who experienced the international tensions of the early Cold War through Shakespeare, or called on him to articulate them. It discusses political, diplomatic, cultural, and economic interactions within ‘core’ Western power relations—the USA, UK, and Europe, with particular reference to Germany—in which Shakespeare, or the idea of Shakespeare, was entangled in the struggle for new ideas and structures of community and society within intersecting fields of international law and diplomacy, politics and economics, film, theatre, and literature. Its subjects include John Humphrey and the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights; the Nuremberg Trials and the foundation of West Germany; Laurence Olivier, David Selznick and the Shakespeare film in post-war Hollywood; Noel Annan and the Berlin Airlift; an American Hamlet in Elsinore, Graham Greene, V. S. Pritichettand The Third Man; Carl Schmitt and Salvador de Madariaga on Hamlet in post-war Europe; W. H. Auden, Hannah Arendt and the problem of forgiveness.