Shakespeare’s Fascist Followers

'Richard Wilson's meticulously researched, powerfully argued and brilliantly written account of Shakespeare's 20th-century fascist followers is not just an important but a genuinely essential book.' Robert Shaughnessy, Guildford School of Acting, UK
In this illuminating book, Richard Wilson demonstrates how in the 20th century Shakespeare and his plays were subjected to a sustained institutionalized misreading, which served the purposes of proto-, present and future fascism. It exposes how Shakespeare was misappropriated by the far right to represent Britain's supposedly glorious history, and the ways in which they utilized him and the cultural capital of his work. Wilson argues that in Britain the plays were invoked as a way to anglicize fascism, as its leaders campaigned 'to recover theatre for the national cause' by 'looking back fondly to Elizabethan England'. His extensive and rigorous research also gestures beyond Britain, taking in case studies from North America, Germany and France.
Some of the names this book unearths will surprise: many of the right-wing political views or leanings of the prominent figures discussed have been brushed under the carpet, left unexplored or ignored. Across its ten chapters, this book provides in-depth case studies of a wide variety of figures, from A. K. Chesterton, who was both editor of the British Union of Fascists' newspaper Blackshirt and former manager of press and publicity at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre, to celebrated Shakespeareans such as G. Wilson Knight, through to writers, artists and theatre practitioners including W. B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot, Edward Gordon Craig and Philip Larkin, among many others. At a time when democracy is under threat, populism is on the rise and far right views are increasingly prominent in our political landscape, Richard Wilson's book makes an especially vital and timely contribution to Shakespeare scholarship.