Houlahan, M. (2016). Shakespeare and New Zealand: 1912-1916-1964. Presented at the Shakespeare and the Public: A Symposium, Conference held at Humanities Research Centre, Australian National University, Canberra, Australia 17-18 February 2016.
Abstract
My paper will work away from the approach in my contributions to Christine Jansohn’s 2015 Shakespeare Jubilees: 1769-2014 and the forthcoming Shakespeare and Antipodal Memory, eds. Philip Mead and Gordon MacMullan (Bloomsbury Arden, 2016). Those chapters use the extensive archive illustrating New Zealanders remembering Shakespeare in the tercentennial year, 1916. Here I will contrast that archive with surviving records for Shakespeare pageants in 1912 and celebrations in Stratford, New Zealand for the 300th anniversary of Shakespeare’s birth. These years are linked by a concern for the performance or recreation of the idea of Shakespeare across a range of cultural forms. What kind of public memory do these activities serve? How can we contrast with, for example, the sacred rites of public memory that, in Australia and New Zealand, are entwined around Anzac day, April 25?
