This final chapter focuses on acts of commemoration in the centenary years of 2014-18. It examines the breadth of performance work produced in response to the centenary. It examines large-scale national events and installations including the Tower of London’s Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red, Heard’s Shrouds of the Somme, the National Theatre’s were here because were here, National Theatre Wale’s site-specific Mametz and English National Ballet’s Lest We Forget. At the same time it places new and important focus on the small-scale and intimate performance which proliferated during the centenary including the work of community groups. In looking at the form and content of these productions the chapter draws attention to how theatre was used to celebrate local stories; make visible Chinese, South Asian and African contributions to and experiences of the war, and to address women’s role within the conflict, and rethink conscientious objection. Plays considered include Loh’s Forgotten, Cumper’s Chigger Foot Boys, and Shah’s radio play Subterranean Sepoys. Finally the chapter shows how centenary plays often reimagine the war in relation to an institution, historical figure or community, rather than engaging directly with the combat. Examples include Brenton’s Doctor Scroggy’s War, Gill’s Versailles, Porter’s The Christmas Truce and McAndrew’s An August Bank Holiday.

The Voyage to Brobdingnag reduces Gulliver from the magnanimous and principled behemoth of the Voyage to Lilliput to a risible and contemptible little beast. The first section considers how Gulliver is diminished to an inconsequential creature, objectified and commodified by the giants who handle him as a freak show exhibit or a pet. The second section contends that Gulliver does recuperate his human identity, albeit in a precarious manner, by differentiating himself from animals he encounters in Brobdingnag. However, he is confronted with the disgusting physicality of humans, making his restitution of human identity highly ambivalent. The third section examines how the satire is broadened from human nature to political institutions in Gulliver’s dialogue with the king and account of Brobdingnagian society. The destabilisation of species boundaries and pessimism about human corruption in this voyage are key to the overall vision of Gulliver’s Travels.

The Lives of the Sophists, written by the third-century-CE author Philostratus, contains the most detailed and thorough image of a Classical-period sophistic age surviving from antiquity. Previous ancient accounts of the period are comparable with that of Philostratus in various respects but never emphasize a discrete sophistic age. Philostratus’ text has been known continuously since its production, and the individual members of Philostratus’ First Sophistic were arguably the core for modern lists of the individual Sophists. Yet Philostratus’ image of the First Sophistic is colored by oratorical practices of his own day, privileging the craft of speaking performance, networks of influence and rivalry, and leadership of the city over the kind of intellectual performances that interested philosophers such as Plato. Despite his obvious departures from Plato, Philostratus also depends on Plato for qualities that establish a “Sophist” under his concept, both in the Classical period and in his own.

The paper examines the origins of the distinction between physis, “nature,” and nomos, “norm,” and the uses made of it during the period of the Sophists. The two terms did not originally lend themselves to being contrasted, but the contrast becomes natural in light of two mid-fifth-century developments: a growing interest in the different customs of different societies and a proliferation of accounts of the origins of human civilization. While the contrast is employed by others, such as Herodotus and the medical writers, it is the Sophists themselves, above all, who exploit it for sociological and philosophical purposes. Some, such as Protagoras, see nomos as building on physis – that is, on tendencies in human nature; others see an opposition between the two, and suggest that we would be better off ignoring nomos and attending to what our natures dictate. The contrast is also applied to religion, which some Sophists treat as nomos.

This chapter focuses on issues of objection and dissent. As well as examining the ways in which the theatre challenged or questioned the war - through works such as Drinkwater’s X=0 (1917) and Malleson’s banned Black ‘Ell (1917) - it considers the theatre’s representation of objectors to the war - through pieces such as Jones’ The Pacifists (1917) and Collins’ revue sketch The Consciensciousless Objector (1916). It contextualises the production of these works in relation to changes in wider attitudes towards the war, as well as considering how playwrights with pacifist leanings were constrained both by the censor and by cultural nationalism. It discusses the contribution of George Bernard Shaw to debates over the war and, as the final chapter in this part of the book, it also links to part III and the discussion of changing attitudes towards the war in the 1920s and 1930s.

We have been reading Gulliver’s Travels for nearly 300 years, and we have been arguing about it just as long. The history of the critical reception of Swift’s masterpiece begins as soon as the book was published, when Swift was charged with indecency and misanthropy, though he has always had defenders as well as detractors, a situation that continued into the nineteenth century. In the Victorian period, Gulliver was often sanitised through abridgement, especially in versions for children. In the twentieth century, Gulliver’s Travels has been the subject of numerous lines of academic enquiry, including criticism that focuses on its sources and generic identity; on its employment of rhetoric and irony in service of satire; on feminism and sexuality; on colonialism and politics; and on the histories of science, philosophy, and religion.

For nearly 300 years, authors of all kinds have expanded the world of Lemuel Gulliver through multiple fifth voyages, spinoffs, mock treatises, verse exchanges, and much more. Close to 200 imitative or supplementary works were produced and reproduced between late 1726 and 1730 alone, and well over 100 in each of the following two decades, the 1730s and 1740s. Most Gulliveriana signals a formal connection with Travels, whether it revisits old settings, fills in perceived gaps in the narrative, or provides additional material. First establishing some common terms and issues in the study of print-based Gulliveriana, this chapter explores the different ways in which secondary writers have filled in and filled out the author-explorer’s world in his name. The final section explores proleptic continuations attributed to Gulliver’s offspring, time-forwarded Gullivers, and other, non-Gulliverian authors.

In August 1914, foreign plays, ensembles, artists and writers suddenly stood on opposite sides: those from allied countries and those from enemy states. The Pioneer Players were significant in presenting translated plays, especially from Russian and French to British audiences outside of the limitation of the Licensing Act, and for their exploration of continental aesthetic influences. This chapter picks key areas of dialogue with European theatrical culture and looks beyond the work of the Pioneer Players to the ways in which European influences were seen despite all obstacles on the British wartime stage. From the Grand Guignol season staged in French at the Coronet and the Garrick in 1915 to the production of three of Mozart’s operas by Sir Thomas Beecham in the years 1916/17 to French variety stars such as Gaby Deslys who haunted the British revues even where she wasn’t present herself. In relation to pre-war theatrical life in Britain, continental theatre was partially ‘muted’ for different reasons during the war but persisted in form of aesthetic influences and an awareness that British political and social issues had increasingly become international and had a large influence on the theatrical culture of the 1920’s.

In the late fifth century BCE, traditional religious beliefs and practices were being reconsidered from a variety of intellectual fields and viewpoints, but perhaps most vigorously interrogated by the Sophists. Although ancient Greek religion was characteristically open to change and local variety, the Sophists and contemporaneous thinkers put this flexibility to the test, as ancient reports of trials against intellectuals on account of their religious views attest. Anaxagoras and Socrates, in different ways, offer novel perspectives on what the divine is and is not; Protagoras in one way and the Derveni author in another question traditional certainties about our access to and knowledge of the divine; Prodicus, Democritus, and the so-called Sisyphus fragment provide psychological and/or sociological explanations of religious beliefs; and characters in plays by Euripides and Aristophanes deny outright the existence of the gods and, with that, the existence of traditional moral values.

Part III of Gulliver’s Travels stands out from the other voyages: instead of landing Gulliver in a single country, it consists of four, distinct journeys to extraordinary lands. Each of these is peopled by quasi-magical beings and each voyage dramatizes the abuses of the 'modern' learning and political and scientific culture of Swift’s time. In Laputa, the Floating Island, Gulliver encounters fanatical mathematicians whose bodies are as twisted as their mistaken calculations. In Balnibarbi, the literally overshadowed country beneath, barren crops and cockeyed buildings testify to the misapplied science of its Academy of Projectors. In Glubbdubdriub, the Island of Sorcerers, Gulliver meets the ghosts of the heroes and great thinkers of the ancient world who battled tyranny; he also encounters the ghosts both of corrupt modern commentators who distort classic texts and of the syphilitic ancestors of modern aristocrats. The final voyage to Luggnagg features a race of immortals who illustrate the vanity of human wishes as they grow increasingly quarrelsome, discontented and senile forever. As a whole, Part III constitutes a savage satire on the entire Whiggish project of Swift’s contemporary Britain.

This chapter provides a partner to Vivien Gardners examination of theatre-going in Chapter 4. It examines the social and economic context of wartime theatre production, considering the ways in which the conflict impacted on theatre and shaped what could and could not be performed. It covers the practicalities of theatre-making during the war considering the enlistment of actors, touring patterns, the repertory system, censorship, military tribunals, and air raids. It positions the war as a period of change, whether in terms of the growth of cinema, the increasing role of women, changing sexual mores, or changing audiences. It shows how managers responded to this change in order to keep their businesses afloat, for example with the introduction of twice-nightly performances. The chapter also emphasises the importance of understanding the value of ‘feel-good’ entertainment, and shows how the interweaving of ‘new drama’ and multi-mode, popular entertainment on the touring circuits was designed to satisfy audience demand. In highlighting the ways in which the constraints of war determined both the format and content of theatrical production this chapter provides an important framework through which to read subsequent chapters.

This chapter analyses the material that precedes the chapter summaries and the main narrative of Gulliver’s Travels. It establishes that the purpose of the prefatory material, both verbal and visual, is to make the reader uncertain whether or not they are reading a true story. The purpose of that is to tease and vex the reader, with the broader satirical intention of calling into question the very concept of truth. Swift is pointing out that human beings are systematically perverting language so as to express intentionally untrue statements, chronic mendacity, and its destabilisation of the linguistic system being a manifestation of human corruption. The chapter examines political lying in the early eighteenth century, then literary lying in prose fiction, situating Gulliver as a critique of reader-credulity and ‘absorptive’ reading encouraged by novels. The chapter explains the aims of the text and its preliminaries in their 1726 and 1735 states.