While most adaptation studies are organized around literary works, this book takes as its starting point British film production during World War Two. It situates four cinematic appropriations and one adaptation of Shakespeare—Leslie Howard’s Pimpernel Smith, Humphrey Jennings’s Fires Were Started, Leslie Arliss’s The Man in Grey, Powell and Pressburger’s A Matter of Life and Death, and Laurence Olivier’s Henry V—within wartime culture. The Introduction describes the book’s method, which is to develop a synchronic film history centered upon the “wartime Shakespeare topos” (or WST), a flexible cultural trope that links Shakespeare to national identity. While the WST was deployed to articulate what binds the British people together, it was also often used in period film to register social and cultural differences within the nation. In this regard, British cinema gives us a Shakespeare who simultaneously undergirds national identity and traces the fault lines within it.

The great documentarian Humphrey Jennings is credited with helping to create the iconography of “the people’s war,” a period concept that emphasized how people of all social positions pulled together for the collective good. In Fires Were Started, which focuses on a day in the life of an Auxiliary Fire Service substation, a weary and grief-stricken fireman reads aloud from Macbeth’s speech to Banquo’s murderers. Whereas these lines have (somewhat bizarrely) been taken as evidence of Shakespeare’s status as an emblem of national unity, they articulate a strong sense of class grievance as well as skepticism about the collective ideal of the “people’s war.” In this way, Jennings mobilizes Shakespeare to explore the limits of the model of unity with which the playwright was associated. In doing so, Jennings contends that such unity is not given but in constant need of re-attainment.

This chapter considers the complex relationship between the amateur British ethnographic movement, Mass-Observation, officially inaugurated in 1937, and surrealist methods, ideas, and images. Surrealism influenced Mass-Observation protagonists such as Humphrey Jennings, Charles Madge, David Gascoyne, and Julian Trevelyan, although their formal connections with the surrealist movement in poetry and art and their associations with Mass-Observation overlap only partially. After considering these biographical connections, the chapter goes on to discuss the Mass-Observation–surrealism connection through two complementary but distinct lenses of scholarly discussion: cultural and social science scholars who discern surrealist inspiration in Mass- Observation’s methodological approach to everyday phenomena; and literary and art-historical scholars who trace the intertwining of Surrealism with other 1930s artistic and literary trends, such as British documentary film and I. A. Richards’s critical meditations on science and poetry, in the work of Jennings, Madge, and other Mass-Observation principal figures.

The introduction provides the literary, musical, and critical contexts for the book. It opens with Forster’s contribution to Humphrey Jennings’s documentary A Diary for Timothy, using it to illustrate the intersection of music and politics. It reviews the formalist approaches that have until now dominated the interpretation of music’s influence on Forster. Alluding to the shifting perception of music from a non-referential art to a political discourse in musicology, the introduction demonstrates that inattention to contemporary ideas of and debates about music leads to inadequate, implicitly Eurocentric readings. The Introduction argues that it is necessary to draw attention to the political – political in its broadest sense, be it racial, national, sexual, or social – resonances of Forster’s engagement with and representations of musics. The Introduction proposes Forster’s notion of ‘not listening’ as a way to examine his representations of music and uses Tibby Schlegel’s listening to Brahms in Howards End to illustrate the many extramusical associations that a single reference to music can generate. The Introduction finishes with an outline of the ensuing chapters.