This chapter examines how a shared experience of isolation during the Second World War clouded a sense of the future for civilian internees. It focuses on how various historical processes collapsed into the spacetime of confinement for most working-age Italian men in Egypt. British authorities had planned a complete shutdown of the Italian community during Italy’s 1935 Ethiopia campaign, when they perceived the large-scale participation in fascist institutions as a ’fifth column’ threat to their authority in Egypt. After June 1940, Anglo-Egyptian authorities closed Italian institutions, froze bank accounts, restricted movement, and forbade the signing of contracts with Italian nationals. Italian institutional life, which had become central to the population during the after 1919 was abruptly brought to a halt. While the buttressing of the Italian population collapsed during the war, many of its political structures remained intact. In this chapter, the camp is seen as a temporal isolation chamber, one that delimited the horizons of the internees during the war and then moulded a shared experience that would inform their relationship with the post-fascist Italian state after the war.

It tends to be assumed that Shakespeare was enthusiastically mobilized as a patriotic figurehead during the First World War. Evidence of this practice can be found throughout the conflict, most often by individuals who had a prior vested interest in Shakespeare; but Chapter 4 exposes the dramatist’s contested position by examining four kinds of fragmentation that clarify his presence on wartime stages: fragmented users, fragmented texts, fragmented appeal, and fragmented evidence. It builds on Chapter 3’s discussion of patriotism, a concept that seems to indicate confidence and unity, but often reveals division. Chapter 4 evaluates the work of passionate theatre practitioners such as Frank Benson and Lena Ashwell who saw the performance of Shakespeare as a national service that could boost morale, raise funds, and educate both civilians and troops. It shows how the memoirs, public statements, and articles authored by these individuals have had an outsized influence in mediating our understanding of Shakespeare’s appeal. This chapter considers Benson’s performances within Britain; Ashwell’s work with the YMCA on the frontline and the provision of entertainment to troops; and, finally, the use of Shakespeare as part of theatre in Ruhleben, a civilian internment camp in Germany.

This chapter concentrates on the early months of the war, and delving into autobiographical testimonies looks more closely at the suffering and fate of enemy aliens. The chapter then describes the implementation of the policies adopted in the early months and deals with expulsion, forced repatriation and deportation. It then addresses the internment of civilians, which was one of the major novelties that the belligerent countries introduced in the European war. The chapter follows the spread of concentration camps throughout Europe and the British and French Empires, the internment gender and generational dimensions, and the beginning of the humanitarian activities that the mass internment of enemy aliens triggered. The third part of the chapter deals with another crucial novelty that concerned the property rights of the enemy aliens. States at war sequestered and confiscated their assets as part and parcel of the economic war they waged. The internment and sequestration of enemy property led to enormous growth in the apparatuses of the state. And this meant that state involvement in the lives of civilians increased disproportionately.