Leslie Howard’s Pimpernel Smith seeks to clarify cultural differences between the British and the Nazis by way of Shakespeare—a task complicated by German claims of the playwright’s putatively Nordic nature. This struggle over Shakespeare’s national identity is mirrored, first, in the film’s persistent emphasis on doubles; and, second, in its apparent advocacy for the notion that Edward de Vere, the 17th earl of Oxford, wrote Shakespeare’s plays. Just as Oxford appears in the film as Shakespeare’s doppelganger, Hamlet shadows both Horatio Smith (played by Howard) and Howard’s screen personae as a cerebral hero. Howard’s willingness to countenance arguments about Shakespeare’s Germanness, as well as entertain Oxfordianism, proves to be central to the film’s propaganda objectives. By contrasting Nazi intolerance for dissent with Smith’s apparent acceptance of heterodox ideas, Pimpernel Smith expresses Britain’s cultural superiority not only by way of Shakespeare, but also through Oxfordian challenges to the playwright’s identity.

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.