Tuesday, December 15, 2020

Sergeant Hutton and Shakespeare

 Continuing with my riff on Patton's "Through a Glass Darkly" which is adapted for use here as smelling the smoke of a thousand campfires; I am pondering a story about Shakespeare from George MacDonald Fraser's highly acclaimed memoir of his World War 2 service in the Burma campaign called Quartered Safe Out Here.

One episode of the book has Fraser receiving 2 books from home; one of which was Shakespeare's Henry V and the other was a more comedic book called 3 Men in a Boat . He figured the "Boat" book would be passed around his section, but he expected few takers for the Shakespeare.

To Fraser's surprise, his sergeant, Sergeant Hutton commandeered the Shakespeare and kept it for several days. Hutton returned the book and returned it with the question: "Was Shekspeer ivver in th' army?

Fraser responded that most scholars did not think so, but that there were just enough gaps in his life that he might have served in the Low Countries or even Italy.

As the conversation developed, Sergeant Hutton was adamant that Shakespeare had to have been in the army. In his view, he knew too much about it and it wasn't the kind of stuff you could just learn by talking to military men in the pubs.

Keep in mind, that this was in Burma in 1945 and Sergeant Hutton's service went back to 1914, or even earlier. Hutton knew war, if anybody did. He would have recognized the difference between war and pub talk..

Fraser walked away from the conversation wondering to his dying days if Shakespeare really was in the army.

One of my main thoughts on reading this episode, is that it is a shame that Quartered Safe Out Here is unlikely to find itself into the hands of many modern Shakespeare scholars. Sergeant Hutton's opinion on the Bard of Avon would provide a take on Shakespeare that is probably missing in the modern academy.

Another thought is that Sergeant Hutton was closer in spirit to the Groundlings who attended Shakespeare's plays at the Globe Theater than any modern academician or theater-goer can possibly be.

And then, since my mind turns in that direction, the thought that maybe Shakespeare was in the Army; just not as Shakespeare, but before he was Shakespeare. 

Maybe he really was there and smelled the smoke of a thousand campfires the night before the battle on the muddy field of Agincourt with Henry V and them.




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