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.

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.