Existing comment:
War as Melodrama
Most men aspire to be good actors in the play. There are a few who are so perfect they do not seem to be actors at all.
-- Winston Churchill on the best kind of soldiers in The Story of the Malakand Field Force, 1898
Chapter One of Churchill's first book was called "The Theatre of War." This account of his first warfare experiences reflected his vision of war as a theatrical performance and echoed Shakespeare's view of the world as a stage.
In his first book, published when he was twenty-three, Churchill re-imagines his early experiences with battle as theatrical performance. The Story of the Malakand Field Force (1898) is based on his letters to the Daily Telegraph as war correspondent from the northwest frontier of the British empire in India. He saw action there after graduating from Sandhurst, the British military academy. Churchill fought as an embedded correspondent with the British and Sikhs against groups of Afghan tribesmen over contested territories in valleys along the Peshawar border.
Shakespeare provided Churchill with a framework to describe his first encounter with war. Churchill heads the Preface of The Malakand Field Force with a quotation from Shakespeare's King John: "According to the fair play of the world,/ Let me have an audience" (ACT 5, SCENE 2, LINES 119-20). Chapter One begins with a description of the "scenery" of northwest India. Later in the book, he goes on to describe the soldiers as actors in "the great drama of frontier war … played before a vast … audience." |