Shakespeare's England

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Title:     Shakespeare's England
Author: William Davenport Adams [More Titles by Adams]

It was with true instinct that one of our most vigorous orators, desiring the other day to emphasize by quotation an appeal to the patriotic sentiments of his audience, went to a play of Shakespeare's for the passage. For the bard of Avon is par excellence the poet of England. Keen as, in later years, has been the love of country displayed by such men as Thomson, Wordsworth, Lord Tennyson, and Mr. Swinburne, it is in the pages of Shakespeare that we find the most magnificent outbursts of national feeling. Let it be granted that the poet has not hesitated to throw a few satiric pebbles at his countrymen. Everybody will recall the amusing colloquy in 'Hamlet,' in which the Gravedigger humorously reflects upon the sanity of the English people, declaring that, if Hamlet be mad, it will not be noted in England, for there the men are as mad as he is. And then there is that other diverting colloquy in 'Othello,' wherein Iago stigmatizes Englishmen as 'most potent in potting,' asserting that they 'drink with facility your Dane dead drunk,' so expert is your Englishman in his drinking.

But these be the gibes of Danes and Italians--not of the man Shakespeare or of Englishmen speaking with his voice. True it is that if Shakespeare was strongly patriotic, he was so only in common with the Englishmen of his day. He lived in an age when the English people were consumed with a spirit of burning affection for the isle which they inhabited--when the great religious upheaval which we call the Reformation had set the blood coursing through their veins, and infused new life into their heart and brain--and when the fear of Spanish domination had joined all classes in an indissoluble bond of love and loyalty. Probably the English nation never was more thoroughly united, more profoundedly in earnest, more closely attached to its traditions and its soil, than in those spacious times of great Elizabeth. And if Shakespeare produced play after play dealing with the history of his country, and presenting on the boards many of the most famous Englishmen of the past, he was led to do so, no doubt, not only because the topic had attractions for him, but because the Englishmen of his day revelled in such reminders of the stirring years gone by--of the great soldiers, statesmen, clerics, and the like, who had shed lustre on the national name. There must have been a decided and continuous demand for these elaborate chronicle-dramas, and it may be argued that the poet, in supplying them, did but comply with the call made upon him by his public patrons.

The fact, however, that Shakespeare found historical plays a paying product will not wholly account for the powerfully patriotic strain in which they were composed. It is not only that the long series stretching from 'King John' to 'Henry VIII.' pulses from beginning to end with love of, and pride in, country; it is not only that the poet makes great Englishmen speak greatly--that, placing them in positions in which declarations of patriotism are natural and necessary, he makes those declarations eloquent and thrilling;--it is that he charges all his passages about England and the English with a passion of enthusiasm which can be explained only on the hypothesis that he was throwing his whole heart into the work, and sympathized deeply with the utterances of his creations. There is, for instance, something more than mere appropriateness to the character and the occasion in that marvellous piece of eulogy of which, in 'Richard II.,' John of Gaunt is made the spokesman. The poet seems unable to hold his admiration within bounds:

'This royal throne of kings, this sceptred isle,
This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars,
This other Eden--demi-paradise--....
This happy breed of men, this little world,
This precious stone set in a silver sea,....
This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England,
This nurse, this teeming womb of Royal Kings...
This land of such dear souls, this dear, dear land,
Dear for her reputation through the world'--

on what other country has such magnificent praise been poured out by her poets? One can see, too, how sincere Shakespeare was in his feelings as an Englishman by the phrases and the epithets he everywhere bestows upon his fatherland. There is Chorus's famous description of it in 'Henry V.' as 'Little body with a mighty heart;' there is the Queen's allusion, in 'Henry VI.,' to its 'blessed shore.' Now it is called 'fair,' now 'fertile,' and now 'happy.' 'Dear mother England,' cries the Bastard in 'King John.' Bolingbroke rejoices that, though banished, he yet can boast that he is 'a true-born Englishman;' and elsewhere we read of 'our lusty English,' our 'noble English,' our 'hearts of England's breed'--Rambures, the Frenchman, admitting that 'that island of England breeds very valiant creatures.'

And mark how Shakespeare causes one and all of his patriots to congratulate themselves that Britain is an island. Tennyson has called upon his countrymen to

'Thank Him who isled us here, and roughly set
His Briton in blown seas and storming showers;'

and elsewhere has made a 'Tory member's elder son' say--

'God bless the narrow sea...
Which keeps our Britain whole within herself.'

Thomson, too, tells how 'the rushing flood' turned 'this favoured isle' 'flashing from the continent aside,' 'its guardian she.' But Shakespeare had been before both in these expressions of gratitude for our insularity. The Archduke of Austria, in 'King John,' speaks of England as

'That pale, that white-faced shore,
Whose foot spurns back the ocean's roaring tides,
And coops from other lands her islanders...
That England, hedged in with the main,
That water-walled bulwark, still secure
And confident from foreign purposes.'

So, in 'Richard II.,' John of Gaunt describes England as

'This fortress built by Nature for herself
Against infection and the hand of war.

'The silver sea,' he says, serves it

'In the office of a wall,
Or, as a moat, defensive to a house,
Against the envy of less happier lands;

while once again he refers to England as

'Bound in with the triumphant sea,
Whose rocky shore beats back the envious siege
Of watery Neptune.'

There is one thing, however, without which, in Shakespeare's view, even our lucky isolation cannot avail to save us, as a nation, from destruction. 'If they (the English) were true within themselves they need not to fear, although all nations were set against them.' So wrote Andrew Borde, when Henry VIII. was King; and in the old play of 'John, King of England' the author made one of his personae say:

'Let England live but true within itself,
And all the world can never wrong her state.'

So Shakespeare, when he came to treat of the same subject, made the Bastard declare that

'This England never did, nor never shall
Lie at the proud foot of a conqueror,
But when it first did help to wound itself...
Nought shall make us rue,
If England to itself do rest but true.'

There is much virtue in an 'if,' and the poet repeats the warning in another play. In '3 Henry VI.' Hastings says:

'Why, knows not Montague that of itself
England is safe, if true within itself?'

That, again, which most troubles John of Gaunt, in the passage already quoted, is the fact that England, which was wont to conquer others, 'Hath made a shameful conquest of itself;' while Chorus, in 'Henry V.,' laments that France has found in England 'a nest of hollow bosoms, which he fills with treacherous crowns,' adding,

'What might'st thou do, that honour would thee do,
Were all thy children kind and natural?'

Here, then, is a lesson for our times. What Shakespeare felt to be true in his own day is equally, nay more, true now--that England, 'set in a silver sea,' is safe from all assaults, save those which she may suffer at the hands of her own 'degenerate and ingrate' sons.

[The end]
William Davenport Adams's essay: Shakespeare's England

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