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.'