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-wallèd bulwark, still secure
And confident from foreign purposes.’