This royal throne of kings, this sceptered
isle,
This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars,
This other Eden, demi-paradise,
This fortress built by Nature for herself
Against infection and the hand of war,
This happy breed of men, this little world,
This precious stone set in the silver sea,
Which serves it in the office of a wall,
Or as a moat defensive to a house,
Against the envy of less happier lands,
This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England. . . .
Even in the twenty-first century, the words
spoken by John of Gaunt in Shakespeare's Richard
II remain among the most familiar as well
as the most powerful celebrations of the English
nation. The literature of the Elizabethan age
abounds with similar panegyrics to a nation
secure in its separateness and in its superiority.
Yet what can sometimes seem like the jingoistic
fervor of the Elizabethans conceals a far more
complicated and troubled reality. Most English
writers were far from certain of the innate
superiority of their nation — or even
certain what their nation was.
To begin with, England was not — and
has never been — a "sceptred isle." Rather,
the English in the sixteenth century shared
the island of Britain with neighboring Wales
and Scotland, with whom their relations ranged
from uneasy and unequal co- existence to outright
conflict. Still more troubled and productive
of anxiety was England's relationship with
the island of Ireland (where Richard II leads
a military expedition in Shakespeare's
play, precipitating his own downfall). As for
the wider world, the proud separateness celebrated
by John of Gaunt was not so much chosen as
enforced. A Protestant state confronting a
largely Catholic Europe over the channel, Elizabethan
England with its excommunicated Queen was a
lonely pariah among nations. The English were
thus anxious to the point of paranoia about
what foreign visitors might think of them.
Little wonder that they sometimes attempted
to compensate for these anxieties with outbursts
of patriotic bluster.
Rebellious Ireland presented the English
not only with a problem of governance, but
with the problem of cultural identity. The
more idealistic among the English administrators
and adventurers who settled in Ireland in the
later sixteenth century believed that if only
the Irish could be taught 'civility' (meaning
English laws, English customs, and the English
language), they would eventually become indistinguishable
from the English themselves. Pessimists countered
that the Irish were by their very nature prone
to savagery and rebellion. The implications
for the native population were fairly dismal
in either case: those who believed that the
Irish were educable were prepared to resort
to the most brutal measures to achieve their
lofty aim, while those who did not saw no solution
to the Irish problem but enslavement or extermination.
Yet while they wrestled with the question of
Irish adaptability, English settlers like Edmund
Spenser were confronted with worrying examples
of English mutability: all around them they
found the descendants of medieval English conquerors
who had, over time, adopted Irish customs,
dress and language, becoming all but indistinguishable
from those whom they had supposedly conquered.
Thus, the future of Englishness was also at
stake in the Irish wars of the late sixteenth
century.
Closer to home, England was bent on extending
its hegemony over Wales and Scotland. Wales
had been conquered in the late thirteenth century;
in the 1530s and 40s, it was fully incorporated
into the English state, sending representatives
to the Parliament in Westminster. Yet the Welsh
remained a separate people, with a separate
language, and a fierce pride in their status
as descendants of the ancient Britons, who
had inhabited the island long before the arrival
of the Anglo-Saxons. Indeed, the term "Briton" as
commonly used referred exclusively to the Welsh.
Yet "Briton" could also be used in
a wider sense, to mean all inhabitants of the
island, be they Welsh, English, or Scottish.
As English politicians bent their minds on
subduing Scotland once and for all, they found
it convenient to argue that they were really
only asking the Scots to accept their common
identity as Britons. The Scots countered that "Britain" was
just another word for England. Then, when Scotland's
King James came to the throne of England in
1603, the tables were turned. Now it was a
Scottish king who insisted that his subjects
should all call themselves "Britons," while
the English found themselves clinging stubbornly
to their Englishness. The long struggle over
the meaning and future of Britishness was waged
mostly by textual means, giving rise not only
to innumerable propaganda pamphlets and treatises,
but also to literary masterpieces such as Spenser's Faerie
Queene and Shakespeare's King Lear.
Whatever the boundaries of the state
that emerged from these struggles, and whatever
name it went by, everyone accepted that it
would be ruled from London. The rapid growth
of London in the sixteenth century was an unprecedented
phenomenon, and transformed both the way the
English thought about their nation and the
way they were viewed by visitors from abroad.
It has been estimated that one in eight English
people lived in London at some point in their
lives. They took an intense interest both in
the daily changing face of the metropolis and
in its long and complex history; both facets
of the city are recorded in exhaustive detail
in John Stow's extraordinary Survey
of London. London was also the destination
of the overwhelming majority of foreign visitors
to England, be they ambassadors, merchants,
Protestant refugees, or simply tourists, like
the Swiss German Thomas Platter, who rounded
off his tour of the city with a visit to the
theater, to see a play by Shakespeare.
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