In response to Native Country, published just a day ago, several readers have very sharply pointed out that Shakespeare clocked the idea of “the immaculate English” long before Conan Doyle or Gilberto Freyre did.
Lines and phrases from the famous speech by the dying John of Gaunt in Richard II (c1590), Shakespeare’s play about the fall of the Plantagenet king, are routinely quoted here in England, most usually on BBC 2 or Radio 4. They’ll be slipped into conversations, referred to in passing, playfully inverted, often punned upon, as though they’re hovering constantly just below the surface of every English person’s common vocabulary, public-school educated or not.
After a few years of living in England you’ll expect to hear them, or you’ll begin to say them to yourself, when you’re listening to Match of the Day on Radio 5 and Joe Root is nearing his nth test century on a fine summer’s afternoon at Lord’s. But you’ll actually hear them, spoken out loud, only when England are chasing 364 to win and the seventh wicket falls with just 48 on the board, and it will be in tones of self-deprecating gravitas so disarmingly charming you’ve got to love them anyway.
What you’ll seldom hear quoted, oddly enough, are lines or phrases borrowed from beyond John of Gaunt’s eighteenth pentameter, “Dear for her reputation through the world…”
So here it is in full:
This royal throne of kings, this sceptred 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,
This nurse, this teeming womb of royal kings,
Fear’d by their breed and famous by their birth,
Renowned for their deeds as far from home,
For Christian service and true chivalry,
As is the sepulchre in stubborn Jewry,
Of the world’s ransom, blessed Mary’s Son,
This land of such dear souls, this dear dear land,
Dear for her reputation through the world,
Is now leased out, I die pronouncing it,
Like to a tenement or pelting farm:
England, bound in with the triumphant sea
Whose rocky shore beats back the envious siege
Of watery Neptune, is now bound in with shame,
With inky blots and rotten parchment bonds:
That England, that was wont to conquer others,
Hath made a shameful conquest of itself.
Ah, would the scandal vanish with my life,
How happy then were my ensuing death!
Now, in the leased-out “tenement or pelting farm” that England has become since we made such a shameful conquest of ourselves in 2016, it’s impossible not to hear the irony of “this land of such dear souls” ringing through the centuries.
The “fortress built by Nature herself against infection” has become a prison “bound in with the triumphant sea…”
Thank you JA, CvZ, RM, MLT and GG.