ABSTRACT

While in his early thirties, Shakespeare offered, in Gaunt’s portrait, a man who has grown wise with age, a man alive to the values that not only accrete over a lifetime but that also seem to reach beyond the boundaries of a lifetime. It is through this man’s lips that Shakespeare speaks the loveliest (and the most elegiac) paean to England as an Edenic place, protected bower and nurturing home (2.1.40-50), a paean ending with the line “This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England.”1