ABSTRACT
This chapter revisits some earlier critical work, less theoretically sophisticated but historically interesting, that elaborated a complementary latticework of links between Wales and Shakespeare. Writing in 1983, Camille Adkins remarked that Shakespeare knew more about the Welsh than about any other people except the English. Shakespeare as royalist, democrat, catholic, puritan, feudalist, progressive, humanist, racist, Englishman, homosexual, Marlowe, Bacon and so on round the bay. Parker discerns 'a decentring critique of the rhetoric of a dominated unity or oneness, suggesting, that the current Prince of Wales once praised for teaching him how to be a king, leaks that perhaps still have not been contained'. Positive as the general picture might appear, Prince Edward is just one of several critics who detect a decline in Shakespeare's regard for the Welsh from Glendower through Fluellen to Parson Evans. The new British history has much to learn from Welsh historians, for Wales has a role to play wider politics of these islands.
