ABSTRACT
The Welsh correction in recent Shakespeare studies has involved a rediscovery of the expansionism of Tudor Wales. Shakespeare and Wales had emerged as a story of artful but persistent evasion of these 'Great Britons'. Yet if it rains on their 'British ensign' and 'crooked smokes' in this parade that may be because the plot seems based on the cosmic joke that these 'Roman Britons' have been too busy fixing 'peace and plenty' for themselves. The same blind-spot about 'British' colonialism blurs Willy Maley's influential polemic 'This sceptered isle', which also underestimates how much Essex's 'Roman' triumph terrorizes the peace-loving Londoners. The castration of English men at the hands of Welsh women thus provides a pretext for outing Shakespeare as an effete Londoner, 'promoted in a context of institutionalised homosexuality' as part of the Empire's cult of manliness, whose 'conquering Englishness' wilts from its own 'effeminacy', as flaunted by a decadent Falstaff, or Bard's sexual relations with his Welsh 'Willy'.
