ABSTRACT
Shakespeare is well known as the most English of English writers, having divided his time between the very heart of the nation and the capital, and expressed its inner soul in his work. After his death his plays served to galvanize Englishmen (and women) during the country's darkest days, as well as to sell the country's essential products (beer, military hardware, cigars, breakfast cereal) to the natives, and attract tourists from abroad. The Google hit list has Shakespeare second only to God, although God's triumph, it has to be admitted, is emphatic: 140 to 17 million, but then God is not English. The bald pate of Shakespeare's funeral monument represents a classic image of Englishness, the character of the greatest Englishman appearing thoughtful (think Tempest), sceptical (Hamlet), stolid (King John), conservative in instinct (Julius Caesar), perhaps dull at times (Timon of Athens), his salad days (A Midsummer Night's Dream, Romeo and Juliet) behind him. However, as this list of plays indicates, Shakespeare hardly ever represents contemporary England. Of course, he writes about the nation's past in a long sequence of plays, mostly written in the 1590s when English history seemed an urgent issue for audiences terrified about who would rule them once the virgin queen, invariably seen as one of the bard's chief supporters, had shuffled off her mortal coil. And again in the British plays of the 1600s, now that a Scot had taken her place.
