Cry ‘God for Shakespeare, England, and St George!’

“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.”

Today is St George’s day, though you’d never know it living in Sarf-east London. It’s also the birthday of perhaps the greatest English man who ever lived.

For English people, we completely understand that the likeliest holder of that mantle is Winston Churchill but for the rest of the world; England’s greatest gift has been the Bard, by a country mile. His work is held in almost universal affection, at least once the traumas of school English lessons have abated. The late Frank McCourt put it rather sweetly; ‘Shakespeare was like mashed potato, I could never get enough’.

But isn’t there something kinda tragic about a nation which won’t celebrate its patron saint’s day or its greatest poet’s birthday with a national holiday?

Doubtless, dewy-eyed expats from Manhattan to Malawi will raise glasses in some corner of a foreign field that is forever England but their countrymen at home barely pause from their endless shopping, gorging and channel-surfing to mark the occasion.

Shakespeare and St George: who do they really belong to? Do the English even know anymore? Have they been hijacked by the little Englanders who would reserve them for the native-born sons; or do they form part of a more cosmopolitan and sophisticated English identity? Or has it now just become something to write on the Specials board in budget boozers?

Stratford’s favourite son remains as relevant as ever even if he was very much a product of his time. Shakespeare was from an England which was just getting used to a new word. French and Dutch ‘refugees’, fleeing Catholic persecution fuelled native xenophobia as their numbers and prosperity grew. Initially at least, young William would have been an outsider in London and he wrote these characters well. What other writer would have had a black hero married to a white woman? (It would be literally centuries before Western literature went near that one again.)

And then there’s George, the Palestinian crocodile-slayer and patron of half a dozen countries. The soldier saint is a martyr claimed by Coptics, Catholics, Protestants, Orthodox Christians and Muslim alike. Could there be a better saint or poet to represent a multicultural Englishness?

Happy birthday Mr Shakespeare.