Shakespeare and Cricket

There have been no posts here for a while, due to the advent of the cricket season.  But while thinking of cricket, I started reflecting on the very Englishness of Shakespeare – something that does not always get mentioned when it should.

Take the notion, which seems important to those who reject Shakespeare as the writer of his plays, that if he never travelled out of the country (and the traditional grammar-school boy story would seem to deny this) how did he write so well about foreign lands and foreign people?

Well… the simple answer is… he didn’t.

Anyone who thinks Friar Lawrence is a genuine Italian friar needs their head looking at; he is an English country friar of the noblest stock.

What about Mercutio?  Really Italian?  Not on your nelly!

What about Othello and the Venetians?  Shylock or Bassanio or Portia (from Belmont)?  These are all characters who originate in English towns and villages and who belong entirely in that country.  They are transported to foreign lands only in the imagination of a playwright and his audience – ‘when we talk of horses, think that you see them’. 

Outside of the British Isles, only the French come close to getting a proper presentation – and even that is caricatured.

And what about the lands depicted in these plays?

The Tempest is supposedly set on an island in the Bermudas.  Only it isn’t.

It’s set on a stage which carries the very faintest of distant traces of some exotic land…. described as if by someone who has never been there… if ‘there’ exists at all in reality.

And the Merchant of Venice might just as well do his trading from the square mile.  Even the [Goodwin] sands on which his boats perish is just off the South Coast.

The fact is that when people talk of Shakespeare they want to make him seem so much more worldly than he actually was.  It seems to justify their lifelong study of him.  It makes them feel good.

What makes ME feel good is knowing that he was as limited by his real life experience of the world around him as I am; he wrote about Englishmen and Englishwomen, and about English towns, cities and landscapes… because they are the people and the places he knew.

In short, Shakespeare was an English writer writing for the English stage.

I doubt he ever ventured off our shores.

I certainly see no reason to question the validity of his authorship on the basis of ‘the author’s extensive knowledge of other people and cultures’.

It’s insane.