Years ago, I heard a few lines spoken on a documentary about England, and always assumed it was a quote from Shakespeare. Now I’m not so sure, because I’ve done a bit of a search on the 'net and came up with squat.
Here’s a fragment of the quote as I remember it: " . . . this blessed rock, this Albion." Any scholars out there who can give me a clue? I’d like to look it up and read the whole thing, because it was a great piece. Thanks.
This royal throne of Kings, this scepter’d 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,
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.
The bolded line sounds closest to what you remember hearing.
It rings like a line from the musical Camelot, where I believe it is “this blessed rock, this Camelot”, though I can’t find a site for that either. Maybe some of our musical theater aficionados can confirm this.
It’s what you call a “famous quote”, so if it’s in Camelot, it’s a ref to the Shakespeare line.
Ah, that Shakespeare, his writing is so full of cliches.
A few phrases from that speech are also used at the end of one of Basil Rathbone’s “Sherlock Holmes” movies that were made during and set in World War 2.
If you’re tracing it, I recommend going to an art store and getting that really thin paper, then put it over the screen - that’s right, right over Olentzero’s quote, take a pencil, and CAREFULLY write over the letters and words that make up that quote…
Olentzero – THAT’S IT! Those are the lines. Now to get out my weighty “Riverside Shakespeare” and read the scene that contains that speech. Good one, isn’t it? But that line about “against infection” makes the continent sound like a germ-pot, if the word infection meant the same in 1600 as it does now.
Connor: Ya big wiseguy!
‘Albion’ is what England was called along time ago so that may be the right word.
Not too long ago, there was a television commercial (for a credit card, I think) which quoted that passage. The voice-over was done by Patrick Stewart, who in addition to being a science fiction icon is an Honorary Associate Artist of the Royal Shakespeare Company.
If I recall correctly from the years I spent there, that’s pretty close to the way many [not all] Brits prefer to view the Continent.
Salien2 - “You might think that, I couldn’t possibly comment”
Also, it’s (sort of) interesting to note that the above speech begins with a word modern day users might not always recognise as being Shakespearian: “Methinks”
He gets around does ye olde Bard
That’s not such an unreasonable view for someone of Shakespeare’s time to have had.
Justinian’s plague (6th & 7th Century) and the syphillis pandemic of the 1490s were both much slower to take hold in Britain than on the Continent. The latter would just about have been within living memory when S. was a child, the former was recorded by Bede and it is likely that many educated people would have been familiar with it.
Bubonic plague seems to have disappeared from Britain for several hundred years between approx. 700 and the mid-14th Century (the outbreak of the Black Death), while outbreaks continued in Europe.
The UK had until recently strict animal quarantine laws which have effectively prevented the spread of rabies to the country.
I’m reluctant to speculate too much on what Shakespeare may have meant by “infection”, but he may not have meant it in terms of disease, but rather as “the infection of foreign invasion”
Recall that that Shakespeare lived during the time that England destroyed the Spanish Armada (1588) and the fear of foreign invasion was certainly one common to Shakespearean England.
The passage above is considered one of the most stirringly patriotic of Shakespeare’s works. Other examples are passages from Henry V, and yet another is the bastard’s speech in King John:
“This England never did, nor never shall,
Lie at the proud foot of a conqueror,
But when it first did help to wound itself.
Now these her princes are come home again,
Come the three corners of the world in arms,
And we shall shock them. Nought shall make us rue,
If England to itself do rest but true.”
–King John, Act 5, Scene VII
(Note the similarity in terms of the “us against the world” point of view between this passage, and the Richard II passage. Same with passages in Henry V. Shakespeare was obviously fond of the “gritty little England vs. the rest of the mean old world” symbolism)
Infection had a number of related but significantly different meanings in Shakespeare’s time, as it has today: harm or injury in a general sense, contamination or pollution, and infection in the sense of disease. The last of these senses (disease) seems to have been a relatively new usage in the mid-16th Century, the others having been around since the 14th Century. It never meant foreign invasion, at least not in a literal sense.
I suspect that what Shakespeare intended when he used the word was to convey the variety of meanings which attached to it, i.e. “infection” in the broadest sense.
You could argue that it was a fairly accurate characterisation of the political situation in Europe at the time. The Pope was gunning for Elizabeth, whom he had excommunicated, and England was surrounded by Roman Catholic neighbours. The Spanish Armada was only one incident in a war that lasted effectively for most of Shakespeare’s lifetime and which ended only with the defeat of the combined Irish and Spanish armies in Ireland in 1601.