Fifty Things You Need To Know About British History

‘Foul play’ – Gloucester, King Lear

‘The game is up’ – Belarius, Cymbeline

‘Good men and true’ – Dogberry, Much Ado About Nothing

‘Good riddance’ – Patroclus, Troilus and Cressida

‘Greek to me’ – Casca, Julius Caesar

‘Green-eyed monster’ – Iago, Othello

‘Heart’s content’ – Henry, Henry VI, Part 2

‘I have not slept one wink’ – Pisanio, Cymbeline

‘In my heart of heart’ – Hamlet, Hamlet

‘I will wear my heart upon my sleeve’ – Iago, Othello

‘Into thin air’ – Prospero, The Tempest

‘The lady doth protest too much’ – Gertrude, Hamlet

‘Lay it on ‘with a trowel’ – Celia, As You Like It

‘Love is blind’ – Jessica, The Merchant of Venice

‘Milk of human kindness’ – Lady Macbeth, Macbeth

‘More fool you’ – Bianca, The Taming of the Shrew

‘Murder most foul’ – Ghost, Hamlet

‘My own flesh and blood’ – Shylock, The Merchant of Venice

‘My salad days’ – Cleopatra, Antony and Cleopatra

‘Pomp and Circumstance’ – Othello, Othello

‘Pound of flesh’ – Shylock, The Merchant of Venice

‘Seal up your lips and give no words but mum’ (giving us the saying ‘Mum’s the word’) – Hume, Henry VI, Part 2

‘Send him packing’ – Falstaff, Henry IV, Part 1

‘The short and the long of it’ – Mistress Quickly, The Merry Wives of Windsor

‘Short shrift’ – Ratcliff, Richard III

‘Sorry sight’ – Macbeth, Macbeth

‘Of sterner stuff’ – Mark Antony, Julius Caesar

‘Strange bed-fellows’ – Trinculo, The Tempest

‘Such stuff as dreams are made on’ – Prospero, The Tempest

‘To the manner born’ – Hamlet, Hamlet

‘Though this be madness, yet there is a method in’t’ (giving us the saying ‘There’s method in his madness’) – Polonius, Hamlet

‘Truth will out’ – Launcelot, The Merchant of Venice

‘Wild goose chase’ – Mercutio, Romeo and Juliet

‘The world’s mine oyster’ – Pistol, The Merry Wives of Windsor

Shakespeare survived these upheavals to emerge by the middle of the eighteenth century as Britain’s supreme dramatist and poet. The theatre had changed enormously since his time. The open air spaces of the Elizabethan stage had been enclosed and Londoners crowded into places like the carefully lit auditorium of the Theatre Royal in Drury Lane. The building itself had been designed by Sir Christopher Wren in 1674 but under the management of its latest impresario, David Garrick, had introduced many new features. There was a clear division between actors and audience. The auditorium was darker and the stage brighter, with footlights and other effects to enhance the action. Before these innovations members of the audience had been allowed to sit on the stage where they could prove troublesome, particularly if the production was not to their liking. In this environment David Garrick set about building his reputation as the finest actor-manager of his time. Many of his productions were boisterous pieces of popular fun, but he never lost sight of Shakespeare and wanted to be identified as a great interpreter of his roles. He played all the great parts – Hamlet, King Lear and Macbeth among them – but his most popular performances were as Richard III and Benedick in Much Ado About Nothing. In 1769 he organised a jubilee at Stratford-upon-Avon to celebrate the 150th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death. It was three years late, but nobody minded. Garrick gave the public a splendid festival of entertainment, including snippets from his Shakespearean performances and his very own ‘Ode to Shakespeare’:

Untouch’d and sacred be thy shrine,

Avonian Willy, Bard divine.

No wonder Garrick’s friend and mentor, Samuel Johnson, described his death as having eclipsed ‘the gaiety of nations’.

Shakespeare’s international reputation began to grow in the nineteenth century. The rapid expansion of the British Empire brought with it British ideas and British culture, with Shakespeare at the helm. The first performance of a Shakespeare play in India was in Bombay, in 1770. Ten years later, in Calcutta, the capital of British India, Othello was performed at Christmas with many other Shakespeare productions following after that. By the middle of the nineteenth century his plays began to be translated and performed in Indian languages. In South Africa the African Theatre in Cape Town staged Henry IV, Part I, in 1801, with a notice in the Cape Town Gazette announcing that this was ‘the customary honour paid to our Immortal Bard’.

But it was not in the Empire but in a part of Europe where in the early nineteenth century Shakespeare achieved his most remarkable success. His work appealed naturally to the romantic imagination which was then the strongest cultural force in all branches of the arts. In Germany two of the principal exponents of romanticism were the brothers Friedrich and August Schlegel. Friedrich was a philosopher, but August was a writer and poet and in the early 1800s he began to translate Shakespeare into German. The results were outstanding. His understanding of Shakespeare combined with his own talents as a poet gave his translations a vitality all their own. Edited and amended by his fellow poet and critic, Ludwig Tieck, they became important works of literature in their own right. Today in Germany Shakespeare is revered almost as highly as the great masters of German literature, Goethe and Schiller: he has become almost German.

Shakespeare helped to give the British the ability to express themselves.

A nation needs inspiration. It may have been created out of purely pragmatic considerations, but it needs ideas to survive. Shakespeare helped to give the British the ability to express themselves, to look inwards with imagination and outwards with confidence. Ever since he first entertained the boisterous crowds in the theatres of London at the end of the sixteenth century, he has been, and will remain, Britain’s big idea, a vital stream of thought and ideas forever sustaining ‘This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England.’

CHAPTER 8 (#ulink_802a0c9b-4c3a-5fa4-9f10-8dff2ce3457f)

The Act of Union (#ud0885a1f-f5b6-591c-a173-96aa96d4fbee)

1707 (#ud0885a1f-f5b6-591c-a173-96aa96d4fbee)

In 1707 England and Scotland were united in the Act of Union. The two countries had had the same monarch for more than a century. The Act of Union gave them the same parliament and the same government, but it was by no means the end of their long, complicated relationship.

Scotland, too, once had a dream of an empire all its own. At the end of the seventeenth century it was in an unhappy state. In the years immediately following the dethronement of James II in 1688 the Catholics of the Scottish Highlands had risen up in his defence only to be defeated by their countrymen of the Lowlands, loyal to the new joint monarchy of William and Mary. The most shocking episode in this internal war had been the massacre at Glencoe in February 1692 when members of the Clan MacDonald were murdered by a division of Lowland soldiers to whom they had offered hospitality. The troops had been staying with their victims for nearly two weeks before they turned on them, killing in the early hours of the morning those they had been eating and playing cards with the previous night. ‘You are hereby ordered to fall upon the Rebels, the McDonalds of Glencoe, and putt all to the sword under seventy,’ said the orders sent to the commanding officer of the soldiers who carried out the massacre. ‘This is by the Kings speciall command, for the good and safty of the country.’ The bitter treachery of Glencoe, sanctioned by government at the highest level, was followed by terrible weather and famine. Divided and hungry, Scotland looked abroad for ideas for its salvation.

William Paterson had founded the Bank of England in 1694 by proposing that a company was created to lend the cash-strapped British government £1.2 million (see pages 331–336). Having fallen out with his fellow directors he returned to his native Scotland where he came up with a new money-making scheme. He proposed to start a Scottish colony in Darien on the isthmus of Panama. His idea, in principle, was perfectly sound. He argued that long journeys around Cape Horn at the tip of South America, or the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa, were hampering Europe’s trade with Asia. He proposed the formation of a colony on the narrow strip of land between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, where a profitable trading post could be established to ferry goods across land, speeding up the lengthy sea voyages. Nearly 200 years later his ideas were actually put into practice with the building of the Panama Canal, but in the 1690s the problems facing the Scottish colonists proved insurmountable. New Caledonia, as the colony was to be called, never rose as an imperial beacon of Scottish enterprise. It sank into oblivion, extinguished by the rigours of the terrible journey to reach it, the poor quality of its land and the hostility of the existing commercial empires of England and Spain. More than 2,000 men and women lost their lives: just as many lost all their money. Scotland, it seemed, could not survive in the rapidly expanding world of commerce and exploration on its own. It needed to be amalgamated with England, and it was in this climate that the two countries became one.

The uneasy relationship between England and Scotland stretched back for centuries. By the end of the eleventh century, after the Norman Conquest, Scotland’s territory looked very similar to how it does today, but the Scottish kings still hankered after expansion into Northumbria and Cumbria. The line of the border – from the Solway Firth in the west to the mouth of the Tweed in the east – was not actually finally settled until the Treaty of York in 1237 between the Scottish King, Alexander II, and Henry III. At the end of the thirteenth century civil war in Scotland played into the hands of the English monarchy. Edward I agreed to support John Balliol’s claim to the throne in return for being acknowledged as Scotland’s overlord, but Balliol lost control of the situation and his barons formed a council which signed an alliance with the French. Edward defeated the Scots at Dunbar in 1296 and suppressed the uprising of William Wallace at Falkirk in 1298 – although not before Wallace’s band of rebels had shocked the English by winning a surprising victory at Stirling the year before.

England’s control of Scotland was not tolerated for long. In 1314 Robert the Bruce won a devastating victory over Edward II at the Battle of Bannockburn: 6,000 Scotsmen massacred an English army of 15,000 men. Robert the Bruce was declared King of Scotland by the Declaration of Arbroath in 1320 – as proud and defiant a defence of liberty as any in British history: ‘As long as a hundred of us remain alive, we shall never on any conditions be subjected to English rule. It is not for glory, nor riches, nor honours that we fight, but for freedom alone, which no honest man gives up except with his life.’ England acknowledged Robert the Bruce’s sovereignty in the Treaty of Edinburgh of 1328, by which time the boy king, Edward III, had succeeded to the English throne.