The Bard’s Brexit battle
What would Shakespeare have thought of Britain’s imminent departure from the EU?
JUST over four centuries ago, the third-born child of a leather tradesman walked the streets of Stratford-upon-Avon, a medieval market town, nestled in the countryside of an enchantingly verdant island, and imagined stories set on a vast continent he would likely never see.
Epic French battles. Illicit Italian love affairs. Brooding Danish princes.
William Shakespeare, forever after known as England’s national poet, was obsessed with Europe.
It’s an obsession that continues in Stratford-upon-Avon, where the men and women who tread daily in the Bard’s footsteps past half-timbered Tudor houses are fixated on their country’s imminent rupture from the EU.
But is that break a historical triumph, or a tragedy?
Nine months after Britain voted to leave the EU – and just before the United Kingdom formally gives notice to its soon-tobe erstwhile partners across the English Channel next Wednesday – there is nothing remotely approaching consensus.
Stratford is every bit as polarised as the UK as a whole, split between those basking in glorious sunshine and others mired in the winter of their discontent.
The vote here exactly mirrored the national tally – 52% opted to leave, 48% chose to stay – and if anything, the battle lines have only hardened as Britain’s departure draws near. Despite endless debate, neither side has convinced the other. Britain remains a house divided as it prepares to leap into the unknown of a first EU defection.
To Brexit opponents in this charming tourist magnet of a town, the country is making an epic mistake, a misguided turn away from the world after centuries of looking outwards. The internationally-minded Bard, they insist, would have cringed.
But to supporters, British liberation is nearly at hand after decades under the thumb of unelected Brussels bureaucrats. Shakespeare’s English heroes, they insist, would have approved.
Shakespeare gets no say in Brexit, of course, having died 401 years ago – long before even the United Kingdom existed – much less the still-in-its-infancy experiment that is the EU.
That hasn’t stopped both sides from periodically attempting to enlist the services of the Bard of Avon, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language.
Brexit backers point to his patriotic verse: “This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England.”
Plus, they note, there’s no evidence he ever left his native island, despite the French coast looming a mere 30.5km across the English Channel.
Pro-EU advocates, meanwhile, argue that he read deeply about continental Europe, even if he never visited, that many of his plays were set there, and that he saw England as rooted firmly in a broader European history.
“He takes the English people to Venice, to Rome, to Athens.
For Shakespeare that idea of Europeanism connects us back to our roots – to who we are,” said Carol Chillington Rutter, a professor of Shakespearean studies at the nearby University of Warwick.
Regardless of his stance on Brexit, scholars say that Shakespeare would have undoubtedly been intrigued by the subject – and may not have needed to go far had he chosen to write about it.