Literary Mysteries: "The Case of the Vanishing Country"

[steepholm]

I've often wondered about John of Gaunt's speech on England in Richard II:

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.

As you can see, Gaunt makes much of England's being an island. The only trouble is, it isn't one! Both in Gaunt's time and in Shakespeare's, England had a land border - not only with Wales, which the English had long since anschlussed, but with Scotland, a sovereign state.

Of course, the Scots today are used to English people and others conflating England and Britain (the Americans seem very prone to it), but I'm puzzled that the habit dates, not only from before the 1711 Act of Union, but even before the crowns were united under James VI and I. This inability to see Scotland is clearly a condition of long standing, which I propose to give a medical name: "ascotia". Was Shakespeare's Gaunt the earliest sufferer, or is it still older?

Comments

[drasecretcampus.livejournal.com]

This is a man with a coast to Bohemia, so maybe geography would've have not been his strong point. Bacon would not have made the mistake.

Is there a source Shakespeare is drawing on? Can't reach my Arden edn

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

I checked my Arden, and it quotes a few other passages, including King John:

England, hedged in with the main,
That water-walled bulwark, still secure
And confident from foreign purposes

And Daniel - who may have the priority with his 1592 sonnet from Delia:

Florish faire Albion, glory of the North,
Neptunes darling helde betweene his armes;
Deuided from the world as better worth,
Kept for himselfe, defended from all harmes.

That takes it back a few years, but only a few. Probably there's some left-over 1588 euphoria about this emphasis on the sea being like a moat, but Scotland's absence from the picture is still rather remarkable.

[drasecretcampus.livejournal.com]

"Ascotia" risks being philippocritical - certainly race-y - but may explain the line where Crooked Dick wishes to exchange a horse for a kingdom.

[gillo]

Hmm. The lad was from round these parts. We're a long way from the sea, and tend to think of it as all the way round us. I think you probably have to blame habit of mind rather than geography teachers at Stratford Grammar. (Yes, I do know there weren't any in those days...)

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

But I bet no one in Inverness was writing poetry about Scotland being an island!

[kalypso-v.livejournal.com]

If the sea was protecting England "against the envy of less happier lands" maybe the Duke has decided that Wales and Scotland are cheerfully unthreatening?

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

That would be nice! They certainly seemed very happy after his grandfather's visit to Bannockburn.

[kalypso-v.livejournal.com]

I didn't say it was a reasonable assumption!

[dorianegray.livejournal.com]

Maybe it was just a Southerner's inability to grasp that anything north of about Cambridge actually exists.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

Maybe, although I always think of Shakespeare as a Midlands boy.

[dreamingbrooke.livejournal.com]

It's probably a political/colonial idea: "England is everything, it already owns everything." To act and think that this is true is the propaganda commonly put out during that time as an effort to make the idea a reality.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

They needed to do some pretty hard thinking, since at this time the British Empire consisted of Ireland and a few acres of Virginia, but it clearly paid off over the following 150 years!

[endlessrarities.livejournal.com]

Ah yes, 'ascotia' is indeed a common malady...

Perhaps it's wishful thinking, an early piece of political propaganda which acknowledges the old desire for a united 'Britannia', ruled of course primarily by the anglo-Welsh (though more anglo than Welsh by that time) Tudor dynasty.

Or perhaps it's because Scotia wasn't a foe worth bothering about:-(