Show pride in being English
October 8th, 2006
A letter to the Sunday Telegraph which was published on 8th October 2006.
Your comment that Shakespeare’s “vision cannot be identified with any single country” (Leading article, October 1st), in the context of celebrating St George’s Day as Shakespeare’s Day, is only too typical of the views that have increasingly deprived English people, and especially English children, of any sense of their own culture and its achievements.
Just as Isaac Newton’s profound insights and analysis of the physical world have shaped the modern world, more than any other individual’s, so have Shakespeare’s poetry and insights illuminated human nature more than anyone else’s. But that does not lessen the fact that both these supreme geniuses were English and passed their entire lives in England. Just occasionally, we English should be allowed to celebrate our inheritance without the usual tut-tutting from the metropolitan punditry.