Page:Shakespeare of Stratford (1926) Yale.djvu/165

146 the new political faith—Burghley, Ralegh, and Walsingham—mean nothing.

Shakespeare’s patriotism also, glowing though it is, is traditional and essentially pre-Elizabethan. He has nothing of the new imperialism so dominant in Ralegh and Spenser, and very little indeed of the sense of the gorgeous Indies and the new world beyond the seas that Marlowe shows everywhere. He was distinctly a ‘little Englander.’ He glories in the thought of the aloofness and self-sufficiency of his island,

His vision stops at the ideal of a hermit kingdom, free from foreign entanglements, safe in the unity of its citizens and in a proudly defensive attitude toward the world:

Wars abroad are for him but sallies from the fortress, heroic, yet of dubious advisability. Henry the Fifth has prudential and legalistic aims in invading France, but no imperial aims. He embarks upon his expedition because his crafty father has advised him to end civil discord in England by busying ‘giddy minds with