Page:Shakespeare of Stratford (1926) Yale.djvu/167

148 athlete. King Henry’s speech before Agincourt is the high-water mark of football oratory:

This was not the spirit in which Queen Elizabeth made war. It was not the spirit of the seven thousand English whom the Earl of Essex led to Rouen in 1591 to aid Navarre’s stern Huguenots against the Catholic League. There is more zeal for national expansion and contemporary foreign policy in the one play of Edward III (I think, by Peele) than in all that Shakespeare wrote.

The very sea, which to Ralegh and Spenser was ever beckoning Englishmen abroad, which was Cynthia’s peculiar domain and highway, is to Shakespeare a de-