Fifty Things You Need To Know About British History. Hugh Williams
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Название: Fifty Things You Need To Know About British History
Автор: Hugh Williams
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Историческая литература
isbn: 9780007309504
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Shakespeare’s international reputation began to grow in the nineteenth century. The rapid expansion of the British Empire brought with it British ideas and British culture, with Shakespeare at the helm. The first performance of a Shakespeare play in India was in Bombay, in 1770. Ten years later, in Calcutta, the capital of British India, Othello was performed at Christmas with many other Shakespeare productions following after that. By the middle of the nineteenth century his plays began to be translated and performed in Indian languages. In South Africa the African Theatre in Cape Town staged Henry IV, Part I, in 1801, with a notice in the Cape Town Gazette announcing that this was ‘the customary honour paid to our Immortal Bard’.
But it was not in the Empire but in a part of Europe where in the early nineteenth century Shakespeare achieved his most remarkable success. His work appealed naturally to the romantic imagination which was then the strongest cultural force in all branches of the arts. In Germany two of the principal exponents of romanticism were the brothers Friedrich and August Schlegel. Friedrich was a philosopher, but August was a writer and poet and in the early 1800s he began to translate Shakespeare into German. The results were outstanding. His understanding of Shakespeare combined with his own talents as a poet gave his translations a vitality all their own. Edited and amended by his fellow poet and critic, Ludwig Tieck, they became important works of literature in their own right. Today in Germany Shakespeare is revered almost as highly as the great masters of German literature, Goethe and Schiller: he has become almost German.
Shakespeare helped to give the British the ability to express themselves.
A nation needs inspiration. It may have been created out of purely pragmatic considerations, but it needs ideas to survive. Shakespeare helped to give the British the ability to express themselves, to look inwards with imagination and outwards with confidence. Ever since he first entertained the boisterous crowds in the theatres of London at the end of the sixteenth century, he has been, and will remain, Britain’s big idea, a vital stream of thought and ideas forever sustaining ‘This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England.’
In 1707 England and Scotland were united in the Act of Union. The two countries had had the same monarch for more than a century. The Act of Union gave them the same parliament and the same government, but it was by no means the end of their long, complicated relationship.
Scotland, too, once had a dream of an empire all its own. At the end of the seventeenth century it was in an unhappy state. In the years immediately following the dethronement of James II in 1688 the Catholics of the Scottish Highlands had risen up in his defence only to be defeated by their countrymen of the Lowlands, loyal to the new joint monarchy of William and Mary. The most shocking episode in this internal war had been the massacre at Glencoe in February 1692 when members of the Clan MacDonald were murdered by a division of Lowland soldiers to whom they had offered hospitality. The troops had been staying with their victims for nearly two weeks before they turned on them, killing in the early hours of the morning those they had been eating and playing cards with the previous night. ‘You are hereby ordered to fall upon the Rebels, the McDonalds of Glencoe, and putt all to the sword under seventy,’ said the orders sent to the commanding officer of the soldiers who carried out the massacre. ‘This is by the Kings speciall command, for the good and safty of the country.’ The bitter treachery of Glencoe, sanctioned by government at the highest level, was followed by terrible weather and famine. Divided and hungry, Scotland looked abroad for ideas for its salvation.
William Paterson had founded the Bank of England in 1694 by proposing that a company was created to lend the cash-strapped British government £1.2 million (see pages 331–336). Having fallen out with his fellow directors he returned to his native Scotland where he came up with a new money-making scheme. He proposed to start a Scottish colony in Darien on the isthmus of Panama. His idea, in principle, was perfectly sound. He argued that long journeys around Cape Horn at the tip of South America, or the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa, were hampering Europe’s trade with Asia. He proposed the formation of a colony on the narrow strip of land between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, where a profitable trading post could be established to ferry goods across land, speeding up the lengthy sea voyages. Nearly 200 years later his ideas were actually put into practice with the building of the Panama Canal, but in the 1690s the problems facing the Scottish colonists proved insurmountable. New Caledonia, as the colony was to be called, never rose as an imperial beacon of Scottish enterprise. It sank into oblivion, extinguished by the rigours of the terrible journey to reach it, the poor quality of its land and the hostility of the existing commercial empires of England and Spain. More than 2,000 men and women lost their lives: just as many lost all their money. Scotland, it seemed, could not survive in the rapidly expanding world of commerce and exploration on its own. It needed to be amalgamated with England, and it was in this climate that the two countries became one.
The uneasy relationship between England and Scotland stretched back for centuries. By the end of the eleventh century, after the Norman Conquest, Scotland’s territory looked very similar to how it does today, but the Scottish kings still hankered after expansion into Northumbria and Cumbria. The line of the border – from the Solway Firth in the west to the mouth of the Tweed in the east – was not actually finally settled until the Treaty of York in 1237 between the Scottish King, Alexander II, and Henry III. At the end of the thirteenth century civil war in Scotland played into the hands of the English monarchy. Edward I agreed to support John Balliol’s claim to the throne in return for being acknowledged as Scotland’s overlord, but Balliol lost control of the situation and his barons formed a council which signed an alliance with the French. Edward defeated the Scots at Dunbar in 1296 and suppressed the uprising of William Wallace at Falkirk in 1298 – although not before Wallace’s band of rebels had shocked the English by winning a surprising victory at Stirling the year before.
England’s control of Scotland was not tolerated for long. In 1314 Robert the Bruce won a devastating victory over Edward II at the Battle of Bannockburn: 6,000 Scotsmen massacred an English army of 15,000 men. Robert the Bruce was declared King of Scotland by the Declaration of Arbroath in 1320 – as proud and defiant a defence of liberty as any in British history: ‘As long as a hundred of us remain alive, we shall never on any conditions be subjected to English rule. It is not for glory, nor riches, nor honours that we fight, but for freedom alone, which no honest man gives up except with his life.’ England acknowledged Robert the Bruce’s sovereignty in the Treaty of Edinburgh of 1328, by which time the boy king, Edward III, had succeeded to the English throne.
The two countries were not destined to be friends. At the centre of their hostility was Scotland’s relationship with England’s historic rival, France. ‘The Auld Alliance’ led the Scots to invade England on more than one occasion – most disastrously in 1513. The Scottish king, James IV, believing the English army to be preoccupied with Henry VIII’s expedition against the French, marched across the border and was killed with many of his nobles at the Battle of Flodden Field. Scotland, constantly beset by internal warfare and always under threat from its more powerful southern neighbour, struggled after the reign of Robert the Bruce to build itself into a significant independent power.
Its moment came when the last of the Tudors, Elizabeth I, died without leaving an heir. The main political aim of James VI of Scotland was to make sure he succeeded to the throne of England in 1603. In achieving this he gave Scotland position and prestige, as well as an opportunity СКАЧАТЬ