I Am Welsh

David Hawkes’s TLS review of Marisa Cull’s Shakespeare’s Princes of Wales sums up the influence of Wales on Elizabethan England, and on England’s Bard in particular: 

“The Bard (the very term has a specifically Welsh provenance) had a Welsh grandmother, Alys Griffin. The man who taught him his ‘small Latin,’ the Stratford grammar school teacher Thomas Jenkins, was Welsh. At least four of Shakespeare’s colleagues in the Lord Chamberlain’s men were from Wales. Welsh characters feature in all the English History Plays except King John, as well as in The Merry Wives of Windsor. Cymbeline and King Lear are set in Celtic Britain, at a time before the English bestowed their current, paradoxical appellation on the Welsh. Even the historical Macbeth had Welsh connections.”

The Welsh were, quite literally, the Elizabethan “other”: “The Saxon word Welsch means ‘foreigner.’ The verb elschen, to speak gibberish, literally means to speak like a Welshman. The history of English colonialism begins with war on the Welsh, and the colonial dichotomy between centre and periphery has its original in the fraught relations between England and Wales. The contradictory nature of this relation is encapsulated in the very title ‘Prince of Wales.’”

Cull’s book uncovers the influences of Wales on Shakespeare’s work by examining the various princes of Wales that appear in his plays. Shakespeare comes across as “acutely sensitive to Wales’s fundamental role in the construction of English national culture and character. As Cull demonstrates, he embodied and explored the resulting ambiguities through the indisputably central, yet simultaneously marginal, figure of the Prince of Wales.” The sensitivity to the Welsh contribution to England comes most clearly in Henry V’s declaration, “I am Welsh, you know.” He’s not Welsh; nary a drop of Celtic blood in those veins. Yet, as Hawkes puts it, in Henry “the Other becomes part of the Self.” Not only in Henry, but in the Bard who created the dramatic Henry.