A man for all ages

The deployment of Shakespeare to describe Brexit is by now a cliché. It might take the form of a quotation, be borrowed in a headline, or involve the name of one of the better-known characters; it might turn up in that most hollow of adjectives, Shakespearean. It has two possible modes. There is triumphalism drawn from the history plays: this sceptred isle, once more unto the breach. And there is tragic calamity: the betrayal by Brutus, Hamlet dithering. Nobody much invokes the comedies, perhaps because negotiations with the EU have not yet descended to cross-dressing.

Shakespeare is our national myth, most useful in a time of crisis, and an amazingly erudite new study by the Shakespeare scholar Jonathan Bate shows that this process of repurposing old stories has always been the point of Shakespeare. As Bate writes in How the Classics Made Shakespeare: ‘Ever since Anglo-Saxon times, the English had told their national stories in histories and legends, frequently drawing on comparisons with antiquity.’

Sixteenth-century England was pre-occupied with the break from Rome, in the turning away of the Reformation English church from the Pope; but it was equally a society which understood its own cultural and imperial ambitions by reference to classical Rome, and before it to pre-Christian Greece. At school and then in his plays, Shakespeare followed classical models, and this sense of an inheritance from ancient Greece and Rome in turn permitted a nationalist boast. When Shakespeare’s plays were posthumously published together in 1623 in the grand edition known as the Folio, a prefatory poem by Ben Jonson boasted that now Britain may ‘triumph’ because ‘all scenes of Europe homage owe’ to Shakespeare.