The attack on Shakespeare by a Trust set up to commemorate a great writer is yet another unwelcome essay in loathing our history, culture and traditions.
Many of us wish to be proud of our country, to remember its best days, its finest hours, its greatest people and its best achievements.
William Shakespeare is admired, read and enacted all round the world. He is generally acclaimed as a great writer, able to capture eternal truths about human nature and the human condition. His words, characters and plots cross the centuries and national boundaries all round the world.
I will write occasional pieces about our history and the great causes and achievements our country has recorded. Today I begin with a brief comment on the great figures I particularly revere.
I rate Elizabeth I as a great politician who survived threats to her life whilst her Catholic sister was Queen to emerge as England’s greatest monarch.
I regard William Shakespeare as the world’s greatest dramatist.
J Turner was a great artist. His Fighting Temeraire captures the passing of the age of sail to steam, as Rain, Steam and Speed records the arrival of the railway.
Josiah Wedgwood was a great entrepreneur who changed the face of ceramics, developed marketing, built an advanced factory and pioneered better treatment of employees.
Nelson was the greatest military captain, containing and defeating the imperial forces of Napoleon.
March 18, 2025
Good morning.
This is it, we have so many Great Britain’s you can easily leave more out than you can list. The world owes this country much and we have nothing to be ashamed of. I am certainly not.
All this self-hate and loathing reminds me of Mao and the CCP. They too where very much into this rewriting of history. All better to control and re-program the people. It must be resisted.
March 18, 2025
Last year it was the story of an Indian restaurant illegally built too close to Ann Hathaway’s cottage.
March 18, 2025
What a wonderful first post. This is going to be a justifiably long series. Even so, I doubt you will be able to do justice to the fascinating geniuses thrown out so regularly, by the British.
The thing that is astonishing is their versatility. Many nations gave a great strength – the African race are great athletes for example. But the British have world beating people across the spectrum.
We ordinary people need to try to be worthy, at least not to besmirch the well earned reputation that they have won for us across time and the world.
March 18, 2025
In a fierce tirade against an opponent, Bob Hoskins in the film The Long Good Friday, compared US culture to that of Britain. He ranted citing Britain’s finest contributions to the world, ending in a stark statement something like:
‘….. and what did you invent? The ******* hot dog!’
March 18, 2025
The strategy is working well. Import the third world, destroy our culture and defame our heroes. It’s all part of he great reset.
Fortunately there is a disruptor on the other side of the Atlantic who is laying waste to all this white privilege nonesense. I so believe we only have one shot at reversing this nonesense and it isn’t with the bunch of clowns presently in Westminster.
It’d time it stopped
March 18, 2025
Those who would wish us ill first destroy the history and culture of a great nation, while diluting the whole with an influx of alien population. It is difficult to dicern the main purpose of this flight from reality other than destruction for destructions sake. They offer no obvious path to greatness other than the end of nationhood.
March 18, 2025
Lots of plays and operas are routinely updated and set in modern times. This can resemble a stark 1960s car park. Any soldiers are transformed into the brutal troops of a despot.
I suppose the directors get bored of the same production. The audiences are frequently unhappy and these directors are often booed when they appear on stage after the production.
A genuinely historic production at The Globe would allow for the groundlings to heckle and throw things at the stage.
March 18, 2025
The reason British culture is under attack by the radical left is that they have chips on their shoulders.
They look on with envy at British inventions, solutions, discoveries, wealth and its honour. They hate the fact that we discovered and owned a vast Empire which invested GBP trillions in today’s monetary values and brought wealth, health, infrastructure, economics, legality, civilisation and a future to countries that were centuries behind their peers and would still be so today without Britain.
In fact when we just walked away from the colonies many degenerated terribly and are still in an inexcusable condition today.
They hate Britain because they can’t compete with our history (not even close) so they attack, corrupt and brainwash people instead. The radical left are not only an embarrassment because their history is pathetic it is also that the Woke-Marxists amongst them are so proud of their dismal and failing ideology.
March 18, 2025
Can’t resist being picky. Nelson was an Admiral. Very different job, commanding an entire fleet, not just one ship, nor a small squadron.
That said, all those you mention are rightly revered. But the Woke Left socialists reserve a particular hatred of Shakespeare precisely because he dealt in eternal truths and they want to change human nature by rule, suppression of dissent and, now, even surgery.
Reply Yes of course he was an admiral. I was using the generic captain, not the rank.
March 18, 2025
I want to be picky too – Nelson was a Vice Admiral.
March 18, 2025
Perhaps the Shakespeare Trust, like Wedgewood, are good at marketing.
They are not the first to put out a press release knowing there will be a large negative reaction and improved their profile as a result.
Yes, the press release was very silly but perhaps it was meant to be.
March 18, 2025
Marketing ploy? One would like to think so but I very much doubt it. The first exhibit in my argument being the National Trust. We have allowed a Marxist Elite to infiltrate our national institutions…
(Although ‘Marxist Elite’ does sound like an oxymoron of course)
March 18, 2025
The lefty Globalists and the Cultural Marxists have deliberately targeted the most admired British heroes.
It’s part of a deliberate strategy to weaken English/British patriotism and to trash our history and culture so that a multi-cultural, no borders, one-world-government can be imposed.
They won’t be satisfied until our entire history has been corrupted and every individual who has made a significant contribution to our success has been erased.
March 18, 2025
Dear Sir John – if you mention Admiral nelson, then there’s no reason not to mention the 1st Duke of Wellington, Arthur Wellesley. I find it astonishing and worthy of inquiry how and why it is that wellington has so totally vanished from the national memory …
Reply A great soldier and politician. I was at a dinner last night in the London Guildhall . Wall statues to commemorate both Wellington and Nelson. Same in the Royal Gallery at Westminster.
March 18, 2025
@Vivian – Outside Parliament is a fine statue of Cromwell, who trashed it, but not one of General George Monck, who restored it and saved our ancient constitution. Truly we have odd ideas about national heroes.
March 18, 2025
And if mention of Nelson and Wellington is made, so (amongst many others) should be Hugh Dowding, chief of RAF Fighter Command for much of WW2 and the only man in history to have won a defensive air war.
March 18, 2025
The amusing part of this rewriting of history against current fashionable beliefs is that those doing are condemned to being judged by the future. Trans? Paying people not to work? Health waiting lists? Taxes?
The past is a different country, they did things differently there.
March 18, 2025
An encapsulating thought. Those who would destroy our history, culture, and humour are intent on turning us into refugees in our own country.
March 18, 2025
They seem to be succeding AG
March 18, 2025
The whole point of re-writing our history and culture is all about creating ‘our Island story’ where the originators are side lined in order to make DEI the full and only history/culture.
With a history, culture and customs so rich and spreading back so far, with people deeply rooted and connected it is impossible to have a natural story of our Island where the millions that have come in can find their history and roots.
So, knocking down the sturdy structure that has served so well, time and time again and rebuilding the new in the image of DEI is what it is all about.
The problem is there is no strong foundation, they are building on sand.
The talk of conscription has, in my opinion proved this.
For every one that has allegedly cited ‘racism’ as being a reason for not feeling duty bound to serve, I’m very confident that there are more who feel and know that their root/history/culture here is being destroyed, and they have no intention of fighting for those people who it seems on the face of it despise them.
March 18, 2025
What is odd is that these people who think Shakespeare is nothing special are actually running a trust entirely based on the premise that he was. Why did they take the job in the first place ?
March 18, 2025
Its a monthly pay cheque.
March 18, 2025
Those who attack the fine qualities of our national figures and history have tendencies tantamount to enmity.
March 18, 2025
Sir John
It is suggested that history is written by its victors. We should accept the interpretations of the time and not try and re-invent them to suit ‘personal’, very personal desires to manipulate society in a modern take on what a few individuals want as todays image.
We as a society for the most part is all the better for our 57 varieties of difference. It all goes down the drain when a minority want their minority view to be the prime view for all – they want to create discrimination. They don’t accept individuals or difference, they are the ‘Me’ Culture.
The reason so many clear free thinkers are against Woke, DEI and even ‘(Kier Starmer taking the Knee) Black Lives Matter’ agendas is because they start out doing the very thing they suggest they are against they are trying to nurture full on ‘discrimination’. Discrimination of the worst kind had not really entered the norm (the majority) of the UKs Society until those at the top for their own political agendas shoved a ‘them-and-us’ position down our throats. It is those that push these agendas that are a plague on society, they are trying to destroy not build.
Also out there and out of kilter is the so-called human rights interpretations being created, and they are being created, by those that practice Law in the UK. The human rights of the victims and society itself is sidelined just to prove some egotistical money earning point of the Courts and the Legal profession. The return to ‘English Law’ would solve many of the UK’s current two-tier legal system, it would put democracy and our accountable legislators back in control.
March 18, 2025
Pride in our past is not the only reason to commemorate the heroes of the past – They tell us who we are now and how we came to where we are.
There is nothing to trust about the attitude of the thugs that would destroy our reference points to history. They are an aberration. Basically it is a part of the socialist mind-set to destroy whatever made our society great, from the Church to those that moved us on to a better place.
Let’s stop giving any justification to these idiots and treat those that deface and damage historic monuments and statues as the vandals they are, and punish accordingly.
March 18, 2025
I watched the first in a series of programmes entitled “The Emerald Isles”, looking at islands around Ireland.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001zpjr
On Rathlin It was discovered that the mainstream modern indigenous Irish are not descended from Celts but from a preceding Bronze Age population, while on Arranmore they had sent an open letter around the world inviting back just the descendants of people who had left without realising that this was undiluted racism.
I well remember my father talking about our “kith and kin” in the colonies, including Southern Rhodesia, who had stood by us against the Germans, which even then was not a fashionable attitude and is now heresy. And that leads on to another thought, that this government plans to remove the wrong members of the Lords …
March 18, 2025
This is a superb article. I am very proud of the UK and our history. On 21st October 1805, Admiral Lord Nelson defeated the combined French and Spanish fleets off Cape Trafalgar. In a daring and revolutionary manoeuvre, Nelson commanded the English fleet to sail through the enemy’s lines instead of going alongside them, as was the traditional way of warships fighting at that time.
It cost Nelson his life, but what a fantastic career he had. Post the Second World War, we used to celebrate Trafalgar Day. What a pity we don’t do so today!