Scruton on the Religion of England

I am reading Roger Scruton's England: An Elegy. It is, as its title suggests, a book lamenting the passing of an English character that once was and now no longer is.

Put very briefly, the Church was domesticated in England, defined, like everything elses, by a place rather than a doctrine or a chain of command. It adapted to the core religous experience of the English, which was of the consecrated nature of their island. Its ceremonies and liturgies sanctified the English language, the English landscape, the English law and institutions and the English Crown - the mysterious corporation sole which is also the supreme fiction in this fairytale. p. 18

The Anglican religion in other words has helped formed the English social imaginery- to define its dreaming. The trouble is, if you shatter the myth, you lose the dreaming. And there is little you can find that will replace it...

Still, this is an explicitly religious view of Anglicanism, and one which shows how deeply unChristian Anglicanism can be ...

Is Shakespeare an Australian Author?

I had a lovely and lively discussion about this with an English English student who wanted to defend his nation's proprietorial rights to the bard. Surely geographical location counts for something, he said; surely he is more English than anything else?

But as an Australian, my culture and language are unthinkable without Billy the Shake. My education was saturated with Shakespeare; his influence was tremendous on the politics and culture of my country. After all, nations are not places, but ideas. We have every right - even a duty - to study him as one of our own. Shakespeare, we might say, came out on the First Fleet.

I think Shakespeare is more Australian than French: though he knew the French and the Italians, and no doubt he has had enormous influence there and even in Russia. But something is carried in the language itself that means it is not even deliberate for us to own him. He is part of our cultural DNA.

Of course, putting the boot on the other foot, we might say that the England that was Shakespeare's - the 'sceptred isle' - is no more, and has not been for centuries. That notion has long gone. He was not English as we think of English now...