Shakespeare’s historical plays cover a period of three hundred years; the breakdown of the feudal system, and its replacement by a monarchy more or less controlled by a parliament. We have ten plays dealing with this period. Some of them Shakespeare wrote entirely, getting his data from old chronicles; others he worked over from older plays. He was careless about his facts; and how little grasp he had of fundamentals you may judge from the circumstance that “King John” does not even refer to the signing of Magna Charta. He might easily have had a character in this play make a speech on the subject of the people binding the insolence of their rulers. But he had no interest in such matters. What Shakespeare did was to make a series of chronicle plays dealing with the intrigues and quarrels and fightings of the English nobility. He followed tradition, but never hesitated to change the characters in order to heighten the dramatic interest. The result has replaced English history in the minds of all English school-boys, and those grown-up school-boys called statesmen. Their national poet flatters their vanities and encourages their insular prejudices. He did not like the Irish, he did not like the Welsh, he did not like the Scotch, he did not like the French, and of course he did not like the Spaniards. He liked the Romans, apparently because they resembled the English ruling classes. John of Gaunt in his dying speech proclaims England in a series of rapturous similes “this other Eden, demi-paradise ... this happy breed of men, this little world, this precious stone set in the silver sea ... this blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England.”... And that is all right, that is the correct way for Englishmen to feel about England. But do they permit Frenchmen to feel that way about France, to love and defend their country, and manage it in their own way? The answer is, they do not. Frenchmen are to see English kings laying claim to their throne; they are to see English armies invading their country, destroying their cities and laying waste their fields; and they are to hear the great poet of England cheering on the invader with his golden eloquence, burdening his play with wearisome speeches to prove the validity of the English claim to the throne of France, and explaining to Frenchmen that it is for their own good that their country is invaded by a superior race. Stranger yet, we shall find American scholars and critics enraptured over such English imperialist poetry! I go to my local library to see what the learned gentry have to say on this subject, and the most up-to-date thing I find is a book called “English History in Shakespeare’s Plays,” by a professor of a university in Louisiana. He quotes the passage in which Henry V incites his troops to the attack on Harfleur: Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more, Or close the wall up with our English dead.