The kernel of sound patriotism is respect for a nation's traditional
repute, for the attested worth of the race. That is the large lesson
which Shakespeare taught continuously throughout his career as a
dramatist. The teaching is not solely enshrined in the poetic
eloquence either of plays of his early years like _Richard II._ or of
plays of his middle life like _Henry V._ It is the last as well as the
first word in Shakespeare's collective declaration on the true
character of patriotism. _Cymbeline_ belongs to the close of his
working life, and there we meet once more the assurance that a due
regard to the past and an active resolve to keep alive ancestral
virtue are the surest signs of health in the patriotic instinct.
The accents of John of Gaunt were repeated by Shakespeare with little
modulation at that time of his life when his reflective power was at
its ripest. The Queen of Britain, Cymbeline's wife, is the personage
in whose mouth Shakespeare sets, not perhaps quite appropriately, the
latest message in regard to patriotism that he is known to have
delivered. Emissaries from the Emperor Augustus have come from Rome to
demand from the King of Britain payment of the tribute that Julius
Caesar had long since imposed on the island, by virtue of a _force
majeure_, which is temporarily extinguished.
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