Inventing the Nation

I. The Republic of the Yard

Walk into the Globe in the summer of 1599 and you have walked into something that did not previously exist in Europe at this scale: a daily, paying, socially mixed assembly held in the open air for the purpose of being moved together. The medieval mystery cycles had gathered crowds, but on holy days only and under church discipline. The aristocratic masque had gathered elites, but in private and at the king's pleasure. The Bankside playhouses gathered everyone, every weekday, for a penny, under a flag.

This is not a small change. It is the invention of a new social space — what one might call a republic of the yard — in which a butcher and a gentleman watched the same fiction at the same time and were, briefly, the same kind of person: an audience. The political consequences of this discovery would take a generation to play out (it is no accident that the London playhouses were closed by parliamentary order in 1642, on the eve of civil war), but its cultural consequences are with us still.

II. Manufacturing a Nation

The history plays Shakespeare wrote in the 1590s — the two tetralogies running from Richard II to Henry VIII — gave a population that had survived the Armada a usable past. They argued, in the most popular medium of the age, that England was a single thing with a single story, that the Tudor settlement was the providential resolution of a century of disorder, and that to be English was to be the heir of Agincourt. This argument was not subtle and it was not accidental.

What is striking is that the argument was made by, and for, a commercial audience. The crown did not commission the history plays; the box office did. National identity, in late Elizabethan London, was a thing the public bought tickets to. The state benefited; the playhouse paid the rent.

"This royal throne of kings, this sceptred isle, / This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars, / This other Eden, demi-paradise…"

Gaunt's speech is the most-quoted patriotic passage in English literature. It is also, in context, the dying lament of a defeated nobleman about a king he loathes. The audience took the lines and left the context — exactly as audiences would later do with John Wayne, with Bruce Springsteen, with every other commercial provider of national feeling.

III. The First Modern Celebrity

Celebrity, in the modern sense, requires three conditions: a name that circulates beyond the body that bears it; a recognisable and repeatable style; and a paying public that follows that style across time. All three are present in the careers of Richard Burbage and Will Kemp, and increasingly — after about 1598 — in the career of their house playwright.

Shakespeare's name first appears prominently on a title page in 1598 (the second quarto of Love's Labour's Lost). Within a few years it is being used to sell plays he did not write — the Pavier quartos of 1619 attribute The Yorkshire Tragedy and Pericles to "W.S." in the hope that buyers will not look too closely. This is the unmistakable signature of celebrity: the brand has detached from the producer and acquired its own commercial logic.

The mechanism that converted a successful playwright into "Shakespeare" was the First Folio of 1623. Heminges and Condell's volume was a deliberate, expensive, and unprecedented act of canon-making: a working dramatist's scripts, collected at folio size, prefaced by a portrait and by laudatory verses from Ben Jonson (who supplied the line "He was not of an age, but for all time"). The Folio did for Shakespeare what no living entertainer could have done for himself: it removed him from the marketplace and installed him in the library.

IV. The Afterlife

The afterlife of Shakespeare is a study in how a national myth is curated. The Restoration adapted him (Nahum Tate's King Lear ends happily, with Cordelia married). The eighteenth century rehabilitated him: David Garrick's Stratford Jubilee of 1769 — a three-day festival of pageantry, fireworks, and Shakespeare-themed merchandise held in a town where no Shakespeare play was performed — invented the figure of the literary pilgrim and, with him, the cultural tourism industry.

The Victorians completed the project. They installed Shakespeare as the secular saint of the British Empire, exporting his collected works to every colonial school as proof of cultural superiority. The Royal Shakespeare Company was a twentieth-century postscript; the Globe reconstruction on Bankside in 1997 was a twenty-first century one. At every stage, the same operation: the messy commercial entertainer was reshelved as the national poet, and the nation re-narrated itself through him.

V. The Long Echo

The structural inheritance from Bankside to today is direct and underappreciated. The Marvel Cinematic Universe is a repertory: forty interlocking titles produced by a single company for a single audience, sustained by recurring characters whose continuity the audience tracks with the seriousness once reserved for theology. K-pop fandoms organise around a parasocial knowledge of named performers and their visible aesthetic — Will Kemp, who morris-danced from London to Norwich for the publicity and then published a pamphlet, would have recognised the form immediately. Streaming-era prestige television is a return to the rotating repertoire of multi-hour plays that Hamlet's first audience already knew how to sit through.

What changed is the technology of distribution. What did not change is the social fact that a mixed audience, gathered in commercial conditions, will reliably invent both a shared mythology and a class of stars to incarnate it. The first time this happened on the modern scale, it happened in a roughly circular timber building on the south bank of the Thames, between 1599 and 1613. We have been replaying the experiment ever since.