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[/audioplayer]‘What country, friends, is this?’ We’ve been wrestling with Viola’s question almost from the moment she asked it. It was barely a year after Shakespeare had scribbled out those words, in the first Act of Twelfth Night, that James VI of Scotland inherited England’s throne, beginning a 400-year confusion over national identity that has led to the present referendum on partition.
The new monarch wanted to amalgamate his two realms. In his first address to the House of Commons, James asked — in his noticeably Scottish accent — ‘Hath not God first united these kingdoms, both in language and religion and similitude of manners? Hath He not made us all in one island, compassed by one sea?’ The border, the king declared, had always been artificial, and had now disappeared. Shakespeare, whom the king sponsored, seems to have agreed.
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