Shakespeare and the Makers of Virginia (Classic Reprint)

Download or read book Shakespeare and the Makers of Virginia (Classic Reprint) written by A. W. Ward and published by . This book was released on 2015-07-12 with total page 58 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Excerpt from Shakespeare and the Makers of Virginia Through the munificence of Sir Charles Wakefield, our Academy has since, as has been stated to you this afternoon, been enabled to commemorate the Raleigh Tercentenary by administering a Fund singularly adapted for advancing the cooperation of American and English historical scholarship. One other recent manifestation of this sense of international unity I venture to note, before entering on my immediate theme, to which it seems peculiarly germane. Two years ago, 1917, the Royal Historical Society published a volume of very great interest, introduced by a weighty preface from the hand of our honoured late President, Viscount Bryce, and containing a series of essays by historical scholars of high eminence, commemorating, in connexion with the seven hundredth-anniversary, in 1915, of the grant of our great English Charter at Runnymede. None of these essays, I think, surpassed in value that by a distinguished American jurist, now a member of our Cambridge Professorial Body (Dr. H. D. Hazeltine), who in this paper showed with perfect clearness how 'the growth of the colonies in America meant, from the very beginning, the extension of English institutions and laws to these little Englands across the sea. To their birthright of the English traditions of the sixteenth and earlier centuries was now added the gift of the constitutional and legal principles established in seventeenth-century England.' Thus it came to pass - and this is a feature of English colonial life without a parallel in the history of modern colonization - that 'in the political and constitutional controversy of the colonial period' (of American history) 'the rights of the colonists as Englishmen played a vitally important part'; that 'Magna Carta and other English statutory guarantees of the subject were relied upon as the source of political privilege and civil right'; and that, as Professor Hazeltine told a Cambridge audience last summer, 'from the very beginning of effective colonization in the early seventeenth century, Englishmen in America... regarded the English Common Law as their own birthright'; so that 'this incorporation of the English conception of law into colonial thought and practice constitutes one of the most fundamental of all the influences of England upon America'. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.