SOURCE: Potter, Nicholas. “‘Like to a tenement or pelting farm’—Richard II and the Idea of the Nation.” In Shakespeare in the New Europe, edited by Michael Hattaway, Boika Sokolova, and Derek Roper, pp. 130-47. Sheffield, U.K.: Sheffield Academic Press, 1994.

In the following essay, Potter likens England under Richard II to a present-day emerging nation with the choice of two competing ideologies: the masculine “shrewd steel” of Bolingbroke or the feminine “golden crown” of Richard. Neither metaphor, Potter argues, speaks to the middle ground and the plight of the common man.

Perhaps the most pressing question facing not only the countries struggling to emerge from the ruins of what once was the Eastern Bloc but also the countries of the old Europe, is the question of nationhood. The most frightening and disgusting elements of nationalistic feeling were not slow to take advantage of the uncertainty that characterized...