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National Geographic : 1964 May
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This fortress built by Nature for herself Against infection and the hand of war, This happy breed of men, this little world, This precious stone set in the silver sea, Which serves it in the ofice of a wall, Or as a moat defensive to a house, Against the envy of less happier lands; This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England RICHARD II (ACT II, SCENE 1) Sunset gilds chalk-white Shakespeare Cliff, ris ing high above the English Channel at Dover. nUUACHHUME BY NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC PHOTOGRAPHERDEAN CONGER() N.G.S. attended the King's School, which had 50 boys in Marlowe's time and now has 670. In Canterbury Cathedral, Shakespeare would have visited Henry IV's tomb. After the King's death at Westminster Abbey, a barge took his body down the Thames on its way to Canterbury. A terrible tempest arose, and long afterward a legend grew up that the boatmen had lightened their cargo by emptying Henry's coffin into the river. "The story was pure myth," a friendly clergyman at the Cathedral told us. "Records prove the tomb was opened many years lat er and Henry was found in his coffin, well preserved, looking much as the marble image you see there." If Shakespeare ever went to sea-and a Scot tish scholar is writing a book to show that Shakespeare must have served for a time in the Queen's navy-he would have sailed along the English Channel and observed the white cliffs of Dover. On a clear and windy day we peered over Shakespeare Cliff (left). It got its name from Shakespeare's description of the dizzy height at Dover in King Lear (IV, 6): How fearful And dizzy 'tis to cast one's eyes so low! The crows and choughs that wing the midway air Show scarce so gross as beetles... The murmuring surge That on the unnumbered idle pebble chafes Cannot be heard so high. THE ENGLAND that Shakespeare knew, the England he creates vividly in the minds of his readers, is the country that most Americans like to envision. From the white cliffs of Dover to castles on the wind-swept moors of Yorkshire, they go in quest of the romantic past that Shakespeare enables them to re-create for themselves. Shakespeare has given us more than our his tory of medieval England; he has left us geo graphical references and descriptions that estab lish in the land itself points of eternal interest. THE END 665
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