What is unifying is less available. As noted before, religion has not been important to England for quite some time. This cannot serve as a center. The royal family serves as a center of interest, but not as a center of political power or vision. The empire served as a center, but the empire is gone. What remains is a culture of many centers, and this is what contemporary England must build upon, along with the remnants of its history. Williams, G. And Ramsden, J. (1990). Ruling Britannia. London: Longman. It is England that created the global movement of slaves, and the global movement of goods and services. That provided the foundation for the development of the polyglot culture of the United States. It also provided England itself with both history and tradition, and diversity, change, and movement, as characteristics of its society. In some ways, England has been particularly outstanding for its religious and artistic contributions to world culture. Much of the country's struggle for identity has been rooted in deciding which religious traditions should dominate. Some of the county's most famous writers and philosophers, like John Milton, devoted a great deal of time and volumes of work discussing matters both of church and state. Shakespeare too has led to a long term association of England with great theatre and great acting. Briggs (1983) noted that Shakespeare, and the Queen Elizabeth of Shakespeare's time, seem to have appealed to the English pride in an important way, and a way that has carried down through time. Part of that appeal was the very Englishness of both of them. Elizabeth was less foreign than many of the English monarchs of that era. Shakespeare is associated with a passionate lo |
