"Shakespeare has throughout sounded, as has no other great poet or dramatist on record, the note of royalty. His is a royal world. Shakespeare's royalistic thinking is, for the most part, patriotic, and his work from time to time spreads its wings in national prophecy. Royalty and England tend to involve each other, and these in turn involve strenuous themes of war and peace, order and disorder, conflicts of personal ambition and communal necessity, contrasts of tyranny and justice, the whole stamped by the chivalric symbol of Saint George and aspiring to Christian sanctions. This Shakespearian royalty, conceived in the reign of Elizabeth I, is not dead; it has lived since, within the story of Great Britain, and it is alive today, in the reign of Elizabeth II."