Jez Butterworth’s Jerusalem – On Englishness

By Em Robertson Taylor

As someone who has the St. George’s cross blu-tacked to my wall, I am often asked why I display such a controversial visual. Whilst patriotism is a divisive topic in itself, ‘Englishness’ seems to be most commonly defined by extremism. During the destructive riots over the past year, the English flag was often seen towering above the heads of angry racists, and for much of modern cultural history, has become a stamp on the letters of bigotry and exclusion. 

I must admit, I find it a shame that we have seemingly surrendered the concept of Englishness to the extreme margins. I suppose we witnessed the wave of  “Cool Britannia” in the 2000s that led up to 2012 Olympics, which for many of my peers seems to symbolise the peak of their limited patriotism for this country, but even so, that was a pride in Britishness, which seems to be somewhat easier, and less awkward to associate with. And whilst Wales and Scotland have been able to foster a more inclusive cultural nationalism, it is the United Kingdom’s biggest player that has been unable to do so.

In 2009, Jez Butterworth premiered Jerusalem, a play that sought to resituate cultural Englishness into a literary context, and also comment on how rural Englanders respond to their changing cultural landscape. The play focuses on the eviction of Johnny Rooster Byron, an English traveller whose caravan is at risk of demolishment by the local Kennet and Avon council. Upon first impressions, Byron is the personification of aged and chauvinistic stereotypes, his discourse is filled to the brim with derogatory and colloquial euphemism. He drinks, he spits, he is the epitome of the ‘social underclass’ that so many people associate English pride with. Crucially, he’s an outdated anomaly, a glitch, a rural caricature that simply cannot keep up with the mechanisms of modernity. And yet, it is with this archetype that Butterworth believes a realisation of English cultural nationalism can be reimagined. Johnny’s surname, Byron, immediately ties him to the English romantic great.  Johnny also bears stark similarity to the original author of Jerusalem, William Blake. At one point, Byron reminisces about his legendary performances before his fall into social isolation and obscurity, supposedly prancing across three double decker busses at the local Flintock fair – these illustrious tales of greatness much resembling the infamous hallucinations of Blake. Furthermore, his fall from grace has colonial tinges. As Johnny Byron grapples with his isolation, England must surely construct an identity independent from its imperial past. 

By the play’s culmination,  Johnny’s syntax has transformed into lyrical and decorated soliloquies, his flourishing final monologue a clear ode to English mythology and folklore. And whilst choosing to stand by his caravan, Johnny Byron self-actualizes and reconnects with a rural form of cultural Englishness that has become so lost and mistranslated, and argues that there is rich form of English identity that can indeed prosper in the modern world. Englishness is not an unstudied concept in the literary scape. In E.M Forster’s Howards End, for example, a similar mythical and artistic enlightenment is discovered by the protagonists. Forster, however, seems to commit the English middle classes to this task of reimagining England’s green and pleasant pastures. Butterworth imagines a revolution from the bottom-up and suggests that class-consciousness is integral to forming a cultural richness for a nation that seems so fragmented. Perhaps this debate is trivial, perhaps we can never reconcile a version of Englishness that is fuelled by folklore and romanticism, as opposed to exclusion and suspicion. Perhaps, patriotism is just a dusty book on the top shelf that this generation has no interest in reading.  But I do feel it is our responsibility to re-imagine a more accessible and deeper Englishness – after all, the alternative is throwing it to the beer-bellied wolves.