Methinks I am a prophet new inspired

infection and the hand of war – the seas shelter Britain from foreign aggression and disease. Shakespeare’s audience would have been mindful that stormy seas had helped save the nation from the Spanish Armada in 1588, and that each new wave of bubonic plague, the most recent in 1593–4, landed on England’s shore only when ship-borne disease managed to breach the watery barrier of the English Channel

This royal throne of kings, this scepter’d isle,
This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars,
This other Eden, demi-paradise,
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 office 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,
This nurse, this teeming womb of royal kings,
Fear’d by their breed and famous by their birth,
Renowned for their deeds as far from home,
For Christian service and true chivalry,
As is the sepulchre in stubborn Jewry,
Of the world’s ransom, blessed Mary’s Son,
This land of such dear souls, this dear dear land,
Dear for her reputation through the world,
Is now leased out, I die pronouncing it,
Like to a tenement or pelting farm:
England, bound in with the triumphant sea
Whose rocky shore beats back the envious siege
Of watery Neptune, is now bound in with shame,
With inky blots and rotten parchment bonds:
That England, that was wont to conquer others,
Hath made a shameful conquest of itself.

Ah, would the scandal vanish with my life,
How happy then were my ensuing death!

With eager feeding –  one who feeds too eagerly
will choke on his food

Light . . . itself — Frivolous indulgence,
like a voracious bird of prey, will exhaust
its means of support  and then eat up itself

Gaunt’s England has four main characteristics:  (1) it is royal: both a nation invested with regal authority (a ‘sceptered isle’) and a fertile birthplace of monarchs; (2) it is blessed by God and Nature in its Edenic fertility, internal peacefulness, and fortress-like geography; (3) it is a divine, warrior nation, led by its kings and dedicated to the prosecution of holy wars outside its own borders; and (4) it is famous, arousing both envy and admiration in other lands.

earth of majesty (a) majestical land; (b) place and birthplace of monarchs, a sense that anticipates ‘this teeming womb of royal kings’ and connects with the numerous images of earthly fertility that culminate in the ‘garden scene’.

seat of Mars residence of the god of war

demi-paradise Not ‘half-paradise’, but
rather a place that mixes the divine and
terrestrial, as in the word ‘demigod’