Politics & Power Quote by Peter Shaffer

Cambridge sits in this line like a pressure cooker: old stone, old codes, old permission structures. Shaffer isn’t simply reminiscing about a pleasant student social circle; he’s sketching the emotional geography that fed his drama. “Several very good American friends” works as more than a biographical detail. It’s an importation of temperament into a place that trains you to smooth your edges. The Americans arrive as proxies for an alternative self: louder, less deferential, less trapped in the etiquette of not seeming to want too much.

“Land of promise” is doing double duty. In the 20th-century British imagination, America is both myth and market, a place where ambition is not automatically vulgar. Shaffer’s careful qualifier - “in every sense of that word” - hints at the seduction and the sales pitch. Promise can mean opportunity, but also an uncashed check, a story you buy into because you need it. That ambivalence is the engine here: he’s attracted to America not as a geopolitical reality but as a psychological instrument, a way to imagine escape from England’s inhibitions without having to litigate all the costs.

The clincher is “I felt in England.” The sentence lands on interior weather, not national critique. This is less anti-England than anti-suffocation. Coming from a playwright whose work often stages the clash between desire and constraint, the subtext is almost programmatic: freedom isn’t abstract. It’s the permission to be intense, to be ambitious, to be unruly - and to find, in another culture, a vocabulary for impulses your own taught you to downplay.