I find that a stretch. Oscar Wilde is at least as quotable, though I suppose the Brits categorize him as Irish instead. How about Orwell? Lewis Carroll? Jane Austen? Emily Bronte? William Blake? There's enough Sherlock clones around that it's hard to overlook Arthur Conan Doyle? Tolkien? Douglas Adams? CS Lewis? Mary Shelley? Virginia Woolf? Heck, Francis Bacon (unless you buy the theory that he doubles as Shakespeare).

Literature is not what the English lack!

I am not saying no one wrote anything else. I am merely pointing that I only hear about Shakespeare.

Somebody in the 19th Century said that the only quotations acceptable in the US Congress were from the Bible and Shakespeare.

Dickens? Austen?

Yup, I don't know what GP is talking about. English literature would still be the most amazing national literature in scope and depth and popularity even if it didn't have Shakespeare.

But it does.

You're right, and sort of wrong at the same time.

Maybe it's just my poor schooling but the only author we ever /had/ to read was Shakespeare, my mother introduced me to Orwell, my grandfather to Dickens.

The schools only ever introduced Shakespear, like he was the only notable author in the last thousand years.

That sounds like a terrible school and such a waste. I had Shakespeare, Dickens, C. Bronte, Kipling, Graham Greene, Keats, Shelley, Wordsworth, all as required reading plus loads of stuff we were encouraged to read plus extra-curricular drama put on for the public such as Pinafore, Pirates of Penzance, Pygmalion.

Just in case anyone is still around from those days that was Park Senior High School, Swindon, Wilts, 1970-1974. The more I hear of other people's schooling the more grateful I am for the schools I went to

When and where did you go to school? That seems like an exception rather than a rule.

perhaps, I can only speak for myself not others.

and to be fair, it was Warwickshire.

I think (or hope?) they're trying to highlight how ridiculous it is to make sweeping statements about a large country is.

But the whole Tolkien thing? 19th century writers?

Some of the books which most influenced my world view are English; Dawkins (game theory, other writers criticize religion better) and Orwell ("Down and Out in Paris and London", partly also "Animal farm" etc).

You can't generalize millions of people. For a more extreme example of that:

The majority of my intellectual (for lack of a better word) "idols" are probably from USA -- but quite a few people that moved there claims the US average levels of general education is abysmal (except for the specific subject someone studied).

The funniest variant of this was when an old student friend pointed out that his many Americans friends knew more about European history than the average European. (He was active in SCA.)