Methinks I am a prophet new-inspired.

And do foretell that Boris will soon seek

A barricade from which to bellow out

Vast chunks of Shakespeare’s Henry to his troops

Beneath the Harfleur walls. And what his aim?

To claim the Bard for Brexit this weekend,

Who sadly shuffled off this mortal coil

Four hundred years ago on Saturday.

And all those angry, loyal Brexiteers,

Who’ve waited for this moment all their life,

Will summon up the blood and happily

Disguise fair nature with hard-favoured rage.

But they’d be wrong, unutterably wrong.

I have not a shadow of a doubt that William Shakespeare would have voted to remain. Even though he may never have stepped outside this country, he was no parochial little Englander. His parish was the whole of Europe and he cast his plays across the continent. His great and complex love stories were set in fair Verona, Messina, Vienna, Roussillon, Navarre, Sicily, Bohemia, Venice, Padua, Ephesus and Troy.

Not for him a purely English tale. His emotional horizon included Austria, Denmark, France, Spain, Italy, the Czech Republic, Greece and many more. Even in the very English Forest of Arden (or is it Ardennes?), the setting for As You Like It, Duke Senior’s court includes the very French-sounding Jacques and Amiens. Shakespeare’s late, lumbering play Cymbeline sees peace restored at the end when the English King agrees to pay tribute to the Roman Emperor, and at the end of King Lear the French save the day in support of Cordelia.

Like Autolycus, Shakespeare stole shamelessly from other European authors, such as Homer and Ludovico Ariosto. Even Richard II, with its great “this blessed plot, this England” speech, relies on the Chronicles written by the French-speaking chronicler from Hainault in the Holy Roman Empire, Jean Froissart. (And, incidentally, that speech is hardly the epitome of English patriotism as it is spoken by John of Gaunt, a Flanders-born claimant to the throne of Castile who ends with the words “this England … is now leased out … like to a tenement or pelting farm”.)

Shakespeare’s whole linguistic palette is European as he stole words, too, especially from Latin, Greek and French, giving us champion, incapable, majestic, obsequiously, premeditated, assassination, Olympian, lacklustre, torture – and perhaps, in this context most importantly, compromise.

‘Desdemona falls in love with Othello as he tells his tales of derring-do in foreign climes.’ Photograph: Tristram Kenton/The Guardian

He was no xenophobe, either. The plot of The Comedy of Errors hinges on the ludicrous ban on Syracusan migrants entering the city of Ephesus. We sympathise with Perdita abandoned in Bohemia in The Winter’s Tale, Celia who dresses up as Aliena in As You Like It and Prospero in The Tempest because they are castaways in a strange land. Far from fearing people of different nationalities, Shakespeare delighted in the clash of cultures. Desdemona falls in love with Othello as he tells his tales of derring-do in foreign climes and the decent black man Othello is undone by the treacherous white man Iago. And even in that darkly complex play The Merchant of Venice, Shakespeare makes it difficult for us not to sympathise with Shylock when he asks: “If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh?” Compare that to Christopher Marlowe’s unambiguously hateful and murderous Barabas in The Jew of Malta.

Shakespeare’s great battle hero, Henry V, is no jingoistic warrior. His fears and doubts are played out as he sits unrecognised among his soldiers on the night before Agincourt. The French may be the enemy – their insulting present (“tennis-balls, my liege”) presented as the cause of war. Yet when Henry goes a-wooing of Katherine, Shakespeare makes us laugh with her at Henry’s clumsiness and inability to speak French rather than the other way round. And the play ends with peace restored by a treaty alliance with France. This is an argument for European unity, not against it.

Perhaps the strongest Shakespearean antidote to rampant nationalism is the militaristic Coriolanus, who disdains Roman democracy, likening the rule of the plebeians over the patricians to allowing “crows to peck the eagles”. His tragedy is that his own people, the Volscians, kill him for signing a peace treaty with Rome rather than destroying the city when he had it at his mercy. Only a fascist would think the play proves that Coriolanus should have ploughed on with destroying Rome despite his mother’s pleading.

Shakespeare made his position absolutely clear in a speech he wrote for a play on the life of Thomas More, which was never produced. The London crowd are berated for attacking “strangers” (migrants, in Ukip language) from other countries. ”Go you to France and Flanders / To any German province, Spain or Portugal, Nay, anywhere that not adheres to England, / Why you must needs be strangers.” And that’s the point today. No country has more of its nationals living in other countries in the EU than we do.

So my message to those strange bedfellows, Boris and Nigel, Grayling and Gove? In the words of Shakespeare, this is not a foregone conclusion and I don’t want to lay it on with a trowel, but if we leave the EU we will be in a pickle and all your talk of freedom will be cold comfort to those who lose their jobs when companies leave the UK, bag and baggage.

I say this more in sorrow than in anger, but your pomp and circumstance offers a fool’s paradise, because all that glisters is not gold and that way madness lies. You think the fault is in those European stars, but it is in ourselves. More fool you. Nobody wants us to leave the EU more than Putin. So, Brexit, pursued by a bear.