On twitter and elsewhere one might comes across postings by ‘John Bull’, @garius. He is expert on transport in London (see London Reconnections) and digs up recondite aspects of forgotten history (the Emu War is a gem).
Today he made a reasonable complaint:
That is because most producers — and I include Olivier and Branagh— haven’t thought through the context and depth of the great soliloquy speeches in Henry V. Here was my effort, now fifteen years gone, part of a wider study of the play and of Henry’s ‘psychology’:
The address before Agincourt
This is the crunch moment, up against impossible odds, when Henry had to rally some sparks of spirit.
The English army trekked across northern France, an unnecessary journey which should have taken just over a week. It had had now extended into three, in foul weather, and worsening to constant autumnal rain. Just a short march from the English town of Calais, they were brought to battle by a larger (though not, as Shakespeare and some school histories have it, vastly overwhelming) French force. It is also not true, as Juliet Barker shows, that the French tactics were unco-ordinated.
That’s the history: here’s the theatre. This speech, too, is worthy of close analysis. It is something more than mere rabble-rousing:
If we are mark’d to die, we are enow
To do our country loss; and if to live,
The fewer men, the greater share of honour.
God’s will! I pray thee, wish not one man more.
Henry enters, having just overheard Westmoreland wishing for reinforcements. His opening merely recognises the inevitable: there are no additional resources. Instead he offers honour, an abstract, but one of the marks of chivalry.
Chivalry
This of itself needs a passing comment. Chivalry was the morality which controlled the man on the horse, who was the military equivalent of the modern tank (and, curiously, needed about the same size of support team).
A knyght ther was, and that a worthy man,
That fro the tyme that he first bigan
To riden out, he loved chivalrie,
Trouthe and honour, fredom and curteisie.
Those essentials of knighthood would translate into modern English as the code of the noble class:
- giving one’s word and keeping it, no matter what;
- offering due respect and deserving respect from others;
- generosity of spirit and well as of pocket;
- the good manners of the Court.
Henry picks up one those, fredom, to continue:
By Jove, I am not covetous for gold,
Nor care I who doth feed upon my cost;
It yearns me not if men my garments wear;
Such outward things dwell not in my desires…
Then he reverts to his first theme: honour, that most prickly issue of the Medieval and post-Medieval period.
But if it be a sin to covet honour,
I am the most offending soul alive.
No, faith, my coz, wish not a man from England:
God’s peace! I would not lose so great an honour
As one man more, methinks, would share from me
For the best hope I have. O, do not wish one more!
Rather proclaim it, Westmoreland, through my host,
That he which hath no stomach to this fight,
Let him depart; his passport shall be made
And crowns for convoy put into his purse:
We would not die in that man’s company
That fears his fellowship to die with us.
This has segued through stomach to fellowship. The stomach was the seat of anger, the opposite of self-control, according to the theory of the four humours. Apart from the shame of walking out on one’s fellows, Henry manages therefore to lob in a belittling hint of pettiness. It is going to be the fellowship theme that will be developed further.
First, though, a touch of the domestic. At first it seems little more than a momentary reflection on the church holy-day back home:
This day is called the feast of Crispian:
He that outlives this day, and comes safe home,
Will stand a tip-toe when the day is named,
And rouse him at the name of Crispian.
He that shall live this day, and see old age,
Will yearly on the vigil feast his neighbours,
And say ‘To-morrow is Saint Crispian:’
Then will he strip his sleeve and show his scars.
And say ‘These wounds I had on Crispin’s day.’
There are, by the way, only a couple of Church of England dedications to Crispin.
Half way through that section, the appeal changed. It becomes an invitation to project into an imagined certain future, when faced by the uncertainty of an impending battle. It also invites the hearer to imagine a prosperity in which there is the wherewithall to provide the “feast”. Within that is a hidden, cruder appeal: the promise of wealth from plunder or ransom, the substantial motive for going to war.
Then comes the moment of “lightening”, a wry invitation to imagine reaching old age, and being able to “improve” on the personal history:
Old men forget: yet all shall be forgot,
But he’ll remember with advantages
What feats he did that day, …
The speech before Harfleur had clearly distinguished between the orders of society. Now Henry deliberately blurs and overlaps them. This may be a perceptive recognition of the growing cameraderie that would inevitably have developed over months together. It might invite speculation that Shakespeare talks from experience, if he spent some of his “lost years” in a spell with the army in Flanders. It invites the common soldiery, drawn from the yeoman class, to identify with the highest nobility as their “best mates”:
Then shall our names,
Familiar in his mouth as household words
Harry the king, Bedford and Exeter,
Warwick and Talbot, Salisbury and Gloucester,
Be in their flowing cups freshly remember’d.
The slow, settling, sonorous long vowels of the personal names, the commonplace of “Harry”; then flowing cups, again the domestic and cheering tone, as he moves towards a peroration:
This story shall the good man teach his son;
And Crispin Crispian shall ne’er go by, …
It’s the inheritance and posterity line again, the dream of establishing, or continuing a dynasty, that Henry used in the Harfleur speech. Then the rhythm increases: the vowels shorten, the language veers to simple monosyllables:
From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be remember’d;
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
Three soaring promises there: one of an eternal memory, a kind of heaven on earth, kinship with the king himself, and superiority over all those at home:
For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne’er so vile,
This day shall gentle his condition:
Again the carrot of social advancement:
And gentlemen in England now a-bed
Shall think themselves accursed they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s day.
But not just that: “they’re at home in bed: we’re here doing the job of real men”; “you’re not just country yokels, you’re better than the landed gentry”; and the where, when, what and who of the final line. Notice, though, there is something deliberately missed out: at no point does Henry give a reason why the battle is necessary: the one question of all those the common soldiers had proposed to him the night before:
… if the cause be not good, the king himself hath a heavy reckoning to make, when all those legs and arms and heads, chopped off in battle, shall join together at the latter day and cry all ‘We died at such a place;’ some swearing, some crying for a surgeon, some upon their wives left poor behind them, some upon the debts they owe, some upon their children rawly left. I am afeard there are few die well that die in a battle; for how can they charitably dispose of any thing, when blood is their argument? Now, if these men do not die well, it will be a black matter for the king that led them to it …
Wrap up
It’s the most commonplace that is frequently overlooked: the live Mills bomb we have used as a doorstop because Granny did the same. We employ the cliché to avoid thought, but the implication may indicate strange truths (witness the white South African who announced he felt “the Blacks needed a fair crack of the whip”).
What is the English journalist or the grandiose prime minister saying, when he plunders this bit of Shakespeare? It is a desire to link with the “tradition”, that strongest, most potent, and potentially most poisonous aspect of our culture. It is a piece of self-inflation.
We recall the bravado of Henry V, and likely do so with Olivier’s curious pronunciation and emphases in our heads. Perhaps, though, the play is the thing, and we might usefully return to the whole text, and strip from it trite jingoism. For the text is an exercise in psychology: that of the eponymous Henry, but also of those, on stage and in the audience, seduced by his rhetorical expertise.
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