azdak

From petzipellepingo: When you see this in a friend's LJ, post Shakespeare...

Now entertain conjecture of a time
When creeping murmur and the poring dark
Fills the wide vessel of the universe.
From camp to camp through the foul womb of night
The hum of either army stilly sounds,
That the fixed sentinels almost receive
The secret whispers of each other's watch:
Fire answers fire, and through their paly flames
Each battle sees the other's umber'd face;
Steed threatens steed, in high and boastful neighs
Piercing the night's dull ear, and from the tents
The armourers, accomplishing the knights,
With busy hammers closing rivets up,
Give dreadful note of preparation:
The country cocks do crow, the clocks do toll,
And the third hour of drowsy morning name.
Proud of their numbers and secure in soul,
The confident and over-lusty French
Do the low-rated English play at dice;
And chide the cripple tardy-gaited night
Who, like a foul and ugly witch, doth limp
So tediously away. The poor condemned English,
Like sacrifices, by their watchful fires
Sit patiently and inly ruminate
The morning's danger, and their gesture sad
Investing lank-lean; cheeks and war-worn coats
Presenteth them unto the gazing moon
So many horrid ghosts. O now, who will behold
The royal captain of this ruin'd band
Walking from watch to watch, from tent to tent,
Let him cry 'Praise and glory on his head!'
For forth he goes and visits all his host.
Bids them good morrow with a modest smile
And calls them brothers, friends and countrymen.
Upon his royal face there is no note
How dread an army hath enrounded him;
Nor doth he dedicate one jot of colour
Unto the weary and all-watched night,
But freshly looks and over-bears attaint
With cheerful semblance and sweet majesty;
That every wretch, pining and pale before,
Beholding him, plucks comfort from his looks:
A largess universal like the sun
His liberal eye doth give to every one,
Thawing cold fear, that mean and gentle all,
Behold, as may unworthiness define,
A little touch of Harry in the night.
And so our scene must to the battle fly;
Where--O for pity!--we shall much disgrace
With four or five most vile and ragged foils,
Right ill-disposed in brawl ridiculous,
The name of Agincourt. Yet sit and see,
Minding true things by what their mockeries be.


Can I explain why I love it so much? Please?


I love Henry V with a fiery consuming passion. It's my all-time favourite Shakespeare play (sorry, Macbeth, you'll only ever be second best), partly because to my mind Chorus has the most beautiful lines of any of the Dramatic Works and partly because of its treatment of war. I don't know of any other work of literature that deals so convincingly with both the horror and the glory of war. There are plenty of (to contemporary tastes rather unappealing) works that show war as a fine and splendid thing, and many more (and better ones) that deal with war as an abomination, but Henry V does both. It's like two plays for the price of one. There's the thread about charismatic Henry and his glamorous patriotic war, which includes the scenes with the arrogant, ossified Frogs and their unspeakable Dolphin, culiminating (the wooing of Kate is really the epilogue, and the epilogue is something else again) in the English underdogs beating the crap out of them in a phenomenal victory, hooray hooray for England! And then there's the thread about the ordinary people, the lowlife scum who make up the army (and make no mistake, many of them are scum – the ordinary soldier isn't represented by Billy Budd but by Pistol, Nym and Bardolph), and the innocents caught up in war. And these guys die, in their various ways, unlike Henry's glittering team of aristocrats, who are the ones who stand to actually gain from victory (war, for the noblemen, means "crowns imperial, crowns and coronets"; for the lowlife, like Pistol, it means the chance to loot some decent boots from the dead).

The way Shakespeare deconstructs military glory is by a technique of counterpoint – Henry scenes and then lowlife scenes, much of the time not explicitly linked (Bardolph's execution being the great exception, and Williams' speech about the King's conscience), but by virtue of their juxtaposition they become a commentary on each other. We see the luggage boys slaughtered by the French in the middle of the battle and then we hear Henry read out the roll of English dead:

Edward the Duke of York, the Earl of Suffolk,
Sir Richard Kikely, Davy Gam, Esquire;
None else of name; and of all other men
But five and twenty.

It's doubtful whether those 25 nameless dead even includes the luggage boys, but these are the people we have watched die. Shakespeare doesn't underline the point that only the aristocracy benefit from the war, but it's there. (As a side issue, it's a little known fact that Henry actually hears about the luggage boys' death twice - Gower tells us about it first : "'Tis certain there's not a boy left alive; and the cowardly rascals that ran from the battle ha' done this slaughter: besides, they have burned and
carried away all that was in the king's tent; wherefore the king, most worthily, hath caused every soldier to cut his prisoner's throat. O, 'tis a gallant king!")
Later in the same scene Henry shows up and makes his famous announcement "I was not angry since I came to France", and sends the herald off to tell the "horsemen on yon hill" that this time the fight's for real, adding "Besides, we'll cut the throats we have,/And not a man of them that we shall take/Shall taste our mercy". Now, according to Gower, Henry has already given the order to "cut the throats of those we have" (There's a version of the text in which we actually see the effects of this order – Pistol says morosely "Couple le gorge!" and slits Le Fer's throat, thus destroying his dream of wealth that Le Fer's relatives would pay to get him back.) The usual explanation is that this is an instance of Shakespearian sloppiness – he'd changed his mind about having the order reported off-stage but forgot to delete the earlier reference. But I wonder. The scene with the traitors, Cambridge, Scroop and Grey, shows that Henry is a master of PR. He sets them up for a public exposure, gets them all to repent publically and accept their punishment of death ("My fault, but not my body, pardon, sovereign"), and then adds "Touching our person seek we no revenge/ But we our kingdom's safety must so tender..."). It's awfully tempting to see him using the death of the luggage boys in exactly the same way, as an opportunity to spin doctor a militarily necessary decision (killing the prisoners) in a way that will make it more acceptable to men like Pistol, who have a vested interest in keeping them alive.

But back to the structure of the play. It's opening is fabulously Brechtian – first we have Chorus providing a spot of Verfremdung, pointing out explicitly that this a piece of theatre, that none of it is real:

...can this cockpit hold
The vasty fields of France? or may we cram
Within this wooden O the very casques
That did affright the air at Agincourt?

The whole point of the Verfremdungseffekt was to reduce the audience's identification with the characters, so that they could think rationally about what they saw on stage rather than wallowing in emotion. Shakespeare's technique is very different, in that he deliberately provokes an overpowering emotional identification, only to undercut it. But the similarity with Brecht is intriguing, and I see a lot of parallels with Mother Courage in the play, especially in its treatment of the ordinary soldiers.

Next we have a lengthy scene between Canterbury and Ely (usually heavily cut), which seems rather an extraordinary dramatic choice for starting the action. The point, however, is that the clerics' conspiratorial chat reveals the economic basis for the war and thus casts into question absolutely everything that follows. The King is planning a law which will significantly impoverish the church ("If it pass against us/
We lose the better half of our possession"), and to distract him, Canterbury has proposed war with France and offered financial support:

For I have made an offer to his majesty,
Upon our spiritual convocation
And in regard of causes now in hand,
Which I have open'd to his grace at large,
As touching France, to give a greater sum
Than ever at one time the clergy yet
Did to his predecessors part withal.

I hardly need to point out the contemporary political parallels, but it would be a damn funny way to start the play if it was supposed to be unambiguously patriotic and pro-war. It's a very Brechtian analysis of the underlying causes of war and it raises the issue of spin and publicity that will crop up repeatedly in the play. Next comes Canterbury's lengthy, tedious and obtuse explanation of why Henry is the legitimate heir to the French throne. The scene is usually played for humour (and properly done it's very funny) but it's function is to show that Henry's claim to the French throne is a load of legalistic poppycock (I particularly love the phrase "four hundred one and twenty years/After defunction of King Pharamond" which pretty much sums up Canterbury's tactic – blind 'em with jargon).

So the play starts off showing that the war is an act of aggression, and that Henry is being manipulated by the church in order to maintain its economic superiority. It ends, in the epilogue to the epilogue, with a reminder that all Henry's glorious conquests came to nought (in my production we had the war dead speak these lines rather than Chorus, just to rub it in):

Henry the Sixth, in infant bands crown'd King
Of France and England, did this king succeed;
Whose state so many had the managing,
That they lost France and made his England bleed:

The glorious tale of Henry's military triumph is framed by scepticism, scepticism towards motive and scepticism towards the outcome.

And yet, and yet, in between, between the framing scenes and between the scenes with the lowlife and the common soldiery, we have that amazing celebration of Henry himself, the charismatic hero, the man we love to love. Any production that wants us to dislike Henry has to work bloody hard at it (I think it's a mistake to do that – I think Shakespeare's technique of juxtaposition teaches a much more profound lesson about not succumbing to war fever – but it can be done). A lot of the work of making us love Henry is done by Chorus, who sings the praises of the King and the war effort in speeches of unparalleled beauty. It takes a mighty effort not to get swept up in the enchantment – when Henry sends the French ambassador off with a flea in his ear ("And tell the pleasant prince this mock of his/ Hath turn'd his balls to gun-stones; and his soul/Shall stand sore charged for the wasteful vengeance/That shall fly with them") we want to cheer. When Montjoy comes, again and again, with his sneering messages to the rag-taggle English army and is told "We are but warriors for the working-day;/ Our gayness and our gilt are all besmirch'd/ With rainy marching in the painful field" we know who deserves to win the fight, legal claim or not. And it's no wonder Harry's St Crispin's Day speech is so well-known that Joss Whedon could parody it ("Band of Buggered"), it's absolutely bloody brilliant. Properly done, the dream team of Henry and Chorus can make the audience want to go to war, can sweep them up into an emotional identification with the English army that stifles critical thinking and has them going "Yeah, yeah, sock it to 'em!" when Henry threatens the Governor of Harfleur ("why, in a moment look to see/ The blind and bloody soldier with foul hand/ Defile the locks of your shrill-shrieking daughters;/Your fathers taken by the silver beards,/ And their most reverend heads dash'd to the walls,/ Your naked infants spitted upon pikes,/Whiles the mad mothers with their howls confused/ Do break the clouds"). Yeah, go on, rape those daughters! Spit those infants! Smash in those heads! There's plenty of really bloodthirsty stuff in Henry's speeches which, taken in a calmer moment, must give us pause for thought. But we're not given that calmer moment, we're swept up in the glory of the whole thing, the rightness of the English cause, because after all, they're the underdogs and those damned Frogs are so provocatively insulting, not to mention cocky and deeply unpleasant. What Shakespeare does is so much better than making us adopt a critical distance to Henry. He lets us feel the the power and the magic of it all, lets us be caught up up in the thrilling emotion of patriotism, and then provides a contrasting scene that shows us why what we feel is a Bad Thing. In other words, we learn to distrust patriotic militarism in the full knowledge of how gloriously tempting it is.

Chorus's Eve of Agincourt speech provides that temptation in the most thrillingly beautiful form. I adore this from beginning to end (my father loved it, too; he could quote it by heart – mind you, there was a lot of Shakespeare he could quote by heart – and it's the passage that we kids read for him at his funeral). The icing on the cake is that Chorus's performance is so riveting that we fail to notice how the version s/he gives us is another instance of spin (it's a feature of Chorus's speeches that they're a trifle economical with the actualité, in terms of how well they describe the scenes that follow). We don't get to see Harry going forth and visiting all his host to offer them comfort, instead we see him wandering around camp in disguise, indignantly rejecting any claim that he's responsible for the souls of the men in his charge and picking a fight with a common soldier who disagrees with him. But such is the power of Chorus's imagery that we happily accept that as "a little touch of Harry in the night".