Sherry Chandler

Willie and Wilfred

At WCUPA, I attended a presentation by the National Endowment for the Arts and was given a bag of NEA materials for my troubles. Among the goodies was a DVD, Why Shakespeare?, promoting the NEA’s Shakespeare in American Communities initiative, Shakespeare for a New Generation.

The DVD features some famous people (Tom Hanks, William Shatner, Donald Hall) and some ordinary high school students (carefully chosen for diversity) rhapsodizing about what Shakespeare means to them.

Why Shakespeare? calls itself “A documentary by Lawrence Bridges” but it seems to me more like an infomercial.*

On the DVD, Dana Gioia tells of hearing a young man, a youth, who was not a native speaker of English, give a rousing performance of Henry V’s St. Crispin’s Day Speech. He cried to hear it. In fact, he said, there was not a dry eye in the house.

Here is the St. Crispin’s Day speech, a call to arms before the Battle of Agincourt (October 25, 1415):

This day is called the Feast of Crispian:
He that outlives this day, and comes safe home,
Will stand a-tiptoe when the day is named,
And rouse him at the name of Crispian.
He that shall see this day and live t’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.”
Old men forget: yet all shall be forgot,
But he’ll remember with advantages
What feats he did that day. 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 remembered.
This story shall the good man teach his son;
And Crispin Crispian shall ne’er go by,
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;
For he today that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne’er so vile,
This day shall gentle his condition:
And gentlemen in England now abed
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. (IV, iii)

Interesting speech at which to tear up, a young man learning English by reciting a call to arms, it being a fine piece of political rhetoric, a rallying cry for a war of choice, which in the end did not turn out all that well for England. Henry, needing to solidify his somewhat shakey claim to the throne and put some money in his treasury, decided to conquer France (as English kings did periodically for a hundred years or so). He was outnumbered and inferiorly armed. Hence, in the play, the speech, a speech intended to rouse that obviously still does so.

Look here for another point of view about Henry’s glorious victory.

You can view the Lawrence Olivier version here, Branagh here.

At that same NEA presentation, we heard the winning performance of this year’s Poetry Out Loud competiton, by a young woman named Amanda Fernandez from Washington, D.C. Her performance brought tears to my eyes. I don’t know about the room. I didn’t look.

Her choice of poem was Wilfred Owen’s double sonnet “Dulce et Decorum Est”:

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of gas-shells dropping softly behind.

Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime . . .
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

---

*My husband and son concur that this film could have done with some Gilliam-esque deflating. Shatner comes the closest when he says reading/seeing Shakespeare is “weird.” Best to watch the long interview with him, he explains that Shakespeare seems weird to us because the vocabulary is archaic and the syntax strange. Everybody experiences this, says this other Will, though few will admit it. Then he goes on to explain ways to get beyond this weirdness and why it’s valuable to do so.

The DVD contains several of these longer interviews as part of the special features. The one with Donald Hall is very charming. And he muffs the last quatrain of Sonnet 73:

That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou seest the twilight of such day
As after sunset fadeth in the west,
Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death’s second self, that seals up all in rest.
In me thou see’st the glowing of such fire
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the death-bed whereon it must expire
Consumed with that which it was nourish’d by.
This thou perceivest, which makes thy love more strong,
To love that well which thou must leave ere long.

It’s a hard quatrain to get your mouth around.

Conversely, the outtakes of Tom Hanks muffing his lines are just lame.

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