Sherry Chandler

We happy few

Henry V’s “band of brothers” seems to be everywhere in my life these days.

Having watched the Olivier version last week, last night we sampled the Branagh take and then I went to the computer to find that Georgia Stamper had sent me a link to an article in Newsweek, “We Band of Brothers,” that begins like this:

When 1st Lt. Max Adams was deployed to Iraq in 2002, he took with him a 20-pound hardback edition of the complete works of William Shakespeare. Sometimes he would read from it to his soldiers—speeches from “Henry V” were always crowd-pleasers. “The one about ‘We few, we happy few, we band of brothers,’ they always liked that one,” Adams says. The rest of the time the book rode around on the floor of his Humvee “as an additional plate” providing one more layer of protection from potential IEDs. Adams, who left the Army last year, still has the book, “beaten to hell, with bootprints all over it.”

Writer Elizabeth Samet would be pleased to hear that Adams found both philosophical and practical use for the text, which she assigned him for a literature class at West Point. “Books are weapons,” she writes in her new memoir, “Soldier’s Heart,” an account of her 10 years of teaching the sole required literature course, English 102, to first-year “plebes” at the military academy known as Sparta.

Read the whole article.

Branagh’s Henry V is, to quote Poppysmatus, “not very comfortable in his skin.”

“It is,” Poppysmatus continued, “fascinating how a few different choices of lines and speeches can completely change the meaning.” By which he is referring to the different ways Olivier and Branagh chose to use Shakespeare’s material. The former working in 1944 to bolster the British spirit, the latter working in the period of post-Vietnam cynicism.

But I think you must also take performance into consideration. [Added: here, from Lance Mannion's discussion of Brando's best role, may be the key: "But movie stars act with their eyes. Stage actors use their whole bodies..." Which may be another way of saying that Branagh favored the close up while Olivier liked the wide shot.]

Olivier’s Henry is a bright and shining knight on his white charger, stalwart, engaging in single combat with the Constable of France. Branagh’s gets down and gets muddy and bloody with his men.

Olivier gives much time to the rush of the French cavalry charge. Branagh gives much time to carrying the dead off the battle field.

He lets the character get muddy, too, for example by choosing not to cut a scene in which Harry approves the hanging of one of his old carousing buddies or by letting his pre-battle prayer run a few lines longer, so that you see that his conscience is troubled by his role in deposing Richard II so his father could have the throne.

Still it is a jingoistic play and the St. Crispin’s Day speech will always be popular with soldiers who don’t necessarily see its manipulative intent.

Here is a bit from Robert Pinsky’s review of Samet’s book in the NYTimes:

Honor is a reality: people have been known to live by it and die for it. As Samet points out, it has been invoked as a reason to continue sending troops to Iraq. It has also led some of her students, former students and colleagues to question the nature and conduct of that war. Normally, honor and loyalty re-enforce each other; in bad times, they can come suddenly into conflict.

Like love and art, honor comes from the imagination as a force that determines the fate of individuals and nations. And like love and art, honor has also attracted a thick enveloping tonnage of baloney, an encrustation of lies and exploitations.

…

Falsehood, in one form or another, has its appeal. Truth is honorable.

Samet’s version of that principle, as she applies it to her students, should be heeded by journalists and politicians:

“Our national fondness for celebrating the physical heroism of soldiers — the apparent readiness with which they sacrifice their lives to larger causes — eclipses the far less romantic displays of moral and intellectual fortitude that also distinguish so many of them. In turning them all into heroes, we have lost a sense of the individuality they also fight to preserve.”

This straightforward observation by a teacher belongs next to a passage — about the art of fiction, all fiction, though a historical anger couches it in terms of war writing — that she quotes from Tim O’Brien’s book “The Things They Carried”:

“A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest proper models of human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things men have always done. If a story seems moral, do not believe it. If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie.”

Heartening then to know that Samet’s students read Wallace Stevens’s “The Idea of Order at Key West” in the combat zone, that one thinks Virginia Woolf’s Orlando should be required reading for every cadet. Unfortunately, I fear that the citizen soldiers of West Point make up only a small proportion of our current professional army.

The Pinsky review should be read in its entirely for its more sober consideration of the place of literature in the West Point tradition and for its contrast to the Newsweek article, which dealt more on the sort of Bible-over-the-heart-that-took-the-bullet picturesque.

The Samet book is going on my must-read list.

And I highly recommend that you watch both the Olivier and the Branagh films of Shakespeare’s Henry V.

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