How to Teach Your Children Shakespeare (34 page)

Within this wooden O the very casques

That did affright the air at Agincourt?

The phrase
this wooden O
is Shakespeare’s description of his own theater. Just imagine it: A man is standing on the stage, surrounded on three sides by the audience, and as he speaks, he gestures to everything that surrounds him calling it
this wooden O
. Shakespeare is here obliterating the
separation of the world of the play and the world of the audience. He is saying, “Here we are in this theater, this wooden O: How can we cram into this place the soldiers and the horses and everything else that the word
helmets
implies?”

O pardon, since a crookèd
figure
may

Attest in little place a
million
,

And let us
,
ciphers
to this great
account
,

On your imaginary forces work
.

Here is Shakespeare punning again. He uses the word
figure
in two senses: A
figure
, in addition to being a person, is also a number. Moreover, a number that is a
cipher
is a zero. And a zero is a placeholder that can become part of a million if you move the decimal point. So one
crookèd figure
can become part of a million—and one lone person can turn into a million people in our imaginations. In addition, an
account
is both a story and a sum of mathematical figures. So a single figure can become a million if you let the Chorus
On your imaginary forces work
. Brilliant.

The Second Half

The second half of the speech is quite straightforward. It does, however, contain some unfamiliar words and phrases, so let me paraphrase it. Please make sure your children read the real speech first, then the paraphrase.

Once your children understand this half of the speech, help them memorize it a phrase at a time. The Quotation Pages will help more than ever on this one because it’s so long. After that it’s just a matter of repetition.

Henry V
has turned out to be one of Shakespeare’s most popular plays, less, I think, because of the quality of the plot and characters than because it contains so many muscular speeches. Shakespeare’s other popular history plays are remembered for other qualities:
Richard III
for the funny, ruthless, spiderlike megalomaniac at the center who will do anything to become King of England;
Richard II
for the sensitivity of the hero; and
Henry IV, Part 1
for Falstaff and his relationship to the coltish Prince Hal.
Henry V
is a different kind of play. It’s about heroism and war and the tragedy of war—and it’s also about the magic of Theater.

H
enry V
is the last great history play written by Shakespeare. He wrote ten history plays in all, and this was the ninth, so he was certainly a master of the form by the time he tackled it. The play tells the story of the man we first knew as Prince Hal in
Henry IV
. Historically, Henry V was known as England’s savior, the man who rallied his troops and saved the country from the hated French. With this in mind, Shakespeare makes him into an almost god-like creature who personally walks among his men on the night before the Battle of Agincourt, then leads them into the fray and defeats the enemy.

Shakespeare and the Question of Interpretation

Your children should be aware of a movie version of
Henry V
produced in 1944 toward the end of World War II, starring and directed by Sir Laurence Olivier. It became popular in part because of its overt patriotism, which boosted the morale of the English as they fought through the final months of the war to defeat Hitler. A more recent film of
Henry V
was made in 1989 by Kenneth Branagh, who also starred and directed. Branagh takes a much grittier approach and portrays Henry less as an untainted hero and more as a realist. In the Olivier version, the war and heroism are idealized; in the Branagh version, we see the horrors of war and experience the violence of human sacrifice.

Henry V
at Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre with Nigel Cooke as Exeter, Jamie Park as Henry, James Lailey as Westmoreland, and Brendan O’Hara as Fluellen
(photo credit 30.1)

Your children should of course see both of these films, if nothing else, for their sheer entertainment value. But there is also a twofold lesson here.

First, Shakespeare’s plays, like all great works of art, are open to interpretation. That is a hallmark of art that has real value. If a work is static and never changes, then it can never tell us very much about how we change over our lifetimes, and how mankind changes over time. As Hamlet says, it is the artist’s job to hold the mirror up to nature.

When we experience a work of art that has genuine value—when we look at a significant painting or watch a performance of a well-written play—we see it differently depending on who we are by nature and where we are in the trajectory of our own experience. Great art changes with us as we and the world grow older.

Second, Shakespeare’s work is particularly susceptible to this openness of interpretation, more so than the work of other dramatists. The critic
Stanley Wells calls this a “self-renewing quality” of Shakespeare’s work, “as if [Shakespeare] himself had had the wisdom to leave his plays slightly unfinished, to hold back from final decisions so that future ages could read into them preoccupations of their own times.… Perhaps there is, somehow, a more mythic quality about Shakespeare that enables his plays to speak to generation after generation.”

One of the joys of watching Shakespeare on film is to see how interpretations have changed over the years, especially in terms of a single play, and I urge you to watch a few Shakespeare plays on film with your children. Literally hundreds of films of Shakespeare’s plays have been made over the years, and I’ve listed a few of my favorites in the Bibliography.

Henry’s Famous Speeches

Henry V
is exciting and well told, but what makes it particularly memorable is the language of Henry’s heroism. Your children may well recognize two of Henry’s most famous speeches from the play, as they have become emblems of bravery and patriotism throughout the world.

Speech 1: The Rallying Cry

The first is Henry’s rallying cry during the battle to conquer the city of Harfleur. Here is a cut version of the speech that would be perfect for a recitation contest—or just for the fun of learning it.