How to Teach Your Children Shakespeare (35 page)

Speech 2: The Saint Crispin’s Day Speech

Another famous speech from
Henry V
is known as the Saint Crispin’s Day Speech, and it occurs just before the Battle of Agincourt. Henry’s nobles are having a discussion among themselves, worrying that the French outnumber them five to one. One of the nobles, the Earl of Westmoreland, wishes aloud that some of the idle men at home in England were with them now in France to help them fight:

O that we now had here

But one ten thousand of those men in England

That do no work today
.

Henry’s famous speech is in reply to Westmoreland. Again, here is a slightly cut version that is perfect for recitation contests.

What a speech! What a rallying cry of sheer patriotism!

One of my favorite sections of the speech is this:

Old men forget; yet all shall be forgot
,

But he’ll remember, with advantages
,

What feats he did that day
.

Shakespeare starts the line with a fond observation about mankind as it grows older:

Old men forget;

Then he adds the observation that in the sands of time, all that we do will be forgotten:

yet all shall be forgot

Then he adds a joke, a warm, human, touching joke:

But he’ll remember
,
with advantages
,

What feats he did that day
.

The old man won’t just brag about his exploits in the war; he’ll exaggerate the exploits
with advantages
. Only Shakespeare could pack this much wisdom, humor, and humanity into three short lines.

You should also point out to your children that the whole notion of centering the speech on Saint Crispin’s Day is a bit of happenstance. The text of the speech can be confusing otherwise. Why Saint Crispin? Was he a famous fighter or hero? Not at all. The Battle of Agincourt happened to fall on a saint’s day in the calendar (October 25) honoring Saint Crispin, the patron saint of cobblers and leather workers. Shakespeare seized on this fact as a way of identifying the day for rhetorical purposes.

Many a middle-schooler has won a recitation contest with this speech and for all the right reasons. It is long enough to show effort; it is complex enough to show intellectual accomplishment; and if recited well, there is no more stirring speech in the English language.

I
n addition to William Shakespeare, there are two other heroes in this book, and their names are John Heminges and Henry Condell. It’s a scandal that there aren’t statues of these two men in front of every library in the world, and I hope that you and your children will help me rectify this situation.

Heminges and Condell were close friends, fellow theater owners, and acting colleagues of Shakespeare, but their greatest achievement was that they published the first edition of Shakespeare’s complete plays in 1623, seven years after his death. The book was formally titled
Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies
, and it is known as the First Folio. The remarkable thing is that without the First Folio, we would not have
eighteen
of Shakespeare’s plays. Since none of Shakespeare’s manuscripts survive, and none of these plays appeared first in surviving “quarto” editions, these eighteen plays would have been lost forever had it not been for these two men. We wouldn’t have
Twelfth Night, As You Like It, The Tempest, Julius Caesar, The Taming of the Shrew, Antony and Cleopatra
, and twelve others.

And it is not just these eighteen plays that were saved. Some of Shakespeare’s plays that
were
published in his lifetime were printed in such corrupt versions that they are almost unrecognizable as Shakespeare plays. The First Folio was published to set the record straight and make certain
that authorized, quality texts of all of Shakespeare’s plays were available to the public. Thanks to Heminges and Condell, the course of literary history was changed forever.

To appreciate the full accomplishment of Heminges and Condell, your children should understand a little about the publishing history of Shakespeare’s plays. When Shakespeare wrote a play, it was purchased outright by the acting company for which it was written. Thus most of Shakespeare’s plays were eventually owned by the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, which then became the King’s Men. Shakespeare himself no longer owned his plays; and moreover, he had no right to protect the integrity of his words because at this time there were no copyright laws as we know them today.

When Shakespeare’s plays were performed, some of them were so popular that Shakespeare’s company decided to make additional money by
selling them to publishers, who printed them in editions called quartos. A quarto is the equivalent of a modern paperback. It is called a quarto because the pages are made by folding a large sheet of paper twice (into a quarter of its original size), then binding the book on one side and cutting the pages open. A folio is twice as big because the sheets were folded only once. A folio was often bound with a leather cover and was equivalent to a modern coffee-table book.

The title page of the First Folio
(photo credit 31.1)

Scholars have divided the quartos into two kinds. The “bad quartos” were apparently patched together from various sources, such as partial scripts, actors’ memories, or the scribblings of plagiarists who were planted in the audience; the “good quartos” were usually printed directly from the author’s or a scribe’s manuscripts, or from the manuscripts used as promptbooks. Prior to the printing of the First Folio, some of Shakespeare’s plays were available only as bad quartos, and some of them are pretty bad indeed. Take, for example, Hamlet’s famous soliloquy, which appears like this in the good quarto:

To be, or not to be—that is the question:

Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer

The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune
,

Or to take arms against a sea of troubles

And, by opposing, end them. To die, to sleep—

No more—and by a sleep to say we end

The heartache and the thousand natural shocks

That flesh is heir to—’tis a consummation

Devoutly to be wished
.

The bad quarto of
Hamlet
reads like this:

To be, or not to be, I there’s the point
,

To Die, to sleepe, is that all? I all:

No, to sleepe, to dreame, I mary there it goes
,

For in that dreame of death, when wee awake
,

And borne before an everlasting Judge
,