~ > Rob
~ >
~ > "For he who sheds his blood with me today shall be my brother."
~ > King Henry V, looking for help as he skinned his knuckles [...]
~ > before the battle of Agincourt.
~
~ I thought Scott Fisher was the only one with license to quote form
~ Henry V. Well, maybe quote isn't the correct word here.
That was the speech I had cited on the gas tank of my race car, in
honor of the fact that you can't build a car by yourself:
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers
For he who sheds his blood with me today
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 accurs'd they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon St. Crispins day.
Jeff Zurschmeide had the one from act (um) II, at the gate at Harfleur
(the speech that begins with "Once more into the breach, dear friends,
once more, or close the wall up with our English dead!"):
I see you stand, like greyhounds in the slip,
Straining upon the start. The game's afoot!
Follow your spirit, and upon this charge
Cry "God for Harry! England and St. George!"
In my opinion there is NO finer speech to capture the feeling in pregrid
when they blow the whistle and the whole cavalcade hits the starter
button and gets waved onto track for the warm-up lap. It's also
technically perhaps the most perfect blend of traditional Anglo-Saxon
bardic verse style with Elizabethan iambic pentameter; it scans
perfectly in five iambs, yet there's a caesura in each line where
it should be, and the alliteration carries through better than all but
the best since Caedmon ("Nun sculon herigean || Heofonrices weard,/
Meothodes mahte || for his modgethanc"). My other two favorite
modern-English couplets in bardic style aren't iambs -- I think
they're dactyls, but I can't quite recall ("Ring the alarum bell!
Murder and treason! /Malcolm and Donalbain! Banquo! Awake!" from
Macbeth, and -- if I do say so myself -- "We'd ridden the dragon,
clung tight to the scales and skated the spines, and now we were stopped,"
from a story I wrote years ago about driving my LBC down the dragon's
tail, Pacific Coast Highway. There, some LBC content!)
St. George's Day, for those paying attention, is April 23, which is
also Shakespeare's birthday (observed -- his birth was recorded some
days later and the 23rd is a sort of best guess, made more ironic
because he died on April 23 in 1616). That is also the birth date
of Albert Einstein, Shirley Temple, and my daughter Bronwen. (And
there's a good "English cooks, Swiss lovers, and German policemen"
joke in there, I'm sure of it...)
~ My favorite quote comes from an earlier scene in the play when the
~ French envoy presents Henry with a gift from his king. Damn,
~ forgot to bring my copy into work today. Maybe you can help me out
~ here Scott?
Aack. I know the scene; the gift is tennis balls, and there is much
wordplay on both tennis and balls (cannon and, um, otherwise). Me, I
like the scene where Catherine is learning the English words for things
from her old nurse. "Les doigts--the feengers, la coude--the nick..."
Jeffie? Got the concordance handy?
--Scott "I can speak English, I learned it from a boooook" Fisher
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