The Globe Theater, London. From the Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre website. Photographer: John Tramper.
The movie opens with a camera flying over a diorama of Elizabethan London, then drops into the circular Globe Theatre: “This wooden O” as the Herald calls it. He opens the play with the greatest plea I know for the power of our imaginations:
“O for a muse of fire, that would ascend
the highest heavens of creation….”
This “wooden O,” he says, can never hold the “vasty (sic) fields of France”, or “the two opposing armies”—French and English—”with high up-rearing and abutting fronts the perilous narrow ocean parts asunder” as King Henry comes with his army to attempt to overthrow the French monarch and claim France.
And so, “On your imaginary forces work…”
The play, and the movie, continue with the battles—knights heavy in armor falling from their horses and unable to rise, among many other things—culminating in Henry’s speech, on horseback, before the decisive battle of Agincourt:
“Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more,
Or close the wall up with our English dead…
And
He today who sheds his blood with me
shall be my brother, be he ne’er so base,
And gentlemen in England now abed…
Shall hold their manhood cheap
Whilst any speak that fought with me…”
And then his horse rears and he leads the charge. Victory is theirs, although at the cost of much English and French blood.
One of the great, if not the greatest events of my adolescence was seeing this movie, in Technicolor (new at the time), surely with my father, whose passion for Shakespeare’s plays never waned. One of the last times I saw him was when he played King Lear, a life-long dream, in an amateur production in Louisville.
Lines from the plays furnish my mind along with stanzas of poetry: Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Mary Oliver. Other lines, from Shakespeare’s sonnets, helped my mother; she recited them in the long dark nights.
No matter how many legitimate grievances we hold against our parents—and most of us have a storehouse—if they were able by example or dint of persuasion to introduce us to what I, with hesitation, still call The Great Works (and we know how much was left out), then they have given us weapons to deal with hardship or even tragedy.
Not the dubious example of a king’s heroics as he leads his soldiers to almost certain death, but the heroics of the language itself, which we have lost. Ordinary, daily speech has always been sloppy, but what is sliding away is the higher use of words as in the great plays, great literature, and great poetry. Almost no one I know reads “ancient” literature—this could be pre-twenty-first century—or is willing to tackle a novel longer than 300 pages. I’m not certain we would be inspired to see any versions of Shakespeare’s plays except for those that have been simplified—stripped of Elizabethan language.
But while there’s life, there’s hope. I have a granddaughter in her final year of college who has become engaged with Shakespeare’s plays due to the influence of one professor. And she is writing her senior thesis on an aspect of “Hamlet.”
Oh for a muse of fire…
I find it difficult to think of anything you do as a coincidence for I have never observed a more deliberate life in action. As to synchronicity, oh yes, I see your hand in it with the watch on your wrist. In my faculty days, one of my scholarly ventures included advocating for the use of works of literature as the better way to illustrate values to be examined, and I told the women in my classes that if I were king, no female would graduate without reading ‘the merchant of Venice.’ The wide eyes of students in my courses on business strategy when they learned I required them to read a novel and search out the expressions of values from its pages, are treasured memories for in that open view into their heads I saw I was doing my job, calling them to question rather than to answer. So I count this essay of hope for your granddaughter as the language I’ve come to love from you, the language of heroines.
Your words and Shakespeare’s enhanched an Autumn day here in Kentucky.
When hearing such timeless presentations of our common language, it takes me back to Walden Theater at Anchorage School being performed and my “office” at Old Faithful Lodge, Yellowstone, WY.
I had just finished my first year at Transylvania and the tiny janitors closest is where I read more and more of Shakespeare’s truths.