Bingo 14: Détente
I’ve re-read Henry V the Shakespeare history play because I’m teaching it and haven’t actually re-read it for a good long while. This play both ends and begins with questionable peace between England and France, so it’s suitable for this square. I don’t actually remember my first read, just being really impressed by Kenneth Branagh’s film version, or perhaps more specifically Patrick Doyle’s score. The choral bit after the battle of Agincourt is pretty impressive.
One big thing I noticed upon re-reading is Shakespeare’s attempts at dialect (Irish, Welsh, and Scots) all in prose, literarily equating his non-English allies with the lower-class loser figures. To be fair, the main lower-class guy Pistol gets his comeuppance (by being forced to eat a leek) and Bardolf also gets punished pretty severely, but this is going to work its way into some kind of class discussion about representations of “other” (from the noble perspective) and keeping the peace between the various groups.
This play is also one of my favorites because it’s got a couple of impressive monologues. The famous St Crispin’s Day speech (a pre-battle pep-talk) is one of the best ones Shakespeare wrote imho, and I have to admit I’d forgotten this play also has “Once more into the breach!” speech as well. It’s going to be interesting when the class gets to comparing Laurence Olivier’s 1940s delivery to the 1989 version that was basically Branagh’s breakout hit.
Making the girls the comic relief is also an interesting choice, but the scenes with Princess Katherine of France trying to learn English with Alice her maid are actually pretty entertaining if you’ve got a well-footnoted version to explain the French and the pronunciation-related puns that result in some dirty jokes, think an adult version of “Head-Shoulders-Knees-and-Toes”. The humor is not left exclusively to the women either; there’s a balls joke pretty early, although the exact point of the tennis ball scene (which was somewhat borrowed from Holinshed- a historical source) isn’t very well agreed-on.
