Navigating Digital Text, Performance, & Historical Resources
Introduction
Henry on the Console
During the midbattle “once more” speech in Act III of Henry V, the eponymous king exhorts his followers to dissimulate a warlike aspect, to “disguise fair nature with hard-favored rage” in order to prove their legitimacy as sons of Britain, and by extension assist Henry in proving the legitimacy of his claim to the French throne (3.1.9).Two acts later, preceding the battle of Agincourt, Henry proclaims that participation in his enterprise will bind his followers to him, negating birth and station. He states: “he today that sheds his blood with me/shall be my brother; be he ne’er so vile/this day shall gentle his condition” (4.3.63-65). The first speech urges the adoption of a nostalgic, fantastical heroism, while the second absorbs Henry’s diverse constituents into his own body and blood. Both speeches, in addition to their drawing together of past and future traditions via ritual and repetition, are interested in the rehearsal and consolidation of identity, of legitimacy obtained through unified, martial action. Henry appropriates—rhetorically and physically—his followers to his own design, as he gestures toward their inclusion in a shared identity as sons of Britain.
In their use, popular culture citations crop up in a scattered array of media: Star Trek, Marvel Comics, the computer game Baldur’s Gate, Gus Van Sant’s Good Will Hunting, the action blockbuster Independence Day, all feature references to at least one of Henry’s two battle speeches. A few years shy of the quadricentennial anniversary of Henry V, the Danny DeVito comedy Renaissance Man reaches its climax as Private Donnie Benitez—portrayed by Lilo Brancato Jr.—proves the worth of his academically stunted squad of ragtag military recruits by reciting Henry’s “band of brothers” speech at the prompting of his skeptical drill sergeant. In 2001, during the season five finale of the WB program Buffy the Vampire Slayer, following Buffy Summers’ fatalistically brief pre-battle speech, the unlikely vampiric ally Spike, in response to another character’s aside that the speech was “not exactly the St. Crispin’s Day speech,” refers to their ragtag group of outnumbered and outgunned comrades as “we band of buggered,” simultaneously parodying and invoking Henry V’s rhetoric of underdog solidarity.
The “St. Crispin’s Day Speech” appears, in somewhat tailored form, a few years later in a 2008 advertisement for Sony’s Playstation 3: a fake British accent supplies Henry’s lines in voiceover as the video cuts between footage of games meant to demonstrate the breadth offered by the console. To choose Sony, the advertisement suggests, is to join a coterie of unlikely yet unified consumers: brothers of a brand. In each case, Henry’s speeches are attached to narratives in which an unlikely group must come together against all odds, to efface difference and consolidate their actions and aims.
Royalty-Free Legitimacy
Popular culture cites Shakespeare as a means of obtaining legitimacy. The bard’s words stand for a kind of English quintessence: one can hold up a skull, strike a pensive pose, and suddenly they have been inscribed on an allusive network at the center of which sits a figure who, in many cases, is interchangeable with the idea of Englishness itself. As Margaret Tudeau-Clayton and Willy Maley explain of the intertwinement between Shakespeare and England:Hamlet is Hamlet in the same way that England is England, and Shakespeare is England too, since ‘Any one who reads and understands him understands England.’ Yet nobody knows what Shakespeare and England (let alone Hamlet) really stand for except for each other and an elusive—ineffable yet intuitively grasped—‘core’ or essence that, if defined at all, is defined by negation. (5)To quote Shakespeare is to prove that one has done their homework, or passed a certain literary threshold, and to connect Shakespeare to emergent forms of media, as Lanier explains, allows new media a “royalty-free way of suggesting their cultural utility, importance, and continuity with tradition, only later to distance themselves once they gain a popular audience. Shakespeare allowed silent filmmakers, for example, to demonstrate their medium’s artistic possibilities, and to answer those who feared the cinema’s levelling social effects” (43-44).
