Today, October 25, is St. Crispin’s Day. For centuries, this day was a Catholic feast day observing the saints Crispin and Crispinian, twin brothers who were martyred. The day has since been removed from the church calendar—but its fame lives on due to the historical events that have taken place on that day, and the literary works that celebrated those events.
It was on St. Crispin’s Day that a British brigade of light cavalry charged the Russian lines in the Crimean War. Due to a miscommunication in the chain of command, the brigade assaulted the wrong artillery battery, and as a result was completely wiped out. This foolish military blunder leading to senseless death was later recast as a noble, if doomed, display of patriotism by Alfred Lord Tennyson in his poem, “The Charge of the Light Brigade.”
Yet as famous as that event and poem are, they are far eclipsed by the event that took place hundreds of years earlier in 1415, and by the Shakespeare play that immortalized it. I’m talking, of course, about the Battle of Agincourt and Henry V.
Henry V tells the story of the young king’s military conquest in France, culminating in a major victory at Agincourt. The play is most famous for the speech Henry gives his troops before the battle, which remains one of the most rousing pre-battle speeches. Here’s the end of the speech, which gave us the “band of brothers” language that is still quite potent today:
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne’er so vile,
This day shall gentle his condition;
And gentlemen in England now-a-bed
Shall think themselves accurs’d they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s day.
Though Henry V is best known for this moving speech inspiring an army to brave acts on the battlefield, the play itself is somewhat ambiguous in its relationship to war and violence. The reasons given for attacking France are hazy at best—by modern standards, the campaign Shakespeare describes is a unilateral and unprovoked military assault. Henry himself is portrayed as honorable and kind, yet that doesn’t stop him from occasional acts of cruelty, ruthlessly ordering the execution of one of his friends for a petty theft. And the speech itself, inspiring though it is, can be read as a manipulative bit of war propoganda, the king fooling his men to die for him in the face of enormous odds (the French outnumbered the British) and for the promise of honor.
The play was first staged in 1599, near the end of the reign of Elizabeth I—which may explain some of its ambivalence toward military might. Elizabeth had spent much of her reign persecuting Catholics, of which Shakespeare is often held to have been a secret practitioner. Yet Shakespeare could hardly write a play openly critical of the Queen—this would be an act of treason, punishable by death. What we have instead is this strange, powerful, ambivalent play: a play praising the British monarchy and military might, and simultaneously meditating on the ethical compromises inherent in wielding the power of the sword.
The play has retained its uneasy relationship with history well into the twenty-first century. In 1944, a film adaptation starring Lawrence Olivier was financed by the British government to boost morale during WWII, giving the St. Crispin’s speech a rich new subtext.
For the best delivery of the speech, look no further than Kenneth Branagh’s own film adaptation, which focuses more on the horrors of war yet still plays the speech uncritically as an inspirational call to battle:
