148
Shakespeare of Stratford
athlete. King Henry’s speech before Agincourt is the high-water mark of football oratory:
“This day is called the feast of Crispian:
He that outlives this day, and comes safe home,
Will stand a-tiptoe when this day is nam’d,
And rouse him at the name of Crispian.
He that shall live this day and see old age,
Will yearly on the vigil feast his neighbours,
And say, “To-morrow is Saint Crispian”:
Then will he strip his sleeve and show his scars,
And say, “These wounds I had on Crispin’s day.”
Old men forget: yet all shall be forgot,
But he’ll remember with advantages
What feats he did that day. Then shall our names,
Familiar in his mouth as household words,
Harry the king, Bedford and Exeter,
Warwick and Talbot, Salisbury and Gloucester,
Be in their flowing cups freshly remember’d.
This story shall the good man teach his son;
And Crispin Crispian shall ne’er go by,
From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be remembered.’
He that outlives this day, and comes safe home,
Will stand a-tiptoe when this day is nam’d,
And rouse him at the name of Crispian.
He that shall live this day and see old age,
Will yearly on the vigil feast his neighbours,
And say, “To-morrow is Saint Crispian”:
Then will he strip his sleeve and show his scars,
And say, “These wounds I had on Crispin’s day.”
Old men forget: yet all shall be forgot,
But he’ll remember with advantages
What feats he did that day. Then shall our names,
Familiar in his mouth as household words,
Harry the king, Bedford and Exeter,
Warwick and Talbot, Salisbury and Gloucester,
Be in their flowing cups freshly remember’d.
This story shall the good man teach his son;
And Crispin Crispian shall ne’er go by,
From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be remembered.’
This was not the spirit in which Queen Elizabeth made war. It was not the spirit of the seven thousand English whom the Earl of Essex led to Rouen in 1591 to aid Navarre’s stern Huguenots against the Catholic League. There is more zeal for national expansion and contemporary foreign policy in the one play of Edward III (I think, by Peele) than in all that Shakespeare wrote.
The very sea, which to Ralegh and Spenser was ever beckoning Englishmen abroad, which was Cynthia’s peculiar domain and highway, is to Shakespeare a de-
