We band of brothers

"We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he today who sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother......"

                                                Henry V      (IV, iii)

The Shakespearean lines quoted above are among the most memorable ever written on the visceral emotions of human conflict: they've been used to hearten troops in wars as recent as our involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan. During World War II, Winston Churchill asked Laurence Olivier for a film version of Henry V as a means of bucking up the spirits of the English people and its soldiery in the face of Nazism. In more recent years, film director Steven Spielberg used "Band of Brothers" as the title of a series depicting an American fighting unit making its torturous way from the beaches of Normandy into the heart of Hitler's Europe.

Pictured above is some of the armor, primarily from the 16th and 17th centuries, in the collection of Agecroft Hall. Earlier versions of essentially the same sort of breastplates and backplates would have protected some of the English warriors and their French counterparts at the battle of Agincourt, where Henry V made himself legendary in 1415. The English had already proven victorious against the French at Crecy and Poitiers; Agincourt produced more icing for a very sweet cake.

The fact that the French, led for a time by Joan of Arc, later drove the English out of France would have to be related in a messier tale: the sad reign of Henry VI, years that saw England lose continental territory and tear itself asunder under a pious but weak king. Shakespeare found enough of a mess to make up a three-parter.

Shakespeare's Henry V has almost always been regarded as a patriotic play, extolling the virtues of England's fighting spirit. But one very talented critic begged to differ. Harold C. Goddard, who headed the English department at Swarthmore College from 1909 until 1946, wrote a book on the works of Shakespeare but died before giving his book a title. His publishers called it The Meaning of Shakespeare. An admiring and perceptive commentator, the late Joseph Sobran, wrote that a better title would have been The Spirit of Shakespeare, since each reader of the playwright would and should create a personal interpretation of the meaning of the poet's works.

Goddard maintained that Shakespeare, in writing Henry V, was adhering to personal convictions that emerge repeatedly in his histories and tragedies: that the use of force ultimately does not prevail and in fact drags human souls into darkness. As Goddard points out, a Romeo swept up in ancestral feuding ultimately did not help himself or his Juliet; Hamlet left enormous carnage in his wake (including his beloved Ophelia) after heeding the ghost of his father. The territorial gains of Henry V were wisps in the wind.

Shakespeare, Goddard believed, was convinced that giving in to the aggressive, violent side of man's nature, often urged on by atavistic sources, only led down a winding road to catastrophe. Goddard's take on Shakespeare is both surprising and magnificent, and gives Shakespeare's works a unity and coherence that so many literary critics fail to grasp.