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Thursday, June 7, 2018

St. Crispin's Day speech - Henry V - YouTube
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The St. Crispin's Day speech is a speech from William Shakespeare's play, Henry V, in Act IV Scene iii 18-67. The play was written around 1600, and several later writers have used parts of it in their own texts.


Video St Crispin's Day Speech



Text


Maps St Crispin's Day Speech



Cultural influence

Use and quotation

  • During the Napoleonic Wars, just prior to the Battle of the Nile, Horatio Nelson, 1st Viscount Nelson, then Rear Admiral of the Blue, referred to his captains as his "band of brothers".
  • Charles Dickens' magazine Household Words (1850-1851) took its name from the speech.
  • During World War II, Laurence Olivier delivered the speech during a radio programme to boost British morale and Winston Churchill found him so inspiring that he asked him to produce the Shakespeare play as a film. Olivier's adaptation appeared in 1944.
  • During the legal battle for the U.S. presidential election of 2000, regarding the Florida vote recount, members of the Florida legal team for George W. Bush, the eventual legal victor, joined arms and recited the speech during a break in preparation, to motivate themselves.
  • On the day of the result of the United Kingdom European Union membership referendum, 2016, as the vote to leave became clear, activist and MEP Daniel Hannan is reported to have delivered an edited version of the speech from a table, replacing the names Bedford, Exeter, Warwick and Talbot with other prominent Vote Leave activists.

Film, television, music and literature

Parts of the speech appears in films such as Tombstone (1993), Renaissance Man (1994), This Is England (2006), and Their Finest (2017). It has also been used in tv-series such as Rough Riders (1997), Buffy the Vampire Slayer,, The Black Adder and Doctor Who.

  • The phrase "band of brothers" appears in the 1789 song "Hail, Columbia", written for the inauguration of George Washington as the first President of the United States; and in the first line of the 1861 Confederate marching song "The Bonnie Blue Flag".
  • Stephen Ambrose borrowed the phrase "Band of Brothers" for the title of his 1992 book on E Company of the 101st Airborne during World War II; it was later adapted into the 2001 miniseries Band of Brothers. In the closing scene of the series, Carwood Lipton quotes from Shakespeare's speech.
  • A part of the speech is quoted in the 2017 novel The Ministry of Utmost Happiness by Arundhati Roy as one of the character's mother's favourite passage from Shakespeare which is recited (silently) at her second funeral.

The Hollow Crown: Shakespeare's Henry V | Great Performances | PBS ...
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Notes and references

Notes

References

  • Barker, Juliet (2005). Agincourt: The King, the Campaign, the Battle. London: Little, Brown. ISBN 978-0-316-72648-1. 
  • "The St. Crispin's Day Speech". Folger Shakespeare Library. Archived from the original on 3 December 2013. Retrieved 3 December 2014. 
  • Harris, James. "Oral History of the President's Speech in 'Independence Day'". Complex. Retrieved 13 December 2015. 

Source of the article : Wikipedia

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