Monday
Following a particularly stirring speech by New York Governor Andrew Cuomo to the National Guard, Harvard English professor Derek Loeb tweeted out comparisons with Henry V’s stirring St. Crispin’s Day speech in Shakespeare’s play. [Thanks to Lois Stover for the alert.] The parallels are so striking that I feel confident that Cuomo has read or seen Henry V, whether or not he was consciously alluding to it.
Henry delivers the speech on the eve of the Battle of Agincourt, one of England’s greatest military victories. The troops need inspiration because the French troops far outnumber them. Compare the two speeches, starting with Henry’s:
If we are mark'd to die, we are enow
To do our country loss; and if to live,
The fewer men, the greater share of honour.
God's will! I pray thee, wish not one man more.
By Jove, I am not covetous for gold,
Nor care I who doth feed upon my cost;
It yearns me not if men my garments wear;
Such outward things dwell not in my desires:
But if it be a sin to covet honour,
I am the most offending soul alive.
No, faith, my coz, wish not a man from England:
God's peace! I would not lose so great an honour
As one man more, methinks, would share from me
For the best hope I have. O, do not wish one more!
Rather proclaim it, Westmoreland, through my host,
That he which hath no stomach to this fight,
Let him depart; his passport shall be made
And crowns for convoy put into his purse:
We would not die in that man's company
That fears his fellowship to die with us.
This day is called the feast of Crispian:
He that outlives this day, and comes safe home,
Will stand a tip-toe when the day is named,
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 remember'd;
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 accursed they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin's day.
And now Cuomo’s:
And I want to thank our National Guard because you are the best of us.
And whenever we call on you, you are there. And what you did in this facility in one week creating a hospital is just incredible.
I don’t know how you did it. Now you did such a good job that I’m asking for four more from the president. That’s the downside of being as good as you are at what you did. But what you did is really incredible.
And I want to make two points to you, and I want to make two promises to you: This is a different beast that we’re dealing with. This is an invisible beast. It is an insidious beast.
This is not going to be a short deployment. This is not going to be that you go out there for a few days, we work hard and we go home.
This is gonna be weeks and weeks and weeks.
This is going to be a long day. And it’s gonna be a hard day. And it’s gonna be an ugly day. And it’s gonna be a sad day.
This is a rescue mission that you’re on. The mission is to save lives — that’s what you’re doing. The rescue mission is to save lives and as hard as we work we’re not going to be able to save everyone.
And what’s even more cruel is this enemy doesn’t attack the strongest of us. It attacks the weakest of us. It attacks our most vulnerable, which makes it even worse in many ways.
Because these are the people that every instinct tells us we are supposed to protect. These are our parents and grandparents. These are our aunts, our uncles. These are our relatives who are sick. And every instinct says protect them, help them, protect them because they need us.
And those are the exact people that this enemy attacks.
Every time, I’ve called out the National Guard I’ve said the same thing to you. I promise you, I will not ask you to do anything that I will not do myself and I’ll never ask you to go anywhere that I won’t go myself. And the same is true here.
We’re going to do this and we’re going to do this together.
My second point is, you are living a moment in history. This is going to be one of those moments they are going to write about and they’re going to talk about for generations. This is a moment that is going to change this nation. This is a moment that forges character, forges people, changes people, make them stronger, make them weaker. But this is a moment that will change character.
And 10 years from now you’ll be talking about today to your children or your grandchildren and you will shed a tear because you will remember the lives lost, and you’ll remember the faces and you’ll remember the names, and you’ll remember how hard we worked and that we still lost loved ones.
And you’ll shed a tear and you should because it will be sad. But you will also be proud. You’ll be proud of what you did. You’ll be proud that you showed up — you showed up — when other people played it safe you had the courage to show up and you had the skill and the professionalism to make a difference and save lives.
That’s what you will have done and at the end of the day nobody can ask anything more from you. That is your duty, to do what you can when you can. And you will have shown skill and courage and talent. You’ll be there with you mind. You’ll be there with your heart. And you’ll serve with honor and that will give you pride and you should be proud.
I know that I am proud of you. And every time the National Guard has been called out they have made every New Yorker proud. And I am proud to be with you yet again. And I’m proud to fight this fight with you and I bring you thanks from all New Yorkers, who are just so appreciative of the sacrifice that you are making, the skill that you are bringing, the talent that you’re bringing. And you give many New Yorkers confidence.
So I say, my friends, that we go out there today and we kick coronavirus ass.
That’s what I say. And we’re going to save lives and New York is going to thank you. God bless each and every one of you.
Now, I’m not entirely sure that Henry will pay the passage back to England for anyone who doesn’t want to fight. That could be empty (albeit effective) rhetoric. On the other hand, I’m glad that Cuomo didn’t go so far as to deliver some version of “We would not die in that man’s company/ That fears his fellowship to die with us.” That would have been rhetorical excess.
That being said, however, healthcare workers are aware they are risking their lives, and indeed some have died, in large part because they entered the battle insufficiently armed. If Donald Trump tried to give this speech, it would fall flat because we have seen him dithering about ordering companies to manufacture the protective equipment that our health workers need. He has been more like Falstaff, who uses war to enrich his coffers (in Henry IV, Part I) and who, by Henry V, is dying offstage, an afterthought and irrelevance. To draw on the latter play, Trump is to Cuomo as Falstaff is to Henry.
Falstaff’s game has been to use his powers of enlistment to prompt wealthy families to pay him not to draft their sons. As a result, the castoffs he sends to fight England’s battles are useless. While Henry is ready to sacrifice his life for England’s good, Trump is determined to use congressional COVID money to bail out his own properties. Like Falstaff, Trump will take credit when things go well—Falstaff claims to have killed Hotspur in Henry IV, Part I when Henry has actually done the deed—but he’ll take none of the blame. Note that he hasn’t volunteered space in his New York hotels to help with COVID quarantines, even as he expects others to make such contributions.
But back to the speeches. When interviewed by the Harvard Gazette on his comparison, Professor Loeb laid out the parallels:
Cuomo echoed Shakespeare’s Henry primarily by calling attention to the historic nature of what was taking place. Just as Henry foretells that ‘He that outlives this day and comes safe home/Will stand a tiptoe when this day is named,’ Cuomo imagines the members of New York’s National Guard telling their grandchildren about their exploits, mingling grief for lives lost with pride in a job well done.
And Cuomo, like Henry, emphasized shared sacrifice. Cuomo spoke about what “we” are doing “together” and promised to “fight this fight with you, recalling Henry’s address to his army as a “band of brothers.” It hit so many of the same notes from Henry’s speech that I joked on Twitter that it was a “Shakespeare for Dummies” translation. More seriously, though, I felt that Cuomo’s speech was just as powerful, in its modern idiom, as Henry’s, even outdoing Shakespeare in his impressive use of anaphora [repetition of “This is a moment”].
Loeb concludes with observations about the importance of such speeches:
This was a reminder that a leader’s oratory plays a central role in creating a sense of communal purpose at times of danger. By casting this challenge in historic terms, Cuomo helped give everyone’s daily fear and drudgery meaning, even for a brief moment. In Shakespeare’s play, the speech wins Henry the Battle of Agincourt against the vastly larger French army. Let’s hope Cuomo’s speech — and all the other labor it inspired — has a similarly good effect on our fight against this pandemic.
Many of us wish Cuomo—or, for that matter, Hillary Clinton or Joe Biden—were directing the national defense against COVID. Instead we’ve got Falstaff.
Further thought: In Henry IV, Part I Henry (Prince Hal) is an irresponsible young man who allows Falstaff to command center stage. When he becomes king, however, he rejects his former friend, famously saying, “I know thee not, old man.” Trump, by contrast, has never evolved from media personality to president.