The cruelest month: Belie with false compare

Well, alrighty, then—time to haul out the big guns for National Poetry Month. I’m talking Shakespeare, baby; the one and only.

The challenge with the Bard is, of course, being spoilt for choice. Do I go for Hamlet’s soliloquy? Macbeth’s “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow”? “All the world’s a stage,” from As You Like It?

No, I do not.

And which of the sonnets? Number 18—“Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” Number 116—“Let me not to the marriage of true minds”?

Hmm—not so much.

No, you can get plenty of romantic hyperbole out of many of the sonnets—Shakespearean and otherwise. I happen to like number 130—the one where Will gets real about his mistress and still prefers her. You know—kind of like Charles and Camilla.

Sonnet 130

My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun;

Coral is far more red than her lips' red;

If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;

If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.

I have seen roses damask’d, red and white,

But no such roses see I in her cheeks;

And in some perfumes is there more delight

Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.

I love to hear her speak, yet well I know

That music hath a far more pleasing sound;

I grant I never saw a goddess go;

My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground:

   And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare

   As any she belied with false compare.

There’s love for you.

As for the plays—I’m picking the Saint Crispian’s Day speech from Henry V:

This day is call’d the feast of Crispian.

He that outlives this day, and comes safe home,

Will stand a tip-toe 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 Crispian’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 rememb’red.

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-

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.

I love that speech. And squawk me no squawk about the lack of rhyme. You didn’t grouse about “The Waste Land”, did you?

Here’s the power of that speech: you can have Kenneth Branagh give it before the field of Agincourt in full regalia and that’s as it should be. But here it is in a different setting, a field exercise in a basic training camp in the 1994 film Renaissance Man.

Here’s the deal: Danny DeVito is an unemployed advertising guy who slums taking a job trying to teach some misfit recruits how to take instructions. Gregory Hines’ drill sergeant thinks teacher and students are collectively and individually a waste of space. They’re studying Hamlet in class, but a trip to Ontario to watch a production of Henry V on the hoof captures the soul of Private Benitez, as you can see in this clip:

The filmmakers cut about three lines and threw in a couple of words, but still.

I cannot watch this sequence dry-eyed, hearing Henry’s words coming out of a Brooklyn-bred mouth on a guy with the army-issued eyeglasses that everyone knows are a key birth-control device, and seeing the way it captures the universal spirit of the warrior, as the drill sergeant clearly recogizes.

And that’s why you can’t have a poetry month without Shakespeare.