I’ve had a fondness for Kenneth Branagh‘s version of Henry V ever since its relative box-office success almost exactly 30 years ago seemed to validate my undergraduate thesis (which I’d just defended the previous spring) on Shakespeare as the writer of popular entertainment, rather than highfalutin court plays (using Henry V and some analysis of the size of Elizabethan theater audiences and London’s population as my arguments). Possibly the shortest English Literature thesis on record at Reed College.
Anyway, today is St. Crispin’s Day, a day that I’ve observed a number of times in the past years, so here’s the man himself with the speech that gave us “band of brothers.”
And here is a sample of my latest Shakespeare fix, David Mitchell in his show Upstart Crow, which continues to prove my point.