Thinking Out Loud: “Scatter’d Men”: Mutilated Bodies and Militant Nostalgia in Shakespeare’s Henry V

Date and Time
October 26, 2016
Event Details
Henry V, King of England, 1387-1422
Henry V, King of England

Henry V is one of William Shakespeare’s most war-oriented English history plays.  It is obsessed with broken bodies, memory and the question of what will be remembered after a war ends.  In his famous St. Crispin’s Day speech before the battle of Agincourt, the king imagines a returned soldier, now old, celebrating the victory at a future feast.  But the soldier Williams has another vision of the future.  In Act 4, he speaks of a soldierly ghost that will rise up on the Day of Judgment: a thing made out of the body parts of men who died in battle.  Both of these moments look to the future—or to the moment the play is performed—and to the kinds of memories that Agincourt will produce, but they envision memory in vastly different terms.  Can Agincourt produce memorials that will celebrate conquest and victory?  Will these soldiers be remembered?  Or will they simply rot in French soil?  

Please join us Wednesday, Oct 26 at 6PM  for an NYPL Scholar Talk featuring Frederick Lewis Allen Room researcher-in-residence, Susan Harlan.  This talk is part of Harlan’s book Memories of War in Early Modern England: Armor and Militant Nostalgia in Marlowe, Sidney, and Shakespeare (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016).

Susan Harlan is an associate professor in the Department of English at Wake Forest University.  Her book Memories of War in Early Modern England: Armor and Militant Nostalgia in Marlowe, Sidney, and Shakespeare examines depictions of the construction and destruction of the armored male body in combat in relationship to early modern English understandings of the past.  She has also published articles on Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing, Troilus and Cressida, Henry V, Pericles, Henry VIII, The Winter’s Tale, and Twelfth Night and has delivered conference papers on militarism, masculinity, and materiality in early modern English drama.  Harlan's writing has been featured in The Guardian US, Curbed, Jezebel, The Hairpin and others.  She is currently at work on a cultural history of luggage for the Bloomsbury series Object Lessons. 

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