Classifications and Harry at Harfleur…

Now that’s a catchy title designed to make you rush to read it. But it has to do with my own obsession with lists. The tabling of knowledge in a seeming order with a logical overview: to get the whole at a glance. Roget’s Plan of Classification for his Thesaurus is probably one of the simplest. His Thesaurus is divided into six basic classes:

1. Abstract Relations, deals with ideas such as Number, Order and Time;
2. Space, is concerned with movement, shapes and sizes;
3. Matter, covers the physical world and humankind’s perception of it by means of the five senses;
4. The Human Mind, i.e. the intellect, the exercise of the mind in the formation and communication of ideas;
5. The Human Will, i.e. Volition, the exercise of the will, whether individual or social;
6. The Human Heart and Soul, i.e. the exercise of Emotion, Religion and Morality.

You notice the gradual movement and logical progression from abstract concepts, through the material universe, to humankind itself. Simply put, the world of human experience described from outside to inside.

Now there is a lot to be argued there, if we must, about Will and Souls; but basically you are looking at a Shakespearean world-view. This is Sh’s playground.

My play of the moment is Henry V. Go, if you will, to Act 3, Scene 3. and read how Harry addresses the governor of Harfleur, a town on the verge of being ransacked by the English forces. Stone-cold killer talking. No wonder this play is Rumsfeld’s favourite. No mockery here, real bloodshed, rapine and vengeance tempered by a civilising nature, if only you do as he says.

Harry’s defiance is David to Goliath. A little pretext and a foreign prince’s mock of tennis balls in Act 1, Sc. 2. line 405. start this invasion. This mock is echoed in Act 4, Sc. 3, line 93-95.

‘Good God! why should they mock poor fellows thus?
The man that once did sell the lion’s skin
While the beast lived, was killed with hunting him’

(The tennis balls serve a similar purpose in Love’s Labours Lost, written about 10 years before Henry V).

The Chorus, whose monologues begin each of the 5 Acts, and whose epilogue is written in the form of a Sonnet (!), is the embedded reporter throughout the piece. All in all Henry V is a fine piece of propaganda in which Shakespeare got to show off the French that he knew.