Love is Patriotic... Wider Reading 16: Henry V

It is a commonly held belief that Shakespeare's Henry V was the first to be performed at the new Globe Theatre in the spring of 1599. Since then, the story of the victor of Agincourt has been performed and adapted many times, with the dashing king as a prominent historical figure. Many types of love are explored within the play, the most obvious of which is patriotism and love of one's country. When Henry calls for his army to "Follow [their] spirit, and upon this charge / Cry 'God for Harry, England, and Saint George!" they are portraying their strength in terms of their love for England and its king. During the play Henry also experiences the loss of many of his friends and family members, who he remembers gratefully as loving him as a man despite his high status.

Henry's wooing of Katherine - or as he calls her, Kate - at first superficially appears to be the charming comical awkwardness of a soldier talkinh to an aristocratic lady. But Katherine knows that "the tongues of men are full of deceits", and for all his insistences on lacking eloquence Henry's speech is lengthy and highbrow. Katherine asks, "Is it possible dat I sould love de enemie of France?". To the king, and probably most others, the match with Katherine is a marriage of national conquest, not of human love. Henry is obliged to answer that he is not the enemy of France - quite the opposite. That this marriage is about rapacity for land rather than love is clear from Henry's rhapsodizing about France itself. At best, after some banter about the language barrier, "I love thee cruelly", he protests, letting slip a Janus-faced adjective. He believes calling her "a good soldier-breeder" is an appeal to maternal instincts.

After substantially more dissertation from Henry, Katherine punctures the hypocrisy of all this - the pretense that any fate is in her hands - by noting that the match is entirely up to her father. Although the Princess and Alice insist it is not French custom for ladies to kiss before marriage, Henry kisses her. The French nobles return, and Burgundy explains Katherine's resistence as maidens' natural modesty regarding Cupid. Henry declares, "Yet they do wink and yield, as love is blind and enforces". Historically, Henry married Catherine de Valois on 2 June 1420. Here, it may not be so much a marriage as a rape dressed up in ceremony. With the French conceding all, the "conquest" is achieved and all look forward, incorrectly as the audience knows, to a lasting peace.

Henry v - Quotations

Love is Enduring... Wider Reading 9: Birdsong

Birdsong is the story of Stephen Wraysford, a young Englishman who arrives in Amiens, France in 1910. After a passionate love affair with his married landlady that goes terribly wrong, he leaves only to return four years later to fight in the Great War. Over the course of the novel he suffers a series of traumatic experiences, from the clandestine love affair that tears apart the family with whom he lives, to the unprecedented experiences of the war itself. Entwined with his story are numerous heartrending tales of others affected by the fever sweeping Europe: from Michael Weir, his best friend, Jack Firebrace, whose tender heart becomes his undoing, Jeanne, a woman of endless kindness and patience, to the 1970s and the story of Elizabeth, who discovers her grandfather's tale through his letters, diaries, and the stories of those who were close to him. Set before and during World War One, Birdsong captures the drama of that era on both a national and a personal scale.

The novel defies modern convention by exclusively employing the omniscient narrator to tell its harrowing story. Penetrating into the deepest thoughts, pasts and even, in some cases, futures of every single character, it seems unnervingly invasive, but becomes an all-encompassing narratorial rubric to complement perfectly the difficult subject matter. Birdong is indeed difficult; it is a World War One novel with an explicit focus on trench warfare - that most horrifying and unimaginable of all wartime terrors. While the public consciousness may have a vague notion of the sheer horror, a true understanding remains forever ungraspable to the individual.

Birdsong has a tripartite plot structure, beginning with a long pre-war love story. Faulks’ intentions in doing this are obvious and multiple: put simply, this section serves to humanize the characters we are soon to see committing horrific acts of brutal killing and to drive home to the reader what’s at stake. There’s also more than a little dramatic irony. The reader knows what is coming, and is powerless to warn the characters. Stylistically this is also the most colourful part of the book. The writing here is metaphor-heavy, plentiful with adjectives and parenthetic digressions. The second section offers the ‘meat’ of the novel. A jump-cut to mid-war trench life carries with it a drastic change in Faulks’ linguistic register. The synaesthesia of sex is replaced with that of war: now there’s blood, iron, mud and agony. There’re no more metaphors, few adjectives, many more concrete nouns and a focus on active verbs. The contrast with the first part of the book is abrasive and sudden – here there is no artificiality of language. The third and weakest part of the novel is another jump-cut, but this time to a modern-day setting. The characters and events that occupy this part of the novel seem extremely dull and muted, creating a sharp contrast to the horror, and excitement and bravery, of war.

Birdsong - Quotations

Love is a Journey... Wider Reading 6: Song of Achilles

Greece - in the age of heroes. Patroclus, an awkward young prince, has been exiled to the court of King Peleus and his perfect son Achilles. Despite their differences, Achilles befriends the shamed prince, and as they grow into young men skilled in the arts of war and medicine, their bond blossoms into something deeper - despite the displeasure of Achilles's mother Thetis, a cruel sea goddess. But when word comes that Helen of Sparta has been kidnapped, Achilles must go to war in distant Troy and fulfil his destiny. Torn between love and fear for his friend, Patroclus goes with him, little knowing that the years that follow will test everything they hold dear.

Despite its fame, the relationship between Achilles and Patroclus is one that has puzzled scholars and readers for hundreds of years. It is hard to make a character like Achilles, who drags his enemy's body around the beseiged Troy several times a day sympathetic - especially to modern eyes. This is the writers challenge in this novel, and for the most part she succeeds convincingly by taking his story back to its roots, and imagining the development of Achilles' relationship with his beloved Patroclus. Using the latter's gentle narrative voice, Miller deftly paints the picture of a boy, and later a man, in love, and the way in which he is stunned and grateful for that love being returned.

Although not explicitly stated in Homer's epic "The Iliad," some accounts have placed the two men, always depicted at least as close friends, in a homosexual relationship and it is on this that the novel rests. Its strengths lie not so much in evoking the passionate love story, although the writer does so elegantly, but in creating an almost distressingly real setting in the 'age of Heroes' - despite the matter-of-fact intervention of gods and the lauding of values that seem alien to modern eyes. The argument between Achilles and Agamemnon evolves from a petty spat between raging warlords into an inevitable clash of personalities driven by prophecy, love and loss.

Love is Everlasting... Wider Reading 3: In Memoriam A.H.H.

Often considered to be the greatest poem of the 19th century, "In Memoriam" is a poem of epic proportions, whose sensitive portrayal of heartache and loss tugged on the heartstrings of Victorian society. At first known only for his short, rhythmic pieces, poet Lord Tennyson satisfied critics who doubted he could produce something more strenuous and sustained, by shaping a long prophetic poem from the short personal lyrics that came naturally to him.

At the end of 1850 Tennyson succeeded William Wordsworth as Poet Laureate to Queen Victoria, and published "In Memoriam" 17 years after the death of Arthur Henry Hallam, the poet's artistic mentor and dear friend, to whom the poem is dedicated. It was an instant and resounding success, even surpassing the past popularity of great writers such as Byron. Queen Victoria also found solace in the poem after the death of Prince Albert.

One of the many reasons for "In Memoriam's" lasting effect is that the sense of loss it carries within it is something very relevant to everyone who has lost someone, whether it be a contemporary reader or one studying it today. The main theme of love is the platonic friendship between two people, which we can all relate to.

In Memoriam - Quotations