William Shakespeare

William Shakespeare
(High School)
Opening of the Globe Theater: Summer/Fall 1599

William Shakespeare
Born: 1564
Death: 1616
Rank: Bard

‘Nature herself was proud of his designs’
In her Notes on Nursing, Florence Nightingale wrote that patient symptoms don’t come solely from the sickness, but also from “want of fresh air, or of light, or of warmth, or of quiet, or of cleanliness, or of the punctuality of care and administration of diet, of each or all of these things.” Patient care extends far beyond treating the disease; nurturing people back to health has just as much to do with the cleanliness of their environment, the food they eat, and the linens upon which they sleep, as does the medicine that combats their illness. Nightingale noted that if a patient suffered from the cold or bed sores, it was hardly the fault of the disease, but rather that of the nurse. “Bad sanitary, bad architectural and bad administrative arrangements often make it impossible to nurse.”

These lessons she learned from working in hospitals in London, and, more famously, from her care of British soldiers during the Crimean War (1853 - 1856). In the nineteenth century, more soldiers died through disease and infection, then were killed in battle. Too often, armies didn’t have enough trained medical personnel to care for the influx of wounded and sick. This problem plagued the British Army in the Crimean Peninsula, leading William Howard Russell, the war correspondent for the London Times, to report: “Not only are the men kept, in some cases, for a week without the hand of a medical man coming near their wounds,” he wrote, but when they entered the hospital, “it is found that the commonest appliances of a workhouse sick-ward are wanting.” Of the twenty-two thousand British dead in the Crimean War, some seventeen and a half thousand, a staggering 79%, were lost through disease and infections of their wounds - losses among the bigger French and Russian armies were even worse.

Moved by these reports, Nightingale decided to lead a group of nurses to help in the army hospitals. To help her in her journey, she called upon her friend, Sidney Herbert, the Secretary at War, who directed her to voyage to Turkey, leaving the organization of the nurses in Nightingale’s hands, while working under the overall authority of the British army.

Upon her arrival at the hospitals at Scutari, Nightingale wrote that the greatest problem was the filth. “When we came here,” she reported:

there was neither basin, towel, nor soap in the wards, nor any means of personal cleanliness for the Wounded except... [that] thirty were bathed every night… but this does not do more than include a washing once in eighty days for 2300 men.

Poor packing meant many of the badly needed medical supplies could not be unloaded at the hospitals, and when a new group of nurses showed up without her approval, Nightingale threatened to resign. She was having discipline issues with her original group of nurses, and getting them to work within the strictures of a military hospital had been a hassle. Consulting with “Mr. Menzies,” the Army’s principal medical officer, Nightingale refused the offer of further nurses because, “if we were swamped with a number increased to sixty or seventy, good order would become impossible. And in all these views,” she continued, “I so fully concur that I should resign my situation as impossible, were such circumstances forced upon me.”

Having the ear of the War Secretary gave Nightingale a direct link to the British government, enabling her to bring about changes in the way the British army ran its hospitals and medical services. But she wasn’t the only one working to better the plight of the soldiers. Mary Seacole ran a hotel right behind the British lines, providing medical care, as well as food. The French Army counted amongst their number some fifty Catholic Sisters of Mercy, and hundreds of the famed cantinière, who supplied their regiments with drink and makeshift nursing skills. The Grand Duchess Elena Pavlovna, the sister-in-law to the Czar of Russia, organized the Society of the Holy Cross, which sent Russian nurses to the front lines, to work among the wounded as close to the battlefield as possible.

The hard lessons learned in the wards at Scutari served to shape medicine for decades to come, for Nightingale established a school of nursing, with which to arm the next generation with the skills necessary to save lives.

Activity:
Florence Nightingale (Elementary School Activity) - Florence Nightingale was a lifelong nurse, most famous for her role in caring for British soldiers during the Crimean War. Military medicine was not what it is today; infections ran rampant, and disease killed far more men than battle. Journeying to Turkey, Nightingale and her nurses went to work on cleaning up these hospitals, leading to a dramatic decrease in loss of life. After the war, she founded a school of nursing in order to train generations of nurses to come. For this activity, define the role of a nurse. In modern hospitals, nurses are the backbone of the modern medical profession. What does it take to be a nurse, and what jobs do they fulfill? Let us know; for background on modern-day nurses, see here:

William Shakespeare
High School:
William Shakespeare
(High School)
Opening of the Globe Theater: Summer/Fall 1599
William Shakespeare
Born: 1564
Death: 1616
Rank: Bard
‘Nature herself was proud of his designs’
‘And joy’d to wear the dressing of his lines.’ Ben Jonson was unsparing in praise of his friend, the late lamented William Shakespeare, on the occasion of the great playwright’s death, in 1616. Taking a shot at his old friend, a rival’s lack of classical education: “thou hadst small Latin and less Greek,” Jonson praises Shakespeare’s work as being emphatically timeless, for, “He [Shakespeare] was not of an age but for all time!” Such a pronouncement is high praise indeed, as writers - like artists of all kinds - seek to have their work endure through the ages. Jonson’s pronouncement has proven accurate; William Shakespeare remains, four hundred years after his death, one of the greatest writers in all history, his words translated and read daily, thousands of times across the world.

“To this day,” wrote Yale Professor Harold Bloom, “multiculturally, Shakespeare will hold almost any audience, upper or lower class.” Bloom considers Shakespeare the only true universal author, one whose work has been translated countless times and transmuted across the world, but which has also influenced well-known tales emergent on the silver screen - West Side Story and The Lion King, to name but two. Transcending Hollywood adaptations, Shakespeare’s works form the synthesis for foreign-language dramas, namely Kurosawa’s movie, Ran, whose main character suffers a fall from grace eerily similar to that which overcomes Shakespeare’s King Lear. Bloom asserts that, while Shakespeare had overwhelming command of the English language, his words are easily capable of imitation; but what sets Shakespeare apart, “is his power of representation of human character and personality and their mutabilities.”

Shakespeare taps into the human experience, with all its faults and splendour, enrapturing his audience in timeless stories of men and women, in all manner of dramatic and comedic situations. Shakespeare wrote of love and power, forgiveness, despair, treachery and betrayal, and all the agonies of jealousy and the joys of the human experience. He is a bard for every day and every clime, for his themes are all-encompassing; there was not a subject that he seemingly could not turn his hand to, but, perhaps of them all, it was in the realm of war that Shakespeare’s greatest works shone brightest.

‘We happy few…’
Was William Shakespeare ever a soldier? The answer is unknown, but the England of his day was a nation under arms, with military commitments in Ireland, France, the Low Countries, and in the waters of the Caribbean and the Atlantic. “War was everywhere in the English 1590s,” observes historian Adam Mckeown. “There was nothing and nobody it did not affect every day.” Many of Shakespeare’s historical plays dwell in the wars of England’s past; Henry IV and Henry V, for example, brim with a keen understanding of the soldier’s lot and the traumatic effects of war upon its survivors. The London of Shakespeare’s time was teeming with combat veterans, men who’d warred from Ireland to Spain, and come back with stories enough to tell to eager listeners. War stands in abundance among the works of Shakespeare, so much so, that, according to Robert Logan, in about half of Shakespeare’s thirty seven plays, the poet “portrayed...attitudes towards war ranging from disgust with its violence and terrorism to an idealization of its heroics.” These paradoxical views are on full display in Henry V, Shakespeare’s most militant historical drama.

Recounting the early reign of King Henry V, and his opening campaign in France that culminates in the improbable English victory over the French at Agincourt, in 1415, the eponymous Henry is a warrior king of many faces. Faced by the defenses of the city of Harfleur, the young monarch, upon seeing his troops waver in the attack, emboldens them with a powerful rallying cry: “Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more/Or close up the wall with our English dead.” In the attack, to falter is to die, and such is Henry’s understanding of the situation, that he must stand to the fore and rouse their fury, for peace is the realm of quiet and joy, “But when the blast of war blows in our ears/then imitate the action of the tiger/...disguise fair nature with hard-favored rage.” In short, one must kill, difficult in the extreme, but in the terror of a battle, with friends being cut down in the inferno, and them that struck the blow at the edge of your sword, it remains but to kill them.

There is a brief sense of euphoria having killed the foe, followed by an inevitable low, once the combatant realizes what he has done. In Shakespeare’s own day, the armies of Europe advanced to kill at close quarters; the pike, despite the increasing presence of field artillery and the handheld arquebus and the firepower they provided, remained the dominant infantry weapon into the seventeenth century. Killing was still an intimate experience, made more so by the fact that Shakespeare’s Henry V is set early in the fifteenth century, when to kill in war literally was hand to hand. The sword, and even the English longbow, limited the killing space for want of range; thus, Henry’s rally before the French city of Harfleur, inducing his warriors to cast aside civilized behavior and tap into their primordial instincts.

What is more, in the scene following Henry’s rally at Harfleur, he calls upon the governor of the town to surrender, lest the English be forced to storm the city once again and suffer losses. Shakespeare puts into the King’s mouth the unveiled threat of the sack, to terrorize the French into submission:

If I begin the battery once again,
I will not leave the half-achieved Harfleur
Till in her ashes she lie buried.
The gates of mercy shall be all shut up,
And the flesh'd soldier, rough and hard of heart,
In liberty of bloody hand shall range
With conscience wide as hell, mowing like grass
Your fresh-fair virgins and your flowering infants.

When a city fell to a besieging army, it was at the mercy of its conquerors. The victorious soldiery, having endured all the hardships of a siege, compounded by surviving the ordeal of storming a fortified position, would give over - in many cases - to base actions: rape, murder, and pillage being chief horrors rendered unto a fallen town and its populace. Henry, here, is not a paladin of chivalry, but a weary leader of men with heavy losses and a great many sick. The town before him has defied his advance, so now’s the time to test Harfleur’s backbone. It finally surrenders.

Shakespeare’s war writing brims with authenticity. He gets the veracity, the hunger for glory in some, the gut-wrenching wait of a battle’s eve, and perhaps most poignantly of all, he writes of combat’s traumatizing effects on those who have survived it. In Henry IV, Part One, Shakespeare delivers a monologue that aptly describes the psychological torment plaguing a warrior after battle. Hotspur Percy has just come from battle and is hastening to depart from his home yet again; his wife, Lady Percy, then begs to know the reasons for his distant coldness:

Tell me, sweet lord, what is ‘t that takes from thee
Thy stomach, pleasure, and thy golden sleep?
Why dost thou bend thine eyes upon the earth,
And start so often when thou sit’st alone?
Why hast thou lost the fresh blood in thy cheeks
And given my treasures and my rights of thee
To thick-eyed musing and curst melancholy?
In thy faint slumbers I by thee have watched,
And heard thee murmur tales of iron wars...

Four hundred years in the past,Shakespeare describes a man haunted by the horrors of the battlefield ,as ascribed to him by his wife. Hotspur ignores his wife’s pleading and hastens into the night, but the force of Lady Percy’s words linger on in the mind of the reader. Combat trauma has affected soldiers for thousands of years, yet the study of such effects has only gained attention in the last century. That Shakespeare rendered it so poignantly four hundred years ago is a testament to his genius as an artist, and astuteness, not only towards the ways of war and the minds of the military man, but illustrates his depth of insight into the human condition. Whether Shakespeare ever fought in one of the myriad campaigns the English involved themselves in during the twenty years he was active as a playwright remains to be debated, but he knew enough of them to have gleaned a marvelous insight into the tragedy of their trade. He treated them as he did most of his subject matter, by immortalizing it in verse that is to be enjoyed by millions across the world. Shakespeare’s work is universal as are the themes of which he wrote, and any who have ever seen war at its brutal worst can find solace in the pages of one who understood.

William Shakespeare (High School Activity) - Shakespeare was a wordsmith, with few rivals. In terms of popularity, he easily is bigger than any of his contemporaries. Be it play or poem, old Willie from Stratford-upon-Avon could spin a phrase. Far more famous for his plays, Shakespeare was an accomplished writer of sonnets. He wrote in iambic pentameter - the meter in which he also wrote his plays - a line of verse of five metrical feet, consisting of a stressed, followed by an unstressed, syllable. An example is to be found in the first line of Romeo and Juliet: “Two households, both alike in dignity.” This is the core of Shakespeare’s writing, repeated throughout his work; so for this activity, you’ll channel your inner Shakespeare and write a sonnet. For examples and advice, see here:

• Book 1
• Book 2
• Book 3

• Website 1
• Website 2