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The title page from an antique book of the plays of Shakespeare.
“We few, we happy few, we band of brothers,” may be the most famous description of military camaraderie in the English language, a climactic line of a climactic speech from a climactic play—Shakespeare’s Henry V—known for its rousing rhetoric and (for the English) glorious victory. And yet Shakespeare knew that, as real and powerful as that brotherhood was, it was only one aspect of an experience that could also entail tremendous strain, trauma, and loss. As we approach Veterans Day—Sunday, but observed on Monday, November 12—his plays can help civilians move beyond a simple “thank you for your service” toward a fuller understanding of how military life shapes individuals and their families. They also offer an important reminder: It’s different for everyone.
In an earlier play—Henry IV, Part 1—when Henry V was still young Prince Hal, Shakespeare invented a scene between a wife and her soldier husband, Hal’s future rival Hotspur, that captures with chilling precision the symptoms of what we would now call post-traumatic stress disorder:
LADY PERCY: 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 [flinch] so often when thou sitt’st alone?
Act 2, scene 3
Loss of appetite, emotional numbness, insomnia, and hypervigilance are all signs of the psychological distress of someone remembering or re-experiencing a terrifying event. And, as the scene so vividly conveys, it can be nearly as trying for loved ones as for the veteran who might be having them.
Though Shakespeare never set foot on a battlefield, England then (not unlike America now) was in a state of almost perpetual war. Like most Elizabethan Londoners, he would have come into frequent contact with veterans of those campaigns, heard numerous stories and seen firsthand the toll it took on many of them. But he also seems to have noticed that others came through not only psychologically unscathed, but with even greater vitality and zest for life.
At the beginning of Much Ado About Nothing, a messenger informs the lady Beatrice that Signior Benedick (“a good soldier”) has “returned from the wars” having “done good service” and is “as pleasant as he ever was.” Sure enough, the “merry war” that unfolds between them is so delightful it’s become a hallmark of the rom-com genre, a model for everything from the Cary Grant/Katharine Hepburn films of the 1930s and '40s to Sam and Diane in Cheers. Far from withdrawing or lashing out, this veteran moves with surprising speed toward intimacy, reconciliation, and communal joy.
But for Shakespeare even these contrasting portraits didn’t capture the full range of the veteran experience. And by combining both in the same character, he created one of the most indelible and life-affirming figures in all of literature.
Sir John Falstaff was Prince Hal’s drinking buddy in the Henry IV plays, a veteran of numerous expeditions and a man of boundless energy and insatiable appetites. The scholar Harold Bloom calls him (borrowing Falstaff’s own words) “the true and perfect image of life.” But beneath all the merriment and conviviality are hints of something darker: food, drink, and lechery as self-medication, compulsive dishonesty and petty crime as a substitute for the arousal of battle.
He is not a hero. He is not a victim. He may be damaged, but he is far from broken. He challenges our expectations and defies easy categorization. He is, in other words, a fully-realized human being. It’s no wonder that Orson Welles, who played him onstage and in film, considered Falstaff to be “Shakespeare’s greatest creation.”
This variety shows that no two veteran stories are the same. While some bear wounds that never heal or carry weights that never lift, others transition easily and emerge stronger and more open than before. Many feel enormous pride, others crushing shame, some feel both at once and every feeling in between. Still others find that nothing can replace the community and sense of purpose they had serving their country and dedicating their lives to something larger to themselves. They are the ones who re-up and answer Henry V’s other great rallying cry: “Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more.”
Tom Ridgely is the executive producer of Shakespeare Festival St. Louis.
