For He Was Welsh, You Know: Reading Shakespeare's Henry the Fifth

Fluellen:  And I do believe your majesty takes

no scorn to wear the leek upon Saint Tavy’s day.

King Henry:  I wear it for a memorable honour,

For I am Welsh, you know, good countryman.

As I listened to John Metcalf’s Mapping Wales, I conjured a sky thick with Welsh archers’ arrows.  The arrows weren’t the stuff of my imagination, but a scene from Kenneth Branagh’s Henry V.  As one thing so often leads to another, I thought it time to give the film another look.

Armchair Traveling: Mapping Wales, the Music of John Metcalf

Despite several trips to Great Britain, I’ve never been to Wales.  My partner of many years felt marooned there for a time, and that may be the reason we haven’t gone.  (Back then, if an English grammar student had no Latin, attending university in England to study English was next to impossible—Wales was almost all there was.)  The other association we have with Wales is no better:  we’d met a Welsh singer who, we were told, had a lovely voice, but what we encountered was a decidedly unlovely drunk.