‘Band of brothers’ gave its name to Steven Spielberg’s TV series about the Second World War, and the phrase is often associated with comradeship and camaraderie among soldiers serving and fighting together: although not related by blood, they are brothers-in-arms, through battle – or brothers in ‘blood’, not in the sense that they are related by blood, but because they have shed blood together. Here’s the most famous line from Henry’s whole speech: ‘We few, we happy few, we band of brothers’. We few, we happy few, we band of brothers įor he to-day that sheds his blood with me This will last forever – until the end of the world. This story shall the good man teach his son įrom this day to the ending of the world,Įvery good man will teach his son about the battle, so that not a single year will go by when the battle is not remembered on St Crispin’s Day. But then this was probably deliberate anachronism on Shakespeare’s part: he needed to mention the names of figures his audience would recognise from the popular history (and earlier plays, such as his own trilogy of Henry VI plays), otherwise Henry’s claim that these names would be ‘familiar … as household words’ in years to come might sound comically wide of the mark.
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