From Monday's class: the English lesson from Henry V

Just for fun, and for those who missed class, I posted a link to the two videos we watched in class, both performances of the English lesson from Henry V.  My point in showing this is to stress what makes Shakespeare both literary and theatrical: this scene is hilarious when performed, since the actors can make us forget that it's in French--we get the point immediately--but when read, we get the clever French/English pun at the end, which underlines the problems inherent in translation itself (that some things just don't translate).  For Wednesday, we'll discuss the history of translating Shakespeare in performance, from his own age to the Victorian period.  Bottom line, there have always been many 'Shakespeares,' and the idea of being authentic is very difficult to authenticate (and authenticity wasn't a watch word of Shakespeare's theatre to begin with!). 

[Above: from Branagh's Henry V (1989)

I can't get the second one to pull up correctly, but here's the link (it's shorter and even funnier): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-22nJ458RiQ