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Harfleur
(Shakespeare Teaches About Internal Representations)
Henry V - SCENE III.
Before the gates of Harfleur (town in France)
Enter the GOVERNOR and some citizens on the walls. Enter the KING and all his train before the gates on horseback.
KING HENRY.
How yet resolves the Governor of the town?
This is the latest parle we will admit;
Therefore to our best mercy give yourselves
Or, like to men proud of destruction,
Defy us to our worst; for, as I am a soldier,
A name that in my thoughts becomes me best,
If I begin the batt'ry 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 flow'ring infants.
What is it then to me if impious war,
Array'd in flames, like to the prince of fiends,
Do, with his smirch'd complexion, all fell feats
Enlink'd to waste and desolation?
What is't to me when you yourselves are cause,
If your pure maidens fall into the hand
Of hot and forcing violation?
What rein can hold licentious wickednes
When down the hill he holds his fierce career?
We may as bootless spend our vain command
Upon the enraged soldiers in their spoil,
As send precepts to the Leviathan
To come ashore.
Therefore, you men of Harfleur,
Take pity of your town and of your people
Whiles yet my soldiers are in my command;
Whiles yet the cool and temperate wind of grace
O'erblows the filthy and contagious clouds
Of heady murder, spoil, and villainy.
If not - why, in a moment look to see
The blind and bloody with foul hand
Defile the locks of your shrill-shrieking daughters;
Your fathers taken by the silver beards,
And their most reverend heads dash'd to the walls;
Your naked infants spitted upon pikes,
Whiles the mad mothers with their howls confus'd
Do break the clouds, as did the wives of Jewry
At Herod's bloody-hunting slaughtermen.
What say you? Will you yield, and this avoid?
Or, guilty in defence, be thus destroy'd?
Here Henry tries his hand at a spot of persuasion engineering to avoid having to make yet another attempt to take the walled and well defended town by force - they've been trying for ages and keep getting repelled, and his men are dying by the bucketload and getting well dispirited; on the last attempt some of the officers had to remain behind to threaten soldiers with their lives to keep them going forward instead of running away.
So what does he do?
Firstly, he places the choice of outcome into the governer's hands, entirely.
However, the choice he gives is NOT between winning or losing, but ONLY of losing, either by unconditional surrender easily OR by being taken by force.
The outcome is fully and congruently pre-supposed, although in reality, it is far from certain - as far as the town's people are concerned, 50 - 50, but actually, the situation is in *their* favour if only they knew that and now would kept their heads.
Henry steps back from *any* responsibility or promise of trying to make the takeover after the "inevitable win" to be civilised - well, I am a soldier too, he says, and will lose my mind as completely as any of my men. There will be no reason left nor any authority whatsoever to stop what will happen to you.
Now, having placed ALL responsibility for the illusionary choice of just how they will surrender (and every single word and every single line strengthens that underlying pre-supposition, blow by blow), we get into a most wondrously constructed set of internal representations about just what happens when uncontrolled soldiers seize a town.
If you are still here and have an interest, read each one out loud and note which representational systems are being engaged, and what your emotions might be if someone stood at your front door and referred to your loved ones in that fashion, with a sword in his hand. Also note your kinaesthetics - they shift quite interestingly with each situation being constructed with a few sharp brushstrokes.
(You may note the metaphoricals of Satan and the Grim reaper all rolled into one, the biblical references at the end, in passing - when the going gets rough, we're right into the deepest, highest and widest concepts such as death and damnation, redemption and loss of soul, once more).
Here is also, note, the walk away closure technique: "Take pity on your town and on your people while yet my soldiers are in my command" is the time limiter, with more internal representations of the "away from nature" stacked up until the final ultimatum is delivered - no time to think, no time to debate, NOW make up your mind! (which is a lesson in exactly where one should not make up one's mind if one can avoid it at all! however, the governor of Harfleur might have well thought at that point that he had absolutely no option left to choose from!).
Also note the structure of the main loop: Choice/Responsibility opens it; I'm still in control but won't be much longer; horrible internal reps; the core command - Take pity on your town and on your people (that in itself is a bastard of a stack of presupposition!!) - more horrible reps, more I can't hold them back much longer, and back to the choice/responsibility question that opened it in the first place. There are many more such loops there, see if you can track some of them, notably in the metaphors employed throughout.
But the most extraordinary feature of this speech are the internal representations being created with just a few choice words, placed on the timeline with clarity and perfection - "In a few moments, look and SEE: ..." And what we see is frightening indeed. Even if we have not seen this ourselves, we have heard tell and we have the deepest fears of every father, son, husband right there - an extraordinarily powerful, direct appeal to the governor's emotions, who is responsible for everyone that night. As an exercise, you might imagine you were given the task of converting the Harfleur speech into a video that exactly shows the right images at the right time, with the right music in the background to give a sense of the emotions present. If you do that, you get a real feeling for the power of the internal representations that are being created here.
Can you deliver such a speech from a state of fear and uncertainty, with a quaking voice? Well, of course not. This is an "all or nothing" - the "Harfleur Pattern" absolutely relies upon the one delivering it to their intended victims to be congruent and absolutely willing to fight it out to the death if necessary. "I will not leave the half achieved Harfleur till in her ashes she lies buried." That is the key statement - if the governor doesn't believe that, all the rest will not sway him, no matter what. And the wonderful thing here is that Henry himself is the very soldier he warns the governor about - he himself is on the very verge of raping that city and then destroying it. Henry is creating himself to be the tide of war, a greater totality than just soldiers, more than human, a force of destruction that is irresistible and that you should, indeed, be very, very afraid of.
One last note - read this speech out aloud as best you can, and note the tempo and the pacing and what happens to your voice quite automatically as you deliver those words. This is really to be spoken at some volume, if not actually shouted (the king is on his horse by the gate, and the governor is high up on the top of the wall's walkway a good distance away). The pacing and rhythm are extremely hypnotic as the links flow from one to the other; for those who equate hypnosis with softly spoken words, this is a neat change of pace as well as a real eye opener and without having to step inside a church or political rally to hear it being done in actuality!
Ladies and Gentlemen, a resounding round of applause please for Mr. William Shakespeare, our guest NLP trainer and a true Master of the craft ....
Silvia Hartmann, 1999
Speak Up, Speak Out, Be Heard And Change The World ...
The Story Teller with Silvia Hartmann
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