Welcome back to The Daily Poem, a podcast from Goldberry Studios.

I'm Sean Johnson, and today is Monday, January 15th, 2024.

Here at the Daily Poem, one of the things we want to impress upon our listeners and our future or potential listeners is that poetry is eminently approachable.

Too often, too many people, think of poetry as mystifying and intimidating, and a good poem

is just not usually that way.

Even a poem that might seem obtuse at first glance usually requires just a little bit of quality time for it to open and unfold itself to the curious reader.

Every good poem leaves the door unlocked,

as it were. And a kind of poetry that definitely falls into this camp of being seen as intimidating

and foreign is the poetry of William Shakespeare. In fact, sometimes

Shakespeare's greatest poetry really isn't thought of as poetry at all, and that is his dramatic

poetry, the lyric and blank verse that he uses when he's writing his plays.

So I thought it would be worth spending a week looking at some of Shakespeare's great monologues,

but because there are some that are almost universally known and familiar and, dare I say, even overdone,

I thought it would be worth looking at some of Shakespeare's underrated speeches.

The first of which is the prologue from Shakespeare's British history play, Henry V.

This is one of his most popular plays, and so those who are already fans of Shakespeare and of this play will certainly know the speech that opens the play.

But it ends up usually playing second fiddle to all of the other speeches in the play, which are even more famous.

I think of his St. Crispin's Day speech, the band of brother's speech, for example.

But this is a great speech that sets a tone for the rest of the play.

He creates a chorus character who recurs throughout the play.

But oddly, his job is to repeatedly break the fourth wall.

So he's telling this sweeping drama about one of the great romanticized patriotic heroes

...