The beckoning breach: “Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more,” begins Henry V’s stirring pre-battle exhortation. “Or close the wall up with our English dead!”

Thirty lines later, he concludes,

“The game’s afoot!

Follow your spirit; and upon this charge,”

Cry, ‘God for Harry, England and Saint George!'”

I thrilled to that, though I’d read it long before re-reading it of a Sunday at Einstein Brothers Bagels after Mass at St. Vincent’s up the street.

Meantime, I’d associated “the game’s afoot” with Sherlock Holmes, who says it to Dr. Watson when going after the criminal. Another lesson in how Shakespeare created our language.

Another language lesson comes when Exeter, Henry’s ambassador, asks the French king to “overlook” what he gave him, meaning to look it over – just the opposite of what we mean by the word. Four hundred years make a difference.

For the groundlings: Another aspect of Shakespeare’s genius is the pace of things. The scene right after the stirring exhortation mocks it. “On, on, on, on, on, to the breach, to the breach!” says Bardolph, a friend of the late Falstaff, the king’s fellow roisterer in his Prince of Wales days.

Bardolph and Nym and Pistol, two other roisterers, decide the hell with this fame and honor business, leaving the stage to the servant boy who thinks about it aloud, then decides to “leave them, and seek some better service.”

Later Bardolph is caught stealing from a church. Pistol tries to get him off, but Bardolph is hanged for discipline’s sake. The servant boy is one of those slaughtered by looting French soldiers while he guarded the baggage.

“We would have all such offenders so cut off,” says Henry of Bardolph. “And we give express charge that in our marches through the country there be nothing compelled from the villages . . . for when lenity [leniency] and cruelty play for a kingdom, the gentler gamester is the soonest winner.” He intended to rule this land and saw no point in angering its people.

It’s part of the whole awareness of Shakespeare. He was so far from going whole hog imperialist a la Kipling or whole hog skeptic a la James Joyce, that he seemed to keep 19 possibilities in his head at once, touching base here, there, wherever it seemed good, to give us in one fell swoop a panoramic view of the proceedings, and all of course in a few extremely well chosen words.

Making fun and having it: In his “Requiem for a Noun, or Intruder in the Dusk,” Peter De Vries pictures “a cold brussels sprout” rolling off the page of the book and lying “defunctive” on his lap. It is held, furthermore, in a “fat, insolent fist” beneath a “bland, defiant face,” above which hung “the shock of black hair like tangible gas.”

He was doing Faulkner with “reverential amusement,” says Gilbert Highet in his 1962 book, Anatomy of Satire. Parody isn’t always reverential, needless to say. Highet tells of Arnold Bennett reading a Max Beerbohm takeoff on him and sinking from writing thousands of words a day to none, “until the shock of this operation wore off, and the scar of Max’s cautery ceased to throb.” Ouch.

So with writers in the U. of Iowa workshop in the ’60s. For quite a while after your work had been criticized by the group, you couldn’t write anything, a veteran told me.

It does take a strong heart, stomach, etc., to survive criticism. One needs a discerning view of readers and critics. Some are not good to listen to and must be ignored. In the after life, fine. Hear them out as angels sing in the background. But for now, find a muse and listen to her. She may lead astray but at least she leads.

Little noted item on Western reading habits: By the mid-18th century, more reading was being done in England partly because houses were warmer in winter and candles were better and gave more light. Thus has the race — human, that is, and in northern climes — developed good habits thanks in part to material progress. Take that, you Luddites.

Go to, you: Robert Benchley, the incomparable American humorist of the 1930s and later, having read in the Book of Proverbs, “Go to the ant, thou sluggard. Consider her ways and be wise,” spent an afternoon in that pursuit and learned that when carrying a large crumb on his head, he should walk sideways.

You make-a me laugh: For the Roman poet Horace, the goal was to tell “the laughing truth,” which is bad translation of good Latin but instructive anyhow. He saw truth laughing at him and responded accordingly in his Satires.

Not very lawyerly: As if lawyers need any more potshots in their direction, Jonathan Swift in his Polite Conversation, the 3rd Dialogue has this: ” . . . he’s a concealer of the law.” Your turn, counsel. (all three items from Highet’s Anatomy of Satire)

Delaying tactic: Consider “anon.” In Shakespeare, as in “Henry IV, Part One,” it’s used by a waiter telling Falstaff he’ll be right there at once. “Anon,” he keeps saying but never comes. So we use it as “by and by” or “in a little while.” But it was short for “at once” and was used to put someone off, as in “right away” or “coming” when someone says, “Come on” and we don’t come because we’re busy. It’s a time-honored dodge.

Gilbert to (Oscar) Wilde to (Jack) Benny: Among “unkillable hymn-tunes” by the composer Sullivan, Gilbert’s partner, is “Onward, Christian Soldiers.” Sullivan has a following today, but not Gilbert, with all his “colossal verbal skill and prodigious industry,” said reviewer X.J. Kennedy in New Criterion, January, 1997.

The two didn’t get along, and each longed to do more serious work on his own. But they stayed together, bound by financial needs: Sullivan was supporting a mistress and Gilbert an expensive wife, yacht, and country estate. Neither could make as much money separately.

Gilbert invented the (comical) straight face, setting the stage for Oscar Wilde’s “The Importance of Being Earnest.” And Jack Benny, for that matter. As a dominant writer-director, he set the stage also for the dominating writer-director George Bernard Shaw. He also sued people a lot, having been a barrister.

The book under review was W.S. Gilbert: A Classic Victorian and His Theatre, by Jane W. Stedman (Oxford).

Gilbert died well, trying to save a screaming teen-age girl. She’d been screaming but was not in danger. He drowned. His widow doted on fresh fruit and while on holiday had peaches sent her from his sumptuous estate.

Hypertexts and hyperlinks beckon. Point and click, say the Internet salesmen. Indeed. Point and click and get hooked. Seductive, addictive, sometimes enervating, the whole package. It’s a jungle in there. Be careful.

So much and so little time: A great poem has “a general sense of compacted wealth,” says Wm. Empson in Seven Types of Ambiguity. Lots of meaning packed in. You needn’t know all of it or have it all in mind at once, no more than you have to know all the notes of a symphony. What you want is awareness of a poem’s “elaborate balance of variously associated feeling.” Just as I was saying the other night at the Ale House.

Kurt Vonnegut Jr. tried meditating in the ’60s, using a mantra, a Sanskrit word which he thinks may mean $85, what he paid for it. Later it dawned on him that “in our civilization” we meditate using “a medieval object, a book,” putting ourselves in touch with people in ages gone by. This kind of meditation, he says, gives “access to brains better than our own.”

Ah the mystery of it all. Some guy 500 years ago had a great thought, and it’s ours to ponder, with or without the Internet.

As for the joys of reading, Dr. Ken Cooper, the meditation-for-relaxation specialist of the ’70s, decided at one point that relaxation was as much obtained by quiet reading as by meditation-with-mantra. The maharishi came and went, and we still have reading.

Secret sharing: People say, “My, you do a lot of reading,” as if I steal from sleep or eating or prayer. It’s time for a little secret: I generally don’t watch the tube, that’s what. The tube I figure is for mind-vacating. A movie works that way too.

The time-snatcher television relates to schooling too. Kids who go for the tube with every free moment, reading only what’s required even in demanding school programs, are culturally deprived. TV, sedative or stimulant, is in any case a drug, sez I.

Some fairly complicated stuff: Harold Bloom touches on TV in The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages, his unapologetic appreciation and promotion of what the West has given mankind.

Discussing “Shakespeare, Center of the Canon,” he says “partisans of Resentment” object that only an elite can read in the way he recommends. Bloom isn’t sure even about that. It’s gotten harder to “read deeply” he concedes, adding that “even the elite tend to lose concentration.”

Wondering if his generation represents the last of the close-reading public, he asks whether his not owning a TV set until age 40 might be relevant. He wonders “if a critical preference for context over text does not reflect” impatience with “deep reading.” (I wonder in the same vein with reference to my years as a Jesuit, with little or access to the tube.)

“Context over text” refers to how critical theorists, his “partisans of Resentment,” tear everything apart, eschewing enjoyment in favor of analysis. Bloom analyzes too, but their analysis is a peevish pecking away at things to satisfy a craving for upset, he says.

Armed with Freud, whom Bloom much respects, and far lesser lights such as the eminence noir Michel Foucault, whom he does not, they take off into a literary sky-blue yonder with anarchistic intent.

When times weren’t a-changing: We take it for granted that times are changing, but Shakespeare didn’t. Nor did his contemporaries, whom we call Elizabethans and Jacobeans, after Queen E. and King James, of Bible fame.

Therefore, Shakespeare et al. could talk of human nature as a timeless universal. They were not tempted to political correctness as we know it, incessant politicizing — or analysis of their society, which they took for granted.

Their times were changing, of course, and we can analyze them. But apart from recording the “rise of [merchant] families and their ambition to ally themselves with needy peerages and to acquire country estates,” Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists had no sense of it, T.S. Eliot observes in his Selected Essays, 1913-1922 (London, 1950).

They were “blessed,” said Eliot, because it meant they could “concentrate their attention . . . upon the common characteristics of humanity in all ages, rather than upon the differences.” The same went for Dante and the ancient Greeks but not for writers “in periods of unsettlement,” as Petronius in the 1st century and Lucian in the 2nd.

Elizabethans and Jacobeans “believed in their own age,” as “no nineteenth- or twentieth-century writer of the greatest seriousness has been able to believe in his age,” said Eliot, whose “Waste Land” was no happy-ending Broadway musical. Eliot sounded wistful as he made this point, as if he would like to be able to believe in his age.

— More to come of these Observations of a Literary Bent —