Stop Build Day and Shakespeare
Written by Frank Merrick, 2016 FEB 23
What goes better with Stop Build Day than a little Shakespeare? You already know the answer: exactly nothing. Nothing goes better, and that’s a true fact.
The scene is Macbeth’s castle at Dunsinane, and Macbeth is preparing for a battle that will determine the fate of his kingdom. Speaking to his troops, he says
***Hang out our banners on the outward walls.
The cry is still “They come!” Our castle’s strength
Will laugh a siege to scorn. ***
From all of us at *FIRST *HQ, good luck to you as you get ready to bag your robot, and hopefully when you get to your competitions you too can look forward to ‘laughing a siege to scorn’!
Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more;
Or close the wall up with our robot dead.
In peace there’s nothing so becomes an engineer
As modest stillness and humility:
But when the blast of war blows in our ears,
Then imitate the action of the tiger;
Stiffen the chains, summon up the volts,
Disguise fair nature with hard-favour’d rage;
Then lend the camera a terrible aspect;
Let pry through the portage of the head
Like the brass cannon; let the brow o’erwhelm it
As fearfully as doth a galled boulder
O’erhang and jutty his confounded base,
Swill’d with the wild and wasteful ocean.
Now set the wheels and stretch the intake wide,
Hold hard the bar and bend up every spirit
To his full height. On, on, you noblest engineers.
Whose blood is fet from fathers of war-proof!
Fathers that, like so many inventors,
Have in these parts from morn till even fought
And sheathed their wrenches for lack of argument:
Dishonour not your mothers; now attest
That those whom you call’d fathers did beget you.
Be copy now to engineers of grosser blood,
And teach them how to war. And you, good yeoman,
Whose limbs were made in Michigan, show us here
The metal of your shop; let us swear
That you are worth your training; which I doubt not;
For there is none of you so mean and base,
That hath not noble lustre in your eyes.
I see you stand like bulldogs in the slips,
Straining upon the start. The game’s afoot:
Follow your spirit, and upon this charge
Cry ‘For Woody Flowers, Dean Kamen, and 3539!’
-Henry V, Shakespeare (with some small contextual tweaks)