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He typically saved the stirring rhetoric for the last few paragraphs of a chapter, in the form of mini St. Crispin's Day speeches, fanfare for his noble, pragmatic mission:

Just before the Battle of Stirling, where his men are hopelessly outnumbered against the British, Wallace rouses his troops with a speech that plays like a Classics Illustrated version of the St. Crispin’s Day speech from Shakespeare’s “Henry V.”

He developed a photographic memory, reciting playbooks and other monologues, including William Shakespeare’s St. Crispin’s Day Speech and Al Pacino’s team address in “Any Given Sunday.”

Henry V’s St. Crispin’s Day speech is perhaps one of the most famous monologues in all of Shakespeare, in which the titular king rouses his unlikely force to eventually triumph over a superior enemy.

Kennedy was aware of the parallels — that, like the soldiers on St. Crispin’s Day, he and his fellow actors were going into the performance aware of “the possibility that this could be the last time that we ever do this.”