Mojo, The Bard, & Me

--We do here pronounce,

Upon the part o’the people, in whose power

We were elected theirs, Marcius is worthy

Of present death.

-Junius Brutus

Coriolanus                          Act III, scene i    Line 210

Today’s is the fifth post on Coriolanus. And Coriolanus is the one play that I’ve read and seen for the first time in the past two months, or since I started doing this silly Totally Random post. So I’d say that the time spent on reading and watching that play was time well spent.  The first time we dealt with this play, just our third post back in August, we had some citizen complaining about Caius Marcius. And the last time we dealt with this play, a week and a half ago we had Marcius give us that fabulous Oh world, thy slippery turns line right before he was about to join the enemy. Well today’s line is the citizenry of Rome pronouncing sentence on Marcius which will end up getting commuted from death to banishment and lead to him being at the enemies door uttering his slippery turns line. And if you recall, the enemy accepts Marcius’s offer and he ends up doing a lot of damage to the Roman citizenry. They maybe should have given it some more thought before passing judgement on this guy.

So, what to say about this line? Junius Brutus, today’s speaker, was discussed briefly in one of our previous posts. He’s an elected representative of the people, but he’s not of the highest caliber. He was represented in the movie version that I saw as a sort of self-serving doofus. And now he’s doing his best to oust the guy who helped save Rome on the battlefield. And by ousting him he’s gonna just cause Rome that much more trouble. This Junius guy is basically pretty worthless. You know, like a lot of the folks we have today in Washington. My goodness, and you ask why we’re still studying Shakespeare! His stuff is just incredibly ageless!

This is a picture of my little guys re-enacting Marcius's banishment. That's Marcius on the far left and the doofus Junius Brutus in the blue hat, closest to Marcius. You can tell that the two guys behind Junius are already having second thoughts.