Mojo, The Bard, & Me

No, they cannot touch me for coining. I am the King himself.

-Lear

King Lear             Act IV, scene vi Line 83

Lear! Yah, there’s a bunch of Shakespeare gurus out there who think this is Will’s masterpiece. Better than Hamlet and all the rest. Is it? I dunno. It’s a good one, no doubt about that.

It’s the story of a King who’s getting on in years who decides to divide up his kingdom among his three daughters while he’s still alive. Only problem is that two of those daughters turn out to be, well not very nice, and things don’t go too well for him (actually, things don’t go too well for just about anyone in the story). At this point in the play Lear has been driven out of house and home and he’s gone a bit mad. Gloucester and his son Edgar are out wandering on the heath (they’ve just concluded a scene where Edgar helps his blind father think that he’s jumped off a cliff) when they run into Lear. The stage direction says ‘Enter Lear fantastically dressed with wild flowers.’ If I’m not mistaken, Ian McKellen took that ‘fantastically’ part to heart and did this scene in the nude a few years ago, which I’m kind of glad I missed. No offense Ian, but well…

Anyway, Today’s Totally Random Daily Shakespeare line is the first thing that Lear says when he shows up in the scene. And it’s not supposed to make all that much sense. Considering that coining means minting coins, or perhaps counterfeiting, the meaning is pretty straight forward. Not that it makes much sense for him to be saying it, but it’s not supposed to. He follows it up with a bunch of disjointed phrases about all sorts of unrelated stuff.

Now we can go into an in depth analysis of this line and the few that follow it to figure out all the symbolism and whatnot that Will put in here. And trust me, there’s plenty in here and it’s been plenty analyzed in the past four hundred years (and don’t let me stop you if that’s what you want to do; go at it and let me know what you come up with). But, to quote John Blutarsky, that could take years and cost millions of lives. And I’m not prepared to pay that price this morning. So let’s just say this might be a perfect line for you to use when you want to throw something out there that’s completely non-sequitur. Now this may sound a little silly to a lot of you, and I imagine there are those of you who never do that, but I find it can be helpful for a number of different occasions. Maybe you’re having an argument that’s just about to degenerate into an all-out fight and you want to derail it before it gets there. Just throw this out there; ‘NO, they cannot touch me for coining. I am the King himself!’ They’re gonna look at you like you’re a bit daft, but that’s the whole point. I don’t suggest taking your clothes off like Ian did. But what have you got to lose? Maybe it works, maybe it doesn’t. Either way you get to use a line from Shakespeare’s King Lear! So what's better than that?