Mojo, The Bard, & Me

The taste whereof, God of his mercy give

You patience to endure, and true repentance

Of all your dear offences!

-King Henry

 

King Henry the Fifth       Act II, scene ii    Line 179

All right then, from Henry VI to Henry V. And it’s not such an outlandish thing to work backwards since Will wrote that way. That is to say, he wrote Henry VI first, and then went back and worked his way through Richard II, Henry IV, and Henry V which is in proper order. Anyway, some minor context here; the line previous to this is ‘Get you, therefore, hence,/ Poor miserable wretches, to your death:’ So that the ‘Taste’ being referred to in today’s Totally Random line is the taste of death. Ouch.

Not much needed to explain here. He’s sentenced these three guys (Lord Scroop, Earl of Cambridge, and Sir Thomas Grey) to death for being traitors to England. They don’t deny it. Today’s Totally Random line are Henry’s last words to these guys before they’re led away.

So this line is not that much unlike the line you hear in modern shows where the judge decrees the death sentence in a court and follows it up with ‘And may God have mercy on your soul,’ or some such thing. Now I’ve never been in a real court where a judge passed a death sentence (and I’m guessing most of you haven’t either) and hopefully I never will (and I’m guessing most of you are hoping so too), so I don’t know if the judge would really say this. But even if it’s only theater nowadays, doesn’t it bear a really strong resemblance to what they were saying (at least in the theater) four hundred years ago. Of course, there’s a good chance that these three guys were going to be put to death in a most hideous way, which is something they liked doing back then. So when the king talked about the ‘patience to endure’ he wasn’t kidding. And therein is the big difference between then and now. These days we go to the movies to see our blood and gore, and it’s all fake. Elizabethans weren’t seeing that at the theater, they were going to the public executions to see the real thing. So that’s something to think about. We’ve become more civilized in that we don’t torture people to death in public. And yet, we still seem to have the need to see this same thing, albeit simulated, at the movies. Curious, isn’t it?

And that’s about all I have to say about that.