Mojo, The Bard, & Me

By my troth, this is the old fashion; you two never meet but you fall to some discord:

Hostess

King Henry The Fourth Part II            Act II, Scene iv   Line 55

Through brazen trumpet send the breath of parley

Into his ruin’d ears, and thus deliver:

Henry Bolingbroke

King Richard The Second               Act III, Scene iii Line 33

We have the last two day’s Totally Random lines here and they are similar in theme. Let's face it, even if they weren't I'd find a way to tell you that they were. But they are because they're both talking about the inability of two people to come to terms. The first one states this right out, and the second one implies it.

Yesterday’s line comes from Henry the Fourth Part II. And just to be perfectly clear, Henry IV is Henry Bolingbroke, the guy talking about Richard’s ruin’d ear in the second line. But it’s not Henry being referred to in the first line. This ‘By my troth’ line is the Hostess talking to and about Doll Tearsheet and Falstaff. And the fight between Falstaff and Doll is one that’s very much out in the open, but also very much a lot of bluster as opposed to substance.

Substance, however, is what the second line is all about. Deliver what? What is Bolingbroke (soon to be Henry IV) talking about by sending the ‘breath of parley’ into Richard’s ‘ruin’d ears’. Should I have included exactly what he wanted delivered in today’s line? Perhaps. So I’ll tell you what he said, but here’s the thing; the tone and words of the message he gives Northumberland to give to Richard are completely different than the tone and message he uses above. He talks about ‘brazen trumpet’ and ‘ruin’d ears’. You can tell that he’s not thinking too highly of Richard. Anyway, the message he wants delivered is that he, Bolingbroke, pledges allegiance to King Richard and all he wants is his land and inheritance back; the stuff Richard stole after he banished Bolingbroke. Of course the bottom line is that Bolingbroke is going for broke here (pun intended). He plans to take the throne from Richard and just about everyone, including Richard, knows that. This line is in the very scene after the one that ended with Richard’s ‘From Richard’s night to Bolingbroke’s fair day’.

So there you go. Two lines about two pairs of people trying, or maybe not trying, to get along. For the record, Falstaff and Doll will get along. Henry and Richard? Not so much.

Since today's theme is trying, or not being able, to get along, here's a pic from a few years back of me at Gettysburg. This is one of the monuments at that battlefield (there's lots of monument's there!), and it seems a little funny to me that we erect monuments on the battlefields of a war that was all about two sides of one country not being able to get along. Now it's a pretty cool monument, especially seeing that it's a huge statue of a book, but maybe if we made big deals out of the ways we were able to get along, our country would be just a little better off today. By my troth, I'm just sayin'.