Mojo, The Bard, & Me

                                           I must to  him too,
Before he go to bed. I'll take my leave.

-Sir Thomas Lovell

                                    

King Henry the Eighth                            Act V, scene i, Line 9

Sir Thomas Lovell. Do you suppose that he was an ancestor of James Lovell the astronaut? I suppose I'll never know. 
In any event, it's a fairly innocuous little line. Thomas has just found out that King Henry is still up so he's going to go see him before going to bed. I don't know what he needs to see him about. Whilst I'm familiar, to some extent, with the life of Henry VIII, I've not much familiarity with this play. It's the last play in my compilation, and certainly one of the last plays he wrote, if not the last. So this writing is at the end of the career of Will. Remember that Henry VIII is the father of Elizabeth I and that she was the queen when Will started  his writing career. By now she has passed on and James I is on the throne. Nonetheless, Will has to be a little more careful writing about Henry VIII than he did when writing about all those other monarchs who were a little bit more historic than current. 

This is page 242 of volume 16 of my Funk & Wagnalls New Encyclopedia. Now this is a 1980's edition (not sure of the exact year). So Jim Lovell should be here, but instead we skip from Loveland to Seth Low. No Jim Lovell, a guy who travelled to the moon twice (albeit never landing on it), and yet Seth Low? Who the heck is Seth Low?