Today’s Totally Random
Lines
England hath long been mad and scarr’d herself;
The brother blindly shed the brother’s
blood,
The father rashly slaughter’d his own son,
The son, compell’d, been butcher to the
sire:
All this divided York and Lancaster,
Divided in their dire division,
O, now let Richmond and Elizabeth,
The true succeeders of each royal house,
By God’s fair ordinance conjoin together!
Earl of
Richmond (later Henry VII)
King Richard the Third Act V, Scene v, Line 27
This is the
last speech of the play, which is the last play in the series that covered the
Wars of the Roses. The Earl of Richmond has just won the battle of Bosworth Field in which
Richard the Third was killed. So the wars, which started with the overthrow of
Richard II, end with the Death of Richard III. In between the two Richards, a bunch of
other Henry’s and a few Edwards get to oversee the turmoil that the Earl is
talking about in Today’s Lines: fathers slaughtering sons and sons butchering
sires.
Boy, I can’t help it but this stuff, like so much else of Will’s material, keeps reminding me of today’s world: more specifically our divided country. And don’t try to tell me it’s not divided. Where is our Earl of Richmond. I’m not really seeing him/her anywhere.
Do you want to know where we can find him/her? We can find them in someone
who’s willing to embrace a member of the other party as their running mate. Mitt
Romney and Pete Buttigieg. Gavin Newsom and Liz Cheney. It’s going to take
something bold like that to make it work. Otherwise it’s going to continue to
be more of the same.
What’s that? It’s
time to pull up? Okay, you’re right. I’ll pull up.
Ahhh, to be as carefree as my little friend here.
‘Tis a consummation devoutly to be wished.
Wait,
that’s Hamlet, not Richard the Third. Sorry.
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