Mojo, The Bard, & Me

 

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.