Today’s Totally Random
Lines
Heat not a furnace for your foe so hot
That it do singe yourself: we may outrun
By violent swiftness, that which we run at,
And lose by over-running.
Duke of Norfolk
King Henry the Eighth Act I, Scene i, Line 142
We’re at the
very beginning of the play. The Duke of Buckingham has been railing to the Duke
of Norfolk about Cardinal Wolsey, going on and on about what a lowlife the cardinal
is and that he, Buckingham, is going to go to the king and take down the
cardinal. In Today’s Lines Norfolk is warning Buckingham to be careful, because
the cardinal is devious and powerful.
It turns out
that Norfolk’s warning is prescient. By the end of the scene the king, based on
Wolsey’s doing, is having Buckingham sent to the Tower. Nobody wants to be sent
to the Tower.
Apparently Wolsey has paid off one of Buckingham’s people to bear false witness against Buckingham and his goose is cooked. Here’s Buckingham with the last words of the scene.
My surveyor is false; the o’er-great cardinal
Hath show’d
him gold; my life is spanned already:
I am the
shadow of poor Buckingham,
Whose figure
even this instant cloud puts on,
By darkening
my clear sun. – My lord, farewell.
It sucks to be Buckingham.
Yes, Mojo, that’s politics. It was politics back in 1630 and it’s politics in 2025. Some things never change.
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