Saturday, September 13, 2025

 

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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