Mojo, The Bard, & Me

 

Today’s Totally Random Lines

 

Rivers and Dorset, you were standers by,-

And so wast thou, Lord Hastings,- when my son

Was stabb’d with bloody daggers: God, I pray Him,

That none of you may live his natural age,

But by some unlookt accident cut off!

 

Margaret

Richard the Third       Act I, Scene iii, Line 215

 

So, yesterday we had Henry VI receiving his new bride, Margaret. Today we have moved on several years and we have that very same Margaret giving us Today’s Line. In the ensuing years Margaret’s husband and son have both been killed by the Yorks who have taken over Henry's throne. Now Margaret is just a former queen and, in fact has been banished.

Apparently she hasn’t left for her banishment yet, because she is here in this scene cursing all the Yorks and York followers for their part in deposing her husband. She saves her best curses for Richard, who is brother to the current York king, Edward IV. It comes after Today's Lines. I won’t give you that whole tirade, but here’s the end of her curses for Richard.

Thou elvish-markt, abortive, rooting hog!

Thou that wast seal’d in thy nativity

Thou slave of nature and the son of hell!

Thou slander of thy mother’s heavy womb!

Thou loathed issue of thy father’s loins!

Thou rag of honor! Thou detested-

And then Richard cuts her off before she can finish. Do you get feeling that she doesn’t like Richard very much? I do.

Shakespeare really paints Richard as the creepy villain, worthy of Margaret’s curses, but Richard was certainly not alone fighting to have the Yorks take power away from the Lancasters and Margaret’s husband.

Anyway, I’ve got a few comments about this.

First, take a look at the first line of Margaret’s curse:

Thou elvish-markt. I’m not sure if she’s calling Richard elvish-markt because he looks like an elf - smallish and somewhat ill formed -, or if it’s because he’s been marked by the elves – meaning that the elves marked him as evil. Either way, my concern is with the word elvish. It’s common knowledge that Will coined many terms and phrases and literally created many words, but did you know that there was a twentieth century writer who took this word, elvish, and changed it, in all of his works, to the now accepted elfin. Yes, JRR Tolkien took elfin, which was considered irregular and substandard, and made it the standard in his works when speaking about anything that applied to the Middle Earth’s elves. Interesting, eh?

The second thing I wanted to mention about Margaret’s rant is how eerily familiar her feelings are to my own feelings (and, to be sure, many people’s feelings) about the current occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. I bring this up because I was, coincidentally, journaling this morning about the fact that today’s upsetting political climate is due not to policies, as it might have been in the past, but rather to the existence of one person whose very nature is, to say the very least, questionable, and to say the most, reprehensible. It/he is very different from Shakespeare’s Richard, but similarly reprehensible, nonetheless. In the past, politics would bother me in the sense of what actions, or laws, or tax legislation was happening and how they would affect me, but today, now, I worry about everything because of what government in the USA has become, or perhaps what it isn’t anymore. It has become an entity wholly subservient to the whims of a six-year-old: a very precocious, and very dangerous six-year-old. And it’s very troublesome that this six-year-old has the moral compass, or lack thereof, of Shakespeare’s Richard. One can only wonder where and when today’s Richard will find his Bosworth Field; and, most worryingly, how much damage he will do before he finds it. 

I do my best to keep these comments out of my posts, and I meditate to try to keep these thoughts from killing me. There are times, though, that I just can’t be silent about this.

Sorry.  

No need to apologize, Mr. Blagys. I feel your pain. So many of us do.