This is the strangers’ case,                                   

And this your mountainish inhumanity.

-Thomas More

                               

Sir Thomas More                                          Act II

Today, for the first time, we are not going to be looking at a random line. And it’s for a few reasons. First, Sir Thomas More is a play that is not included in the compilation that I pick my Totally Random lines from, and so it would be impossible to pick this line. But more importantly, it’s a great line that I’ve been meaning to blog on, and further, it’s a line that has an incredible amount of relevance to what’s going on today.

Sir Thomas More is a play that is believed to be written by several playwrights, William Shakespeare included. The scene that this line is take from is the scene believed to be written by Will. It’s a scene where Thomas More is brought in to speak to the town folk of London who are on the verge of a riot. They are rioting because they’re mad at the foreigners who they believe are stealing their jobs. Thomas More goes into a long speech, but instead of explaining it further to you, I’ll give you this link and Sir Ian will explain and then give you the speech.  I hope you will take the time to look at it and I hope you will appreciate the relevance.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AjEAeOshUGQ

This is a picture, circa 1940, of my great-grandparents and their five grandchildren. The big kid sitting between his grandparents is my dad. This old couple here came over from Lithuania when they were young, sometime around 1900. My great-grandparents came to America in search of a better life. We’ve been told that if he had stayed in Lithuania great-granddad would have stood a good chance of being conscripted into the Russian army. So he fled to what he hoped would be a better place. John and Theodora came through Ellis Island separately, legally, and eventually became citizens.

So that all of us in my family are children, removed by one or more generations, of immigrants. Yes, the two pictured above came legally, but only because they could. If they had to do it illegally there is no doubt in my mind that they would have. After all, they were looking for a chance to have a better life for themselves and their children. This is a universal goal that’s as old as mankind, and This is the strangers’ case.

Now, when the lords and barons of the realm

Perceived Northumberland did lean to him,

The more and less came in with cap and knee;

Met him in boroughs, cities, villages,

Attended him on the bridges, stood in the lanes,

Laid gifts before him, proffer’d him their oaths,

Gave him their heirs as pages, follow’d him

Even at the heels in golden multitudes.

-Hotspur

                                   

King Henry The Fourth Part I       Act IV, Scene iii, Line 67

The speaker, Hotspur, is leading the revolt against Henry and in this passage is talking to Henry’s emissary who has come to try to hammer out a peace with Hotspur. Young Hotspur is pointing out that he and his father, Northumberland, were key in helping Henry gain the throne from Richard II. The ‘him’ in the second line refers to Henry.

So, that’s quite a bit of enough context. What I’d like to briefly discuss is the phrase ‘cap and knee’. I’ve not seen this phrase before, and based on the context I assumed it meant cap in hand and knee bent. That is to say, showing subservience to. I looked it up in my Shakespeare glossary and it said ‘sycophant, flattering, obsequious’. So, yeah, what I said. And I like this phrase. I might even try adopting it. There might be a fair amount of use for it in discussing Orange man’s entourage.

I decided to google it to see if there was any current usage of this nature for the phrase. But when I googled ‘cap and knee’ can you guess what I got? A whole lot of stuff about kneecaps and the various knee replacement surgeries. So it looks like it’s going to take a bit of work to bring ‘cap and knee’ in the meaning of ‘sycophant’ back into the vernacular. Still, I’m up to the task.

                                          Cap in Hand

I think that I was able to understand what 'cap and knee' meant because I was so familiar with the phrase 'cap in hand' (which, by the way and unlike 'cap and knee', is still in modern usage). And I'm very familiar with that phrase because it is the title of a song which you can listen to by clicking on the title above. Enjoy.

Out treacherous villain!

Thou call’st on him that hates thee: It was he 

That made the overture of thy treason to us:

Who is too good to pity thee.

-Regan

                                   

King Lear                              Act III, Scene vii, Line 90

This is the scene where they gouge out poor Gloster’s eyes. And this is the part of the scene where, with his eyes now useless, Gloster ‘sees’ for the first time that his son Edmund is the traitor and his son Edgar is the betrayed. It's part of that 'seeing' theme that Will uses in this play. 

The line that’s spoken before today’s Totally Random line is where Gloster is calling for help from Edmund, who’s not there. Regan’s answer is today’s line. Gloster then answers that with his realization that Edgar is the good son, and Regan responds with one of my all-time favorite lines:

Go thrust him out at gates, and let him smell

His way to Dover.

Let him smell his way to Dover!

And that, my friends, just about sums up Regan.

This is a pic from my hotel room looking out on the Hoth. This is Plymouth, on the southwest coast of England. It's the closest I could come to a pic of Dover, which is on the southeast coast of England. No, I didn't smell my way there; I took a plane and a train.

And in this kind hath our Cleon

One daughter, and a wench full grown,

Even ripe for marriage-rite; this maid

Hight Philoten: and it is said

For certain in our story, she

Would ever with Marina be:

-Gower as Chorus

                                   

Pericles, Prince of Tyre                Act IV, Prologue, Line 18

Well, you kind of need to read the prologue as a whole, so I’ll give you the link:

http://absoluteshakespeare.com/plays/pericles/act4_prologue.htm

What it’s mostly talking about is the fact that Marina is living in Tharsus under the benevolence of the governor, Cleon. Apparently Marina is just about perfect and she’s making Cleon’s daughter, Philoten, look bad in comparison, and so Cleon’s wife, Dionyza, is going to have Marina eliminated. BTW, ‘Hight Philoten’ simply means ‘is called Philoten’.

Today’s Totally Random line is the introduction of Philoten into the plot. Interestingly enough, whilst Philoten represents a significant piece of the plot in this play, she never actually shows up on stage. What do you think about that? But wait, let’s think about this: Gower says that Philoten ‘for certain in our story...would ever with Marina be.’ But what’s up with that if Philoten never actually shows up on stage? So all the time from here on in that we see Marina there is never Philoten with here. Is Gower saying something that’s figurative as opposed to literal? Does Philoten actually exist, or does she just stand for some characteristic of Marina? Lots of questions. Who has the answer? Harold?

Okay, I know you're asking 'what the heck is the connection to this pic?' Well, believe it or not, there's a good answer. This is my box of old baseball cards. But unfortunately it only goes back to the early 80's (because it's actually the cards that my daughters had). And since it only goes back to the 80's we all know what New York Met we don't have a baseball card of: Cleon Jones! Clearly a different Cleon than the one mentioned in today's line, but a Clean nonetheless.

These letters give, Iago, to the pilot;

-Othello

                                   

Othello                                      Act III, Scene ii, Line 1

Iago, give these letters to the pilot. That would be the more common way that we would arrange the words in this sentence. It seems to work either way just as well as the other in terms of the iambic flow (though in either case the second syllable of ‘pilot’ seems to be an extra). So I don’t think Will rearranged it for meter. I guess it’s possible that’s just the more common arrangement for the way they talked back then. Or perhaps he just liked that flow of words as sounding better. Or, perhaps he was trying to accentuate the letters by putting them first. Whatever the reason, it is for sure that Will uses a lot of word order in his sentences that is very different from what we are used to seeing and hearing. And this is one of the reasons that his works are viewed by some as being hard to understand. But I don’t know why he’s using this word order here. I’m not even sure what these letters are that Othello is talking about, or for that matter, what purpose this very short scene is serving.

Here you go, the answer to the question from the blog post of Oct 19. If you recall, or even if you don't recall, on that date I posted a completely irrelevant picture to see if you could recognize it. Well here it is. It's Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris. See that steeple in the middle of the roof? Well that picture from October 19 is a closeup of that steeple. That picture was taken from the south bell tower that you see in this picture of Notre Dame which was taken from across the river. So, Notre Dame Cathedral of Paris the answer is to the question, Yoda.