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.