Friday, July 1, 2016

Seven Shakespeare Quotations To Get Us through the Election Year

Why seven? I hope it's a lucky number.

1. "All may be well, but if God sort it so, / 'Tis more than we deserve or I expect."

An anonymous citizen -- he's just called First Citizen -- says this in Richard III, just before malevolent Richard of Gloucester manipulates himself onto the throne. It's striking that Shakespeare would put this confession of personal responsibility for the shape of his country in the mouth of a fifteenth-century commoner, who would have had far less choice than the average American citizen over who governed him. This line has always interested me. An English Everyman suggests that if the highest