jm
>>> "Charles Brown" <CharlesB at CNCL.ci.detroit.mi.us> 01/07/00 11:45AM >>>
I agree with Nathan. First, we kill all the lawyers , except Fidel.
>>> [not sure i have this recollected aright, do my initials go next?...] >>>
jm - focused on the rest of your second sentence, going back to Henry VI Part II Act IV, scene ii was *exactly* where of all the things in the world that might be worth paying attention to in this thread, it was most useful to suggest. thanks.
its 1450, we're on the big open hill just south of London where today as in the past (last time seventy years ago), the peasants of Kent when oppressed beyond their capacity to ignore by the great and their government gather armed (its the end of the hundred years war - Joan of Arc and all that - and many english soldiers who had expected to spend the season on work vacation in France are unexpectedly and unpaid suddenly home) -in full sight and sound both of the people of London and of the great and their government. Jack Cade, spokesperson so to speak for this gathering, is setting out their collective program:
>>>
WS*
CADE I thank you, good people: there shall be no money; all shall eat and drink on my score; and I will ap- parel them all in one livery, that they may agree like brothers, and worship me their lord.
DICK The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers.
CADE Nay, that I mean to do, Is not this a lamentable thing, that of the skin of an innocent lamb should be made parchment? that parchment, being scribbled o'er, should undo a man? Some say the bee stings: but I say,'tis the bees's wax; for I did but seal once to a thing, and I was never mine own man since.
*William Aldis Wright (1831-1913), editor of the Cambridge Shakespeare -
and lifelong batchelor of whom it can be confidently asserted that he
sucked - if the notes to this old edition are indeed his, followed in part
Malone who had argued that Greene and Peele wrote the play & Shakespeare
revised. Wright thought that the "recasting of the plays was done by
Shakespeare, perhaps with Marlowe's [ who beyond question sucked ] help" in
1591-2.
>>>
jm - act IV presents the uprising of 1450 as a sort of "Khmer Rouge do Cambodia" and that a serious threat to the lawyers as an organized group (not to the priests - this is 1591-2) is equivalent to peasants gone insane killing anyone who knows how to read or write. this argument is still effective today. what follows the above-quoted section of act IV scene ii is this:
>>>
WS/CM
enter some, bringing forward the Clerk of Chatham ...
CADE ............... Dost thou use to write thy name? or hast thou a mark to thyself, like an honest plain- dealing man?
CLERK Sir, I thank God, I have been so well brought up that I can write my name.
ALL He hath confessed: away with him! he's a villain and a traitor.
CADE
Away with him I say! ... etc etc
>>>
jm - anyhow, thanks Charles! I enjoyed the diversion you suggested. For me it fit well. Where I am focused in my reading now is - in part - on the early modern role (mainly Tudor) of the lawyers in England & therefore in the origins of capitalism itself insofar as the Brenner thesis is the case, and certainly in the origin of the ideology of law/community of lawyers/judges as somehow outside or prior to politics, society and history that is dominant in the US.
But also as a gay man, it was useful to be reminded of Marlowe ("only a fool doesn't like boys and tobacco") who more likely than not was killed because he was open about the fact that he liked to suck. Do lawyers suck? Many more than those few who are open about it. But then again there weren't any open about it not so long ago. (the first meeting of the gay caucus of the National Lawyers Guild was called by Rene Hanover at the Boulder August 1971 Convention by posting a handwritten notice in the lobby of the U of Colorado building we were using - but only two longhairs answered the call, myself and a cute guy with a guitar who wasn't a law student or a lawyer or even attending the convention. we formulated an excellent resolution signed by Rene and myself that, as I recall, was passed without opposition). The National Lawyers Guild remains one of the most useful organizational remnants of the political energy channeled by the CPUSA in the late 30s and early 40s. And good lawyers they are, some of whom - both male and female - like to suck and some of whom don't care to. Their loss.
john mage