How can you say to me, I am a king?

           

            How can you say to me, I am a king?



Harry and Meghan are having a wonderfully human experience as they debate their future.

Immersing the Royals in the world has some dangerous implications. And there are some distressing practical elements too. Coding logs on the Sussex Royal website show that work on their new online presence began in September.

In December, Harry and Meghan trademarked the “Sussex Royal” brand, including 100 items ranging from notepads and socks to counseling services. The Sussexes will most likely be a “luxury brand”, on the levels of Louis Vuitton and Burberry, but they will have to carefully balance their personal lives from a PR respective to maintain that. Andy Barr, retail expert at price tracker website Alertr.co.uk, told Sky News the Sussexes have the potential to “dwarf” the earnings of Prince Charles, whose Duchy brand makes an estimated £100m to £200m a year.

A possible early indicator, the Duchess of Sussex has reportedly signed a voiceover deal with Disney in exchange for a donation to a wildlife charity, according to multiple reports.

Ah, commerce. Maybe it's the Yankee in her. I foresee a partnership--economic and perhaps political-- with Oprah (and maybe the Clooneys.)

Well, let's go back to the more elevated concerns of man."The Crown" has a great moment where the mediocre Charles, fresh from his eye-opening experience in Wales preparing for his investiture as Prince of Wales, returns to Cambridge where he plays Richard the Second in the school play. These are the lines he recites, as King Richard cedes political control of England to the rebellious Henry Bolingbroke:


1 Let's talk of graves, of worms, and epitaphs.

2 Make dust our paper and with rainy eyes

3 Write sorrow on the bosom of the earth.

4 Let's choose executors and talk of wills.

5 And yet not so, for what can we bequeath

6 Save our deposed bodies to the ground?

7 Our lands, our lives, and all are Bolingbroke's,

8 And nothing can we call our own but Death

9 And that small model of the barren earth

10 Which serves as paste to cover our bones.

11 For heaven's sake, let us sit upon the ground

12 And tell sad stories of the death of kings,

13 How some have been deposed, some slain in war,

14 Some haunted by the ghosts they have deposed,

15 Some poisoned by their wives, some sleeping killed,

16 All murdered. For within the hollow crown

17 That rounds the mortal temples of a king

18 Keeps Death his court, and there the antic sits,

19 Scoffing his state and grinning at his pomp,

20 Allowing him a breath, a little scene

21 To monarchize, be feared, and kill with looks,

22 Infusing him with self and vain conceit,

23 As if this flesh which walls about our life

24 Were brass impregnable. And humored thus,

25 Comes at the last, and with a little pin

26 Bores through his castle walls, and farewell king.

27 Cover your heads, and mock not flesh and blood

28 With solemn reverence. Throw away respect,

29 Tradition, form, and ceremonious duty,

30  For you have mistook me all this while:

31 I live with bread like you, feel want,

32 Taste grief, need friends. Subjected thus,

33 How can you say to me, I am a king?

Several "Game of Thrones"

A problem has arisen in Game of Thrones, the HBO series that somehow has reached cult status against the current of previous such fantastic stories. Generally it has survived the transition from book to screen; the characters and drama remain complex and true to the book but the subtlety of the written word is beginning to show.

Many of the characters in the book exhibit that unlikely thought process of thinking in the moment, without any hint of previous events or responsibilities, future plans or aspirations. So schemers do explain themselves in the present but never indict themselves in the past or for the future. That time isolation can give a very good insight into character without revealing plot too much. So we know what characters are doing but are never sure why, never sure of their loyalties or their ambitions.

This is difficult in cinema without soliloquies. The series has chosen to add some scenes to demonstrate personality that otherwise would have been revealed in written interior dialogue. So Littlefinger's opaque character becomes more transparent in a truly ugly brothel scene. Greyjoy's fragile adolescent character gradually comes apart in a newly created mistaken identity scene with his sister that explodes with his father. Cersei has a visual moment of maternal terror when Joffry threatens her after being slapped.

The danger in the rewrite is in trying to keep up with the book's considerable drama. The audience could understand the Littlefinger scene, perhaps even sympathize with the motives of its creation but... it was too much. The Greyjoy horseback scene was worse because it was unnecessary; the two do fine in the chance encounter in the book where the sister reveals herself to be a confident, cynical, dangerous woman. I must admit the Cersei scene was spot on.

But one gets the feeling that the screenwriters are not just gilding the lily, they are repeating it. If the incest of the Lannisters works, duplicate it in the Greyjoys. If egocentric, cold, dispassionate sex is the norm--the only young people in love are Daenerys and her savage--then do it in spades with Littlefinger. What's been added on looks like a hybrid of what has worked before and this story is so good it doesn't need it. Worse, it looks like an effort to stick to a formula.

As everyone learns in chess, it's hard to play another's game.