All the devils are here: The Beast from the Earth helps the Beast from the Sea

 

 

 

 

As high

As his proud head is rais'd towards the sky,

So low tow'rds hell his roots descend.

 

-- John Denham  

O what a goodly outside falsehood hath!

George C. Scott as Shylock, Bob Lerner, 1962

  Mark you this, Bassanio,

The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose!
An evil soul producing holy witness
Is like a villain with a smiling cheek,
A goodly apple rotten at the heart.
O, what a goodly outside falsehood hath!

-- William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice, Act 1, Scene 3 

What say the augurs?

They would not have you stir forth to-day:

Plucking the entrails of an offering forth,

They could not find a heart within the beast.

 

-- William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, Act 2, Scene 2 

 

The Sure Physician

 One that's sick o' th' gout, had rather

Groan so in perplexity, than be cur'd

By the sure physician death.

 

-- William Shakespeare, Cymbeline, Act 5, Scene 4 

The welfare of us all

 The welfare of us all

Hangs on the cutting short that fraudful man.

 

-- William Shakespeare, Henry VI Part 2, Act 3, Scene 1  

Such men as he never be at heart's ease, whilst they behold a greater than themselves

 

Trump Posts New AI Image of Himself Embracing Jesus

D. Stableford, Yahoo News 

 

 

Slaves bury the dead

 

 Henry is dead, and never shall revive:

Upon a wooden coffin we attend,

And death's dishonourable victory

We with our stately presence glorify,

Like captives bound to a triumphant car.

 

-- William Shakespeare, Henry VI, Part 1, Act 1, scene 1  

But we had hoped that he was the one to redeem Israel

 True hope is swift, and flies with swallows wings;

Kings it makes gods, and meaner creatures kings.

 

-- William Shakespeare, Richard III, Act 5 Scene 2 

Let your Yeas be homely russet and your Nays be kersey coarse

 

 Taffata phrases, silken terms precise,

I do forswear them; and I here protest,

Henceforth my wooing mind shall be exprest

In russet yeas, and honest kersey noes.

 

-- William Shakespeare, Loves Labors Lost, Act 5 Scene 2 

Whence the empty suit

 

 

  There can be no kernel in this light nut; the soul of this man is his clothes.

-- William Shakespeare, All's Well That Ends Well, Act 2 Scene 5 

The saddest thing I did all year was bury my constant companion of fifteen years on Christmas Eve

 

 No mournful bell shall ring her burial.

-- William Shakespeare 

Bogged down in the quagmire of tarnation

The Frenchman Gustave Dore's illustrations of Dante's Inferno date to 1857, in one of which he shows damned traitors in the ninth circle of hell, frozen in the mythological river Cocytus around Hades, imagined rather as a lake shallow enough for his scene, and reminiscent of a bog, what the English in the mid-18th century called a tarn. 

Tollund Man is a famous example of a bog body, dating from ~400 BC, found well-preserved in a Danish peat bog in 1950. He died by hanging, as did a number of the many bog bodies which have been discovered in Northern Europe, found as they were with the nooses still around their necks. Some of these bodies also show other signs of violence.

You might say something rotten was found in Denmark. 

Bogs, swamps, and marshes have also been associated for centuries with ghosts, fairies, and spirits of one kind or another, perhaps on the strength of the misinterpretation of the natural phenomenon of the occasional ghost light seen at night in bogs. The elusive lights are due to ignition of gases from the decay of organic matter. The ghost light is known as the ignis fatuus or foolish flame, among many other names used for the phenomenon around the world.    

The word tarnation is first used in literature as far as we know from the pen of the Bostonian Royall Tyler in his 1787 play The Contrast. Etymologists plausibly style its origin merely as a North American euphemism for damnation and do not associate it with tarns. 

Perhaps it's more complicated, and more simple, than that. 

I said in my ecstasy: Every man is a liar

Hell is empty, and all the devils are here.

KJV Psalm 116.11:  I said in my haste, All men are liars.  

RSV Psalm 116.11:  I said in my consternation, "Men are all a vain hope."

LXX Psalm 115.2:   ἐγὼ εἶπα ἐν τῇ ἐκστάσει μου πᾶς ἄνθρωπος ψεύστης

'Tis better to be lowly born . . .

I would rather be a poor beggar's wife and be sure of heaven, than queen of all the world . . ..

 

Verily, I swear, ’tis better to be lowly born
And range with humble livers in content
Than to be perked up in a glist’ring grief
And wear a golden sorrow.

 

-- Anne Boleyn of Catherine, in William Shakespeare, Henry VIII, Act 2, scene 3

Beware of sadness

 

 Such a wantwit sadness makes of me,

That I have much ado to know myself.

 

-- William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice, Act I, Scene 1

Look thou be true

 

 Look thou be true: do not give dalliance

Too much the rein; the strongest oaths are straw

To th' fire i' th' blood.

 

-- William Shakespeare, The Tempest, Act IV, Scene 1

She dallies with the wind, and scorns the sun

 

 She her airie buildeth in the cedar's top,

And dallies with the wind, and scorns the sun.

 

-- William Shakespeare, Richard III, Act I, Scene 3 (the reading is Samuel Johnson's)

Trump betrays Ukraine, the breadbasket of Europe

 Thou hast slain

The flower of Europe for his chivalry,

And treacherously hast thou vanquish'd him.

 

-- William Shakespeare, Henry VI Part 3, Act 2, Scene 1

Bob's your uncle

 Tut, tut! grace me no grace, nor uncle me no uncle.

-- William Shakespeare, Richard II, Act 2, Scene 3

All's fair in love and war again

 

 Against such lewdsters, and their lechery,

Those that betray them do no treachery.     

 

-- William Shakespeare, The Merry Wives of Windsor, Act 5, Scene 3