Smalus

Well, here I am again, at it again, posting from me to me. I guess talking to yourself online is the first sign of fashionable madness.

Anyway, me, I thought you might want to consider the following piece of prophecy, culled from a four hundred year-old text:

“from Libya, where the warlike Smalus…. is feared and loved”

Warlike Smalus? Feared and loved? Libya? Surely this Smalus is the very image and portend of Gaddafi, swimming into the ken of a seer centuries ago?

And can it be any coincidence that I came across this piece of text now, just as the good Colonel tumbles off the wagon (or should that be oil tanker) into slaughter, international pariah-hood and a rain of Western bombs? It must be clairvoyance, providence, any damned –nce except coincidence.

But it wasn’t Nostradamus, as you might have thought.  Nope. Of course, had this been one of Nostradamus’s writings, its Google-hits might currently be exploding into the millions. But these are the words of a poet, not a prognosticator: they’re from The Winter’s Tale.  And wherever Shakespeare’s inspiration came from (wouldn’t we all like to know), I doubt any was from a scrying pool.

The only crystal ball here is the Bard’s brain, tuned unerringly as it was to human nature. It seems that Shakespeare has something to tell me about the inane titillations of superstition, even when he wasn’t trying to.