Our new King concluded his address to the nation with words from Hamlet: “May flights of angels sing thee to thy rest,” an obvious reference to the great spiritual journey his mother has now begun back to her Creator.
Shakespeare’s historical plays are a study in the meaning of kingship. They lay bare in the clearest light the kingly virtues of some rulers, and the faults of others. Like Synesius of Cyrene (373 AD – 414 AD), a Greek bishop in Libya, who preached “On Kingship” before the Byzantine Emperor, Arcadius, Shakespeare believed that “a truly religious king is a grand sight.”
