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Thursday
Tuesday night the Lakers’ Lebron James broke the most prestigious individual record in basketball, one that many thought would never be broken and, given how James keeps scoring baskets despite being 38, are pretty sure will never be broken again. With a fadeaway jumpshot against the Oklahoma Thunder, James surpassed Kareem Abdul Jabbar’s scoring record of 38,387.
Of James’s many nicknames, the one that seems to have stuck was bestowed upon him by his high school teammates: King James. While the name probably alludes to the King James version of the Bible rather than to the monarch who commissioned the translation, still I thought I’d have some fun by applying Shakespeare’s praise of Britain’s James I to our own King James.
In Henry VIII, probably co-written with John Fletcher, Shakespeare concludes by having a character predict two glorious monarchs. The first is Henry’s daughter Elizabeth, whose christening the king is at that moment attending. The second is James. Here’s the passage:
Nor shall this peace sleep with her: but as when
The bird of wonder dies, the maiden phoenix,
Her ashes new-create another heir,
As great in admiration as herself;
So shall she leave her blessedness to one,
When heaven shall call her from this cloud of darkness,
Who from the sacred ashes of her honour
Shall star-like rise, as great in fame as she was,
And so stand fix’d: peace, plenty, love, truth, terror,
That were the servants to this chosen infant.
Shall then be his, and like a vine grow to him:
Wherever the bright sun of heaven shall shine,
His honour and the greatness of his name
Shall be, and make new nations: he shall flourish,
And, like a mountain cedar, reach his branches
To all the plains about him: — our children’s children
Shall see this, and bless heaven.
Think of Lebron rising star-like, as great in fame as was the player he is replacing in the record books. “Wherever the bright sun of heaven shall shine,” —or basketball court lighting—“his honor and the greatness of his name shall be.” Given the player’s remarkable prowess, we can say, without exaggeration, that he has “flourish[ed] and, like a mountain cedar, [has] reach[ed] his branches to all the plains about him.” In later years, “our children’s children shall see this, and bless heaven.”
Shakespeare’s praise of King James appears elsewhere, although less explicitly. I’ve learned from reading James Shapiro’s 1606: William Shakespeare and the Year of Lear that there is a significant allusion to James in Macbeth. (1606 was also the year of Macbeth.) James, who had recently ascended to the throne, believed he was descended from Banquo, and Shakespeare reshaped the historical record to flatter him.
In Shakespeare’s version, Banquo is not Macbeth’s accomplice in the murder of Duncan, as Holinshed’s Chronicles report, but an innocent friend and later victim. According to Shapiro, the “show of eight kings” in Macbeth was inserted with James in mind:
In this dumb-show each of Banquo’s royal heirs appears. The eighth one carries a magical mirror that shows Macbeth many more of Banquo’s descendants…This show of kings culminates in James himself, the eighth Stuart King of Scotland…
The mirror, Shapiro speculates, was physically positioned in front of James, thereby avoiding “the delicate issue of impersonating a living prince on stage.”
So think of our own King James as descending from a noble lineage of scoring champions, with the last two being Wilt Chamberlain and Abdul-Jabbar. Against all probability, Denham Wood has moved upon the old scoring record and there’s a new king in town.