But instead it invites us, in effect, to watch the invention of political parties and the transformation of aristocratic rivals into political enemies. Shakespeare does not envisage these exactly in our terms: there was nothing in the parliamentary system of his time that corresponded to the partisan organizational structures that subsequently developed in England and elsewhere. What he shows is nonetheless oddly familiar. The roses serve as party badges; they designate two opposed sides. With a weird immediacy, the legal argument (whatever it was) gives way to blind adherence to the white or
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