The Reasons Behind it All

“Doctor Who: The City of Death.” By David Agnew (Pseudonym) [David Fisher, Douglas Adams and Graham Williams.] Perf. Tom Baker and Lalla Ward. Dir. Michael Hayes. Doctor Who. Season 17, episodes 5-8. BBC. 29 September-20 October 1979. DVD. BBC Warner, 2005.

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Some readers may find it a bit fluffy to be mentioning Shakespearean (Dis)Appearances* in old Cosby Show episodes or Star Trek-related films or, as is the case in the peripheral matter in this post, Doctor Who PORs**.

But, as this blog builds and grows,*** I hope that two of my intentions will be fulfilled.

First, I’d like to aim for completeness—a completeness that I’m unlikely ever to obtain because of the second intention.

Second, I’d like to show the absolute pervasiveness of Shakespeare in modern western pop and not-so-pop culture. I am likely only to show the tip of a veritable Shakespearean iceberg floating toward the Titanic of western culture and the intersection of the twain—which is, I hope, not always as disastrous as the referent to this metaphor.

I see this blog as a resource, of course—I think it’s most helpful to think about Shakespeare from a huge variety of angles, and film versions or pop culture references to Shakespeare offer just such infinite variety. But its very existence points toward the enormous endebtedness we have in Shakespeare.

Why, without Shakespeare, we wouldn’t have nearly as many intriguing intersections between time travel science fiction and Renaissance England. Just scroll down to see a brief example!

Footnotes:

*A Post-Post-Modern title often passes for depth of analysis.

** Points of Reference. I suppose it should, technically, be PsOR, but that looks like a chemical formula instead of an acronym. As it is, it looks a bit like swearing in the comics, but that’s purely unintentional.

*** Yes—mixed metaphors. I know, I know. Watch the clip below to see why I’m prone to them today.

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