Tuesday, September 23, 2008

Shakespeare and Star Trek

“Ménage à Troi.” By Fred Bronson and Susan Sackett. Perf. Patrick Stewart, Jonathan Frakes, LeVar Burton, and Michael Dorn. Dir. Robert Legato. Star Trek: The Next Generation. Season 3, episode 24. Syndicated television. 10 June 1990. DVD. Paramount, 2002.
Image Caption: 

Worf is uncertain about Shakespearean love poetry.
I was attempting to clean out a folder of images, and I came across these. At some point, we may have to have "Shakespeare and Star Trek week" at Bardfilm (there's enough material, believe it or not, for a large number of posts), but that will have to wait. In the meantime, I have these screenshots of Jean-Luc Picard quoting Shakespeare sonnets to establish his love for Deanna Troi's mother.

A slight misquotation. Sonnet 147 begins with these lines: "My love is as a fever, longing still / For that which longer nurseth the disease."

Back on track, Picard continues the line in perfect iambic pentameter.

Switching to Sonnet 141, Picard quotes with greater accuracy.

Picard counts backward to see if he has quoted the lines with precision. He's checking for pentameter while ignoring iambs at this point.
For more connections between Star Trek and Shakespeare, head to Shakespeare and Star Trek Complete.

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Bardfilm is normally written as one word, though it can also be found under a search for "Bard Film Blog." Bardfilm is a Shakespeare blog (admittedly, one of many Shakespeare blogs), and it is dedicated to commentary on films (Shakespeare movies, The Shakespeare Movie, Shakespeare on television, Shakespeare at the cinema), plays, and other matter related to Shakespeare (allusions to Shakespeare in pop culture, quotes from Shakespeare in popular culture, quotations that come from Shakespeare, et cetera).

Unless otherwise indicated, quotations from Shakespeare's works are from the following edition:
Shakespeare, William. The Riverside Shakespeare. 2nd ed. Gen. ed. G. Blakemore Evans. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997.
All material original to this blog is copyrighted: Copyright 2008-2039 (and into perpetuity thereafter) by Keith Jones.

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 —The Tempest