Monday, November 24, 2008

Mix One Part Hamlet, One Part Tempest, One Part Romeo and Juliet, and One Part Henry IV, Part 2. Mix Well.

Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country. Dir. Nicholas Meyer. Perf. William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, DeForest Kelley, Nichelle Nichols, James Doohan, Walter Koenig, and George Takei. 1991. DVD. Paramount, 2004.
We're still in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country today, mining it for more Shakespearean fragments.  I didn't offer a lot of commentary on the previous clip (the one that ends with Chekov looking skeptical at Shakespeare "in the original Klingon").  The reason that is so funny (and the reason I left the reference to "Earth—Hitler—1938" in the clip below) is the Nazi appropriation of Shakespeare in World War II.  The common story is that the Nazis claimed that Shakespeare had really been written in German, but the English translated him into English and stole him away from his rightful heritage.  I haven't found that claim in a scholarly source, though I have found statements noting that Shakespeare was to be treated as a German author when non-German playwrights were banned.

In the clip below, you get not one—not two—not three—but four, four, FFFFFOUUURRRR Shakespeare references for the price of one!

Links: A Gateway to Star Trek Information at Wikipedia. Official Site of The Klingon Hamlet. 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.

The very instant that I saw you did / My heart fly to your service; there resides, / To make me slave to it; and, for your sake, / Am I this patient [b]log-man.

 —The Tempest