Friday, December 5, 2008

It was a television show. Take it for all in all, we shall not look upon its like again.

“The Most Toys.” By Shari Goodhartz. Perf. Patrick Stewart, Jonathan Frakes, LeVar Burton, Michael Dorn, Gates McFadden, and Brent Spiner. Dir. Tim Bond. Star Trek: The Next Generation. Season 3, episode 22. Syndicated television. 5 May 1990. DVD. Paramount, 2002.
We return to Shakespeare and Star Trek with a moment that most of the commentators have missed.

In this episode, Data is stolen away by an enormously devoted Trekkie, but the other members of the crew think he has blown up. Captain Picard, glancing at a copy of Shakespeare he had previously given Data, finds a bookmark on the page where Horatio questions Hamlet about Hamlet's father. It becomes a statement on the humanity of Data:

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