Friday, January 2, 2009

The Five Most Important Shakespeare Allusions in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory

Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. Dir. Mel Stuart. Perf. Gene Wilder, Jack Albertson, and Peter Ostrum. 1971. DVD. Warner Home Video, 2005.
The Thanksgiving Family Movie Night Feature (Doctor Dolittle) reminded me of the large number of literary allusions in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. I gathered them together in this annotated video clip; you will first see the quotation and then you'll hear the allusion. “Allusion” is the appropriate term—they are not always quotations. You'll see statements turned into queries, you'll find omissions, and you'll discover rewordings, but there's a wonderfully pervasive sense of the Shakespearean in the film as a whole and in these clips in particular:

Links: The Film at IMDB.

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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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