Thursday, May 28, 2009

One more Shakespeare Quote from a Q Episode

“Hide & Q.” By C. J. Holland and Gene Roddenberry. Perf. Patrick Stewart, Jonathan Frakes, LeVar Burton, Michael Dorn, Denise Crosby, Gates McFadden, Marina Sirtis, Brent Spiner, Wil Wheaton, and John de Lancie. Dir. Cliff Bole. Star Trek: The Next Generation. Season 1, episode 10. Syndicated television. 23 November 1987. DVD. Paramount, 2002.
They always seem to quote from Shakespeare when Q shows up. I'm not entirely sure why, but I think it may have to do with the idea that Q seeks to understand human nature—and who has more to say about the emotions and actions of human beings than Shakespeare?

At the end of "Hide and Q," an episode in which Picard and Q exchange Shakespeare quotes (for which, q.v.), Data gives us a brief quote from Polonius as a way of indicating why the crew wants to be who they are:


Polonius' speech to Laertes is awfully long-winded, but it concludes with those eminently-quotable lines—and the ones that must follow as the night the day: "And it must follow as the night the day / Thou canst not then be false to any man" (I.iii.79-80). Apparently, that bit of Polonius' advice is as applicable far in the future as it was in the past.

Bonus! Video clip of this Shakespeare quote!



Links: A Gateway to Star Trek Information at Wikipedia.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Hi, I really love your blog. I am working on a project for an ungraduate Hamlet class about Star Trek and Hamlet, and your blog has been very helpful. Is there a way that I could access the YouTube videos you include so that I can embed them for my project?

Thank you.

kj said...

Thanks very much, Unknown! The videos here aren't through YouTube--in part because of Bardfilm's Fair Use Policy, available at this URL:

http://bardfilm.blogspot.com/2011/01/bardfilm-s-fair-use-policy.html

It is likely to go beyond copyright law to pass video files around--but you can always link to this URL!

Thanks!

kj

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