Monday, June 1, 2009

Juliet at Darmok

“Darmok.” By Joe Menosky and Phillip LaZebnik. Perf. Patrick Stewart, Jonathan Frakes, LeVar Burton, Michael Dorn, Gates McFadden, Brent Spiner, and Paul Winfield. Dir. Winrich Kolbe. Star Trek: The Next Generation. Season 5, episode 2. Syndicated television. 30 September 1991. DVD. Paramount, 2002.
The Star Trek episode "Darmok" is much more often noted for its interest for linguists and linguistics than for anything Shakespearean. There's far more Gilgamesh, actually, than Shakespeare in it! However, there is an intriguing reference halfway through.

The premise of the episode is that communication with the aliens is impossible. The universal translator can translate some of the things they say ("when the walls fell," for example), but these sporadic phrases make little to no sense in the context. Eventually, the crew discovers that the Tamarians use a language that is almost entirely metaphoric (leaving Saussure, Derrida, and Lévi-Straus out of it for the moment). Here's their discussion of the problem:


Interesting, yes? But it's even more complicated than that. The image of Juliet on her balcony used as an example here does not have to be an image of romance. It could be an image of anticipation or loneliness or patriarchal oppression or imminent disaster! It could even be an advertising image for an architectural firm. In fact, it probably is!

The image in the play is similarly polysemic, presenting almost all these possibilities and more. The complexities of Shakespeare are only compounded by the complexities of language. 

And yet, if I tell my beloved that she reminds me of Juliet on her balcony, the context implies one of these concepts to the ultimate exclusion of all others.  That's right: an advertising image for an architectural firm.

Can I help it if my beloved designs balconies for a living?*
For more connections between Star Trek and Shakespeare, head to Shakespeare and Star Trek Complete.

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*She doesn't, really. But it's a bit funnier that way.
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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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