Monday, August 30, 2010

When Captain Picard Shuffled Off

“Tapestry.” By Ronald D. Moore. Perf. Patrick Stewart, Jonathan Frakes, LeVar Burton, Michael Dorn, Gates McFadden, Brent Spiner, and John de Lancie. Dir. Les Landau. Star Trek: The Next Generation. Season 6, episode 15. Syndicated television. 15 February 1993. DVD. Paramount, 2002.
The last missed reference also comes to us from the contributors to Memory Alpha, who noted a Shakespeare allusion in Season Six. Q reappears—and this sort of thing always seems to happen when Q appears—in Captain Picard's afterlife.

And Shakespeare is there, too.

More specifically, a line Hamlet delivers—"When we have shuffled off this mortal coil . . ." (III.i.66)—is re-delivered there, Q making one small change to Hamlet's line, substituting "the" for "this."


And there you have it! All the Shakespeare in the Star Trek universe—or all the Shakespeare I've been able to find in The Original Series, The Animated Series, The Next Generation, and the films. Beyond that I decline to venture. At present.

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.
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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