Wednesday, June 8, 2011

Shakespeare in Kingdom

"Episode 6." By Alan Whiting. Perf. Stephen Fry, Karl Davies, Celia Imrie, Tony Slattery, and Phyllida Law. Dir. Edward Hall. Kingdom. Season 2, episode 6. ITV. 17 February 2008. DVD. BFS Entertainment, 2009.
Another British Comic Drama has even more Shakespeare embedded in it. In addition to a few passing references throughout the series, the last episode of season two of Kingdom (staring Stephen Fry) has a considerable number of connections to The Tempest. The residents of the nursing home at which Peter Kingdom's aunt resides (and which she may, in fact, run—that's not quite clear to me) are putting on a production of The Tempest, but the sprinkler system keeps going off whenever Prospero delivers his speeches.

You can watch the whole episode on Hulu, or you can view an embedded clip (provided the embedding works properly) of the opening performance below:

Links: The Film at IMDB.
Click below to purchase season two of the show from amazon.com
(and to support Bardfilm as you do so).

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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