Thursday, July 20, 2023

A Tiny, Subtle Slice of A Midsummer Night's Dream in The Office

"Gettysburg." By Robert Padnick. Perf. Rainn Wilson, Oscar Nuñez, and Alyssa Larsen. Dir. Jeffrey Blitz. The Office. Season 8, episode 8. NBC. 17 November 2011. DVD. Universal Pictures Home Entertainment, 2018.
In the episode of The Office entitled "Gettysburg," many of the worker in the office take a trip to . . . well, Gettysburg.

While there, Dwight Schrute annoys everyone by insisting that there was a more northerly battle of the Civil War than Gettysburg, namely, The Battle of Schrute Farms.

Eventually, Oscar finds an archivist who shows them part of a documentary about that battle. Let's take a look.


You didn't hear any Shakespeare mentioned in that scene, but if you were watching carefully, your eye would have been caught by the image that heads this post.

What other play could they be performing than Midsummer Night's Dream? One actor has wings and a magic flower; another has the ears of a donkey on his head.

It's subtle, but there you have one more among many Shakespeare allusions (for which, q.v. and q.v. and q.v.) in The Office.
Links: The Episode 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.

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