Wednesday, April 10, 2024

A Quick Line from Romeo and Juliet in a Friends Episode

“The One with the Screamer.” By Scott Silveri and Shana Goldberg-Meehan. Perf. Matt LeBlanc, Dina Meyer, and Reg Rogers. Dir. Peter Bonerz. Friends. Season 3, episode 22. NBC. 24 April 1997. DVD. Warner Home Video, 2003.

Although our last post asserted that Bardfilm is not obsessed with completeness (tracking down all the Shakespeare in a given situation comedy, for example), that doesn't mean that we'll ignore the Shakespeare that comes our way.

For example, in a Friends episode that features Joey among his fellow actors, we get a brief quote from Romeo and Juliet

Here it is!  Note: Since the quote takes approximately three seconds, I've provided quite a bit of context for it. 


I appreciate how the director is quoting the line with such precision: He clearly is saying "A plague a' both your houses" instead of "A plague on both your houses." Despite the subtitles, that's exactly how the line is printed. It's likely that kind of peevish accuracy that brought him to this point.

Bonus Note: This episode aired the day after William Shakespeare's 433rd birthday!

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