Shakespeare in FoxTrot's Houston, You Have A Problem

Amend, Bill. Houston, You Have A Problem. Kansas City: Andrews McMeel, 2007.

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The last few FoxTrot books have followed a trend of inviting the reader to supply the Shakespeare rather than blatantly quoting Shakespeare or alluding to Shakespeare or mentioning Shakespeare.

But we are hardy readers all. We are up to the challenge. If Bill Amend wants us to, we're willing to play "Spot the Shakespeare."

That's what we have in another comic devoted to Peter's English homework:

Last time (for which, q.v.), we noted that Peter was reading The Winter's Tale. It's evident that he's now writing a paper on that play (it has five acts, just like the fifths Peter is talking about—six if you count the long speech by Time).

We can now turn to Paige and her excitement over her most recent reading assignment.

Ah, the Scottish play—Shakespeare's shortest tragedy. Paige will soon learn that it's good not only for being brief but for being a deep sounding of the depths of the human heart.

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Star Trek: Picard and The Tempest

“Et in Arcadia Ego, Part 2.” By Michael Chabon. Perf. Patrick Stewart and Brent Spiner. Dir. Akiva Goldsman. Star Trek: Picard. Season 1, episode 10. Paramount+. 26 March 2020. DVD. Paramount Pictures Home Entertainment, 2023.

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It's been some time since I had anything to add to my "Shakespeare and Star Trek Complete" post (for which, q.v.). And that post, in all honestly, is "complete" for Star Trek: The Original Season and Star Trek: The Next Generation while only venturing occasionally into other Star Trek universes (e.g., Star Trek: The Animated Series, Star Trek: Enterprise, and the reboot films).

But I've finally found the time to watch Star Trek: Picard and to find the Shakespeare therein.

I'm afraid Picard is pretty awful in most respects, but you can learn more about that from other sources. Here, we'll talk about the Shakespeare—which you may think is pretty awful, too.

Note: Spoilers are approaching at high warp.

In the final episode of Season 1, the show awkwardly wraps up. Picard has died (but don't worry—his consciousness has been placed in an android body . . . the very thing we've been warned not to do in "The Schizoid Man" and elsewhere in the Star Trek universe), and Data (who likewise died near the end of Star Trek: Nemesis) has been restored—but only in a simulation, not in a physical body of any sort (but don't worry—Dr. Noonien Soong has a previously-unmentioned biological son who looks just like Data). Data wishes to end his existence since that's the only thing that is certain about human beings (except when it isn't), and he wishes to have a fully human experience.

As Data's simulation shuts down, Picard provides narration in the way of a speech from The Tempest:

Anyone who would say "Spoilers are approaching at high warp" should be careful about calling anything corny, so I'll avoid doing that. Instead, I'll comment on the insight that we're offered. Here's what Picard says before the Tempest quote:

Looking at the human race, with all its violence and corruption and willful ignorance, he could still see kindness, the immense curiosity and greatness of spirit. And he wanted, more than anything else, to be a part of that . . . to be a part of . . . the human family.

He's talking, of course, about Data. But he could easily be talking about Shakespeare—at least in the first part. The second part could be changed for Shakespeare to "he wanted to show us the human family."

With that in mind, perhaps there's less corniness in Prospero's words and Picard's (and Picard's) use of them:

                                We are such stuff

As dreams are made on, and our little life

Is rounded with a sleep. (The Tempest, IV.i.156–58)

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The Episode at IMDB.

For more connections between Star Trek and Shakespeare, head to Shakespeare and Star Trek Complete.

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Book Note: Enter Ghost

Hammad, Isabella. Enter Ghost: A Novel. New York: Grove Press, 2023.

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I've had this book on my "to read" shelf for a while, but it wasn't until I checked the audiobook version out of the library that I actually got down to it. And I'm glad I encountered it that way—the audiobook is read very well, bringing the characters to life by means of their voices.

Enter Ghost is about Sonia, a London-based actor who returns to Palestine after her marriage falls apart and becomes tangentially—and then more integrally—part of an Arabic production of Hamlet. In that plot and in our growing and deepening understanding of her history, the novel has an unhurried pace that I really appreciated.

Naturally, I came to Enter Ghost for the Shakespeare. Overall, that part did not disappoint, but the book is decidedly one-sided in its politics (and it’s also too political overall). All the Palestinian characters have a wonderful three-dimensionality, but every Israeli is a one-dimensional evil villain. I would have liked to have had a lot more exploration of human beings as human beings, whatever their politics—and we certainly get that on the Palestinian side. But the difference between their powerfully complicated portrayal and the simplistic portrayal of the Israelis was stark.

My favorite parts of the novel were those places where the cast discusses and rehearses Hamlet. Enter Ghost often has sections that are written as if it were a play, as in the scene below where the cast and director start exploring their visions of the play and of their production.

You can see how Shakespeare can speak to a particular time and a particular situation as well as to human universals.

Later in the novel, when the cast has been set more firmly and rehearsals are well underway, we are presented with this scene. The actors are working on the "closet" scene:

I find that exercise fascinating. We get one side of the story, which is, politically, what the novel is also doing. But the novel does tell its side of the story well, and, for those who have only heard the other side of the story, it offers a counterbalance. In this scene, Hamlet, like the ghost who enters later in the scene, is silent to Gertrude. Our focus is entirely on Gertrude and her reactions, which allows us to examine them and the actress to portray them with greater precision.

I can't tell you more without providing spoilers, but you'll find Enter Ghost to be well worth reading.

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Shakespeare in FoxTrot's How Come I'm Always Luigi?

Amend, Bill. How Come I'm Always Luigi? Kansas City: Andrews McMeel, 2006.

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As in our last FoxTrot Friday post (for which, q.v.), there's only one Shakespeare-related comic.

As in that previous post, the Shakespeare is pretty subtle.

And, once again, the Shakespearean content has to do with Peter Fox and his exam schedule.

I'll let you take a look at it—see if you can spot the subtle Shakespearean subtext!

It's pretty clear that Peter is facing a Shakespeare exam. And it's also pretty clear which Shakespeare play he ought to have read.

The Winter's Tale. 

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https://amzn.to/4b954d4

More Romeo and Juliet: A Shakespeare Allusion in Season Nine of The Office

"Moving On." By Graham Wagner. Perf. Rainn Wilson, Mindy Kaling, Ed Helms, Leslie David Baker, Kate Flannery, Lindsey Broad, and Oscar Nuñez. Dir. Jon Favreau. The Office. Season 9, episode 16. NBC. 14 February 2013. DVD. Universal Pictures Home Entertainment, 2019.

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Just when I think I've harvested all the Shakespeare The Office has to offer, I find another reference.

I've been keeping up with The Office Ladies podcast, and that necessitates rewatching the episodes they're covering. They're nearly through Season 9, and they are nearly to "Moving On" (so I don't yet know if they'll mention the Shakespeare).

In that episode, Andy has discovered that Erin, having broken up with him, has started dating Pete, and he behaves like a hurt animal—except that a hurt animal might not turn to Shakespeare to illustrate his emotions.

That moment, however indirectly, illustrates the common practice of reading our own lives back into Shakespeare. The trope of Romeo and Juliet as the quintessential lovers is the starting point, but Andy reads beyond the margins to imagine a former beau of Juliet—probably her boss—and his emotional state. As misguided as that is, it's not uncommon.

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Links: The Episode at IMDB.

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Book Note: The Wimsey Family

Scott-Giles, C. W. The Wimsey Family: A Fragmentary History Compiled from Correspondence With Dorothy L. Sayers. New York: Avon, 1979.

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I've been on something of a Dorothy L. Sayers kick recently.

All right, I'll admit what is known to most who know me and all careful Bardfilm readers: I'm on a multiple-decade Sayers kick. Part of that is, naturally enough, the notion that a great deal of Shakespeare makes its way into Sayers' novels (for which, q.v.). And part of is a Shakespearean approach to her characters. Even her villains (most of them, at any rate) are multi-faceted, three-dimensional, and deeply imagined.

Part of the most recent kick has been reading ancillary material that I hadn't encountered before. And part of that has been The Wimsey Family, an imagined but authentically-constructed partial history of the entire Wimsey family by C. W. Scott-Giles. Scott-Giles exchanged letters with Dorothy L. Sayers, proposing that she write a volume so that future generations of scholars would have a reference to turn to when the question "Lord Peter Wimsey: Man or Myth?" arose. The correspondence led to a friendship and then to collaboration—Scott-Giles illustrated D. L. Sayers' translation of The Divine Comedy.

It also led to The Wimsey Family. In reading through the volume, I found two places that are relevant to Shakespeare. In the first, we are (all to briefly) invited to consider whether one of the Dukes of Denver contemporary to Shakespeare was involved with the Earl of Oxford in writing the plays attributed to Shakespeare (Note: This extract comes from pages 21 and 22, here conflated for your reading convenience):

I would love the details of Miss Byrne's paper; I imagine them to be bitingly sarcastic about the Duke and the Earl and the Bard and the ridiculous notion that someone other than Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare's plays.

A bit later in the book (on pages 47 and 48, for those of you keeping score), we're told about a disagreement between the fourth Duke of Denver and John and William Shakespeare. This passage comes right after a section where the Duke, to make peace with Queen Elizabeth I, gives her an estate in Warwickshire:

A perpetual literary revenge sounds sweet indeed—and much less messy than a literal revenge in the form of a duel or the like.

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Shakespeare in FoxTrot's My Hot Dog Went Out, Can I Have Another?

Amend, Bill. My Hot Dog Went Out, Can I Have Another?. Kansas City: Andrews McMeel, 2005.

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I'm afraid there's only one comic from My Hot Dog Went Out, Can I Have Another? that's related to Shakespeare for FoxTrot Friday this week.

And that comic is only very subtly Shakespearean.

The plot runs like this: Andy asks Peter if he's finished studying for his English final.

Peter hasn't.

But he still has time.

Here's how that plays out:

The Shakespeare comes in one of two directions. Either Peter laughably thinks he can study Tolstoy and Shakespeare in forty-five minutes—and, given the characterization of Peter and of jokes about his studying is not unreasonable—or he assumes that the author of King Lear is Tolstoy—again, not outside the realms of possibility.

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Shakespeare in the Finale of Endeavour

“Exeunt.” By Russell Lewis. Perf. Shaun Evans and Roger Allam. Dir. Kate Saxon. Endeavour. Season 9, episode 3. ITV. 2 July 2023. DVD. PBS (Direct), 2023.

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Caution: Major Spoilers.

Not unexpectedly, the show Endeavour, which predates the long-running show Morse in chronology but antedates it in production, has Shakespeare in it from time to time. In one episode, a group of students put on a production of Julius Caesar, for example; other episodes have the occasional Shakespeare allusion or quotation from time to time.

Still, the twofold use of Shakespeare in Endeavour's final episode is at first shocking and then salutary. 

In one of the final scenes, Detective Sargent Morse reveals his knowledge of the wrongdoings of his superior, Detective Chief Inspector Fred Thursday. Thursday has often been presented as belonging to an earlier, less restricted, more brutal age of policing, and Morse has nearly always called him up on it. Here, in their last meeting, Morse's anger at Thursday explodes into a Shakespeare quotation.

Not long after, the Shakespeare rings a more peaceful tone as the series comes to its end.

Here are both those scenes together in one extract:

Morse's bitter exclamation is a portion of a speech delivered by King Henry IV to Falstaff near the end of 2 Henry IV. In Shakespeare and in Endeavour, it is calculated to break the heart of its recipient: "I know thee not, old man" (V.v.47). For Falstaff and Hal, there's an end. But Morse, though angry at the injustice he perceives in Thursday's actions and his own covering them up, promises to work to keep Thursday's family safe.

The closing speech, delivered by Chief Superintendent Reginald Bright, is from The Tempest:

Our revels now are ended. These our actors,

(As I foretold you) were all spirits, and

Are melted into air, into thin air,

And like the baseless fabric of this vision,

The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces,

The solemn temples, the great globe itself,

Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,

And, like this insubstantial pageant faded

Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff

As dreams are made on; and our little life

Is rounded with a sleep. (IV.i.148–58)

[Note: I let the clip continue so you could have the end of the Fauré Requiem and see the "changing of the guards" sequence.]

I appreciated both Shakespeare quotations, but that's because I'm a Shakespeare scholar. I can also see that they are both a little too neat—a little too much like "We need a little Shakespeare here—what do you guys think will work?"

All the same, it's a great end to a great series. And now that you know the end, head back to the beginning and make your way back her to the end again.

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The Episode at IMDB.

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Book Note: How Green Was My Valley

Llewellyn, Richard. How Green Was My Valley. New York: Macmillan, 1940.

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Whenever it's possible, I read the book before I watch the film based on it. When I learned the interesting fact that the film How Green Was My Valley won the Academy Award in 1941 (beating out both The Maltese Falcon and Citizen Cane), I decided to give what must surely be one of the greatest films ever made a try.

But first, I wanted to read the book (see the opening of this post).

The book is genuinely amazing. It's bildungsroman about the transition from the Victorian era into the modern age (and from boyhood to manhood) in a small Welsh coal-mining town. The characters and setting are vividly drawn, and the lyrical quality of the writing reminds me very strongly of Cry, the Beloved Country.

And there's Shakespeare in it! In the scene below, Huw Morgan, our protagonist, takes his sweetie Ceinwen to the Town Hall to see the acting.

As Ceinwen says, "There is elegant." 

Of course, the father of the family has a different viewpoint. When Huw says, "But, Dada . . . only Shakespeare they did. No pollution," he says, "Pollution of Satan" (387).

The scenes with the Shakespeare performers in Huckleberry Finn (for which, q.v.) come to mind—both in the performances and in the chaos that follows

Even without the Shakespeare, How Green Was My Valley is a terrific novel. We'll see whether any Shakespeare makes its way into the 1941 film (or other film adaptations that have been made through the years), is it?

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Le Duel d’Hamlet: The Earliest Filmed Hamlet

Le Duel d’Hamlet. Dir. Clément Maurice. Perf. Sarah Bernhardt, Pierre Magnier, and Suzanne Seylor. 1900. Phono-Cinéma-Théâtre.

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The earliest extant filmed Shakespeare is an extract from King John. And Bardfilm could hardly call itself a Shakespeare and Film Blog if it hadn’t addressed it (for which, q.v.).

But Bardfilm has never mentioned Le Duel d’Hamlet, the earliest extant footage of Hamlet. But we can rectify that oversight fairly easily.

Here is famed actress Sarah Bernhardt as Hamlet in the duel scene from Hamlet.

Yes, I know it looks like they're both fighting the ghost of a giant chicken, but if you can get beyond that, you can see how the possibilities of cinematic Hamlets unspooled from this humble (but not too humble) beginning. 

 

Note: I had a strange sense of deja vu when writing this post. As it turns out, I had written on it thirteen years ago.

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Links: The Film at IMDB.

Book Note: Macbeth (My Own Personal Shakespeare Edition)

Shakespeare, William. Macbeth. My Own Personal Shakespeare Edition. Ed. Duane Morin. N.p.: N.p., 2024

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It may seem odd for Bardfilm to have Macbeth as a Book Note post, but this isn't just any Macbeth.

For me, the Arden Shakespeare series offers the best single editions of the plays. I want to have conjectural composition dates, textual history, performance history, critical apparatuses (apparatii?), and notes upon notes upon notes.

But I have a Doctor of Philosophy in Shakespeare. 

Other readers don't want or need all of that information. In fact, it might get in the way of actually getting to the play. And none of us wants that!

Enter our good friend ShakespeareGeek (a.k.a Duane Morin) and his daughter. She wanted an edition with a lot of space to make her own notes and to provide her own critical apparatus and to fill with her own thoughts. That's when ShakespeareGeek decided it was time for just such an edition: The My Own Personal Shakespeare Edition of Macbeth. You can read more about how it came to be here.

I'm greatly enjoying my own personal copy of The My Own Personal Shakespeare Edition of Macbeth. The text is solid, and ShakespeareGeek has provided enough guidance so that readers don't get lost but not so much that they're in danger of being overwhelmed. And, indeed, there's plenty of space for notes. Here's a sample from the opening scene:

Blank pages have also been provided between acts:

It's a great edition for both the first-time reader and the reader (me) who is in danger of paying more attention to the notes than to the text.

We can only hope that editions of more plays will follow. Go get yours today—you'll have an entirely fresh encounter with Macbeth.

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