Friday, July 26, 2024

Shakespeare in FoxTrot's FoxTrot Sundaes

Amend, Bill. FoxTrot Sundaes. Kansas City: Andrews McMeel, 2010.

It's been a very long time since Bill Amend stopped producing FoxTrots on a daily basis, but I still have a gnawing sense of emptiness in my weekdays.

For today's FoxTrot Friday, we turn to his first collection of Sunday-only strips. I'm certainly glad they exist since they mean we haven't had to go cold turkey, and they're often quite seriously funny.

In FoxTrot Sundaes, I found two tangentially-Shakespearean comics and one comic with a very solid set of Shakespearean puns.

We start with Paige's first day back at school:


I know what you're thinking. You're thinking that there's no Shakespeare in that one. But I think it's very likely that Paige's teacher assigned the Shakespeare-related post-apocalyptic novel Station Eleven (for which, q.v.) for her summer reading.

Our next comic is a little later in the school year; it again involves Paige:


I know what you're thinking. You're thinking that there's no Shakespeare in that one. But in panel two, Paige is clearly late for English class. And that's where she studies Shakespeare!

All right. I sense that you're not fully convinced. If that's the case, read on. I imagine you'll see the Shakespeare more clearly in this next one:


And with that, we can cycle back to the first comic and use Paige's line as support for the claim that she's studying Shakespeare in her classes during this school year.

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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