Shakespeare in FoxTrot's Some Clever Title: A FoxTrot Collection Blah Blah Blah

Amend, Bill. Some Clever Title: A FoxTrot Collection Blah Blah Blah. Kansas City: Andrews McMeel, 2016.

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Welcome back for another FoxTrot Friday!

The volume Some Clever Title: A FoxTrot Collection Blah Blah Blah is the third of the Sundays-only FoxTrot books. 

There are fewer comics in those volumes, which means less opportunity for Shakespeare to find his way in. 

Yet there are a number of possibilities in this one! The first has an allusion to Hamlet:

Hamlet has to be cruel only to be kind to his mother; here, the mother is considering whether to be cruel or kind to her son.

The next one is more about Shakespearean costuming than the text of Shakespeare:

Martin Goldthwait is going for "muse" here, but I'm reading Puck or the person representing As You Like It's Hymen, the god of marriage ceremonies or (at a pinch) Julius Caesar.

The last in this collection is one I've written about before (for which, q.v.), but it loses nothing in the retelling.

Thanks for joining us for FoxTrot Friday. We shall see what the future holds.

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General Shakespeare in Specific Friends

“The One with Monica and Chandler's Wedding: Part 1.” By Greg Malins. Perf. Jennifer Aniston, Courteney Cox, Lisa Kudrow, Matt LeBlanc, Matthew Perry, David Schwimmer, and Gary Oldman. Dir. Kevin Bright. Friends. Season 7, episode 23. NBC. 17 May 2001. DVD. WarnerBrothers, 2013.

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Alert readers will know that I prefer more Shakespeare to less, but my ears are attuned to picking up Shakespeare in even minuscule quantities. 

Having already found many more obvious or more direct connections to Shakespeare in Friends episodes (cf. Friends and Lady Macbeth, What Role did Friends' Joey play in Macbeth?, A Tiny Bit of Shakespeare in a Friends Subplot, Shakespeare Puts Joey to Sleep in Friends, and A Quick Line from Romeo and Juliet in a Friends Episode), we can move on to ever-more-obscure ones.

The first of these involves only the mention of an actor known for Shakespearean roles—and for producing spit when enunciating his lines. The famous actor's name (within the world of the show) is Richard Crosby, and he's played by Gary Oldman (a famous actor outside the world of the show), whose major Shakespeare role (to me) is Rosencrantz in the Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead directed by Tom Stoppard. 

The only allusion to Shakespeare is in Joey's line. He says, "Okay . . . uh, look I know you’re a great actor, okay? And you play all those Shakespeare guys and stuff." That's it. But the premise is that this great Shakespearean actor is enunciating so well that he's spitting all over Joey. And the gag is carried out brilliantly:

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“The One with the Mugging.” By Peter Tibbals. Perf. Jennifer Aniston, Courteney Cox, Lisa Kudrow, Matt LeBlanc, Matthew Perry, and David Schwimmer. Dir. Gary Halvorson. Friends. Season 9, episode 15. NBC. 13 February 2003. DVD. WarnerBrothers, 2013.

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A couple seasons later, we have a reference to an imagined movie. This episode also has a pseudonym for an actor. Jeff Goldblum (a real actor) plays the famous actor Leonard Hayes (not a real actor), and we learn that Hayes is known for a film version of Macbeth.

My first reaction, naturally enough, was to search IMDB for the Leonard Hayes Macbeth (I had never heard of it—and I wonder if the details would help me get the joke about Jackass: The Movie.

Eventually, I realized that it wasn't a real Macbeth and it wasn't a real actor. But it's a Shakespeare reference nonetheless! 

That's all.  But you should all realize, that, for obscure Friends references to Shakespeare, Bardfilm is your site of choice.

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Links: The Episode at IMDB. The Other Episode at IMDB.

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Book Note: The Bookshop of Yesterdays

Meyerson, Amy. The Bookshop of Yesterdays. New York: Park Row, 2019.

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I found The Bookshop of Yesterdays while searching for anything Shakespeare-related that I could load from my library onto a Kindle to dip into easily. 

Its plot involves a woman named Miranda Brooks (so we see the connection to The Tempest right away) who receives a mysterious package from her estranged uncle. Almost immediately after, she learns that he has died (that's a spoiler, but it happens in chapter two). Eventually, she traces the train of clues he leaves her back to Prospero Books (Miranda Brooks and Prospero Books, see?), the bookstore her uncle ran and she loved to go to as a child.

I'll avoid any other spoilers, but I will say that my clarion cry applies to this book: "Needs More Shakespeare!"

Apart from that, it's not terrible. And it has something to say about the relationship between Prospero and Miranda in The Tempest and Prospero Books (and its owner) and Miranda Brooks in this novel.

Let me share the opening of the mystery; you can determine whether you wish to read on.

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Book Note: Then We Came to the End

Ferris, Joshua. Then We Came to the End. New York: Back Bay Books, 2008.

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This summer, I read Then We Came to the End. I knew nothing about it except that it was supposed to be humorous.

I found it hysterical and compelling—but not in any obvious way.  The most intriguing thing about it was the narrator. The narration is provided not by a third-person omniscient (or even limited omniscient) point of view—nor by a first-person protagonist or participant. Instead, the narrator is a collective first-person plural: "We" relates the story.

And it's done seamlessly. The reader almost doesn't notice as the novel takes us into the ups and downs of an advertising agency in New York City.

All of that is a great endorsement of the novel, and you all should read it. But if that isn't enough, there's also the Shakespeare. It's limited, but it's clever.

In this scene, the ad agency has been challenged to come up with public service ads that provide a humorous take on breast cancer.

One of the employees recalls a past triumph—when he consulted with his Uncle Max on a printer ink advertisement:

First, it's a great idea for an ad. Second, I'm fond of the Dickens / Shakespeare uncertainty.

There's only one more Shakespeare reference. It occurs late in the novel when the same employee is asked about the names of characters in a Shakespeare play:

It's just incidental—except that it gives a roundness to Jim's character. Having found Shakespeare useful in selling ink cartridges, he went further and decided to take a course.

Shakespeare . . . he gets the job done.

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Click below to purchase the book from amazon.com
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Shakespeare in FoxTrot's Jasotron: 2012

Amend, Bill. Jasotron: 2012: A FoxTrot collection. Andrews McMeel: Kansas City, 2012.

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I hope you didn't think I'd forgotten about FoxTrot Fridays. 

Heaven forfend! 

It's just that the school year started, and that makes it difficult to prioritize blog posts on Shakespeare-related comic strips.

As things fall into place in the fall semester, free time becomes less of a chimera. 

And that means a return to FoxTrot Friday is in order.

Our first Shakespeare-related strip from Jasotron: 2012 is one of those that has more of an implicit connection to Shakespeare. Paige is, once again, somewhat reluctant to do her homework:

To me, it seems pretty self-evident that the binder is full of Shakespeare handouts. Since Quincy is attracted to it, I'm imagining that reptiles in Shakespeare feature prominently: "[I am] of the chameleon's dish," "I can add colors to the chameleon, "Give him leave, madam; he is a kind of chameleon," "Ay, but hearken, sir: though the chameleon Love can feed on the air, I am one that am nourished by my victuals, and would fain have meat" et cetera.  Yes, I know Quincy is an iguana, but that doesn't mean he can't be interested in other reptiles in Shakespeare.

We move to another FoxTrot comic—one that talks about blogging in general but is likely to have Bardfilm specifically in mind.

I'm considering that business model myself. 

And last and most Shakespearean of all, we have a comic that I wrote about way back in 2013.

And there we have it! Thanks, Bill Amend, for all the great Shakespeare. Let's see what we find in our next FoxTrot Friday.

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Click below to purchase the book from amazon.com
(and to support Bardfilm as you do so).