Friday, October 11, 2024

Shakespeare in FoxTrot's Mother is Coming

Amend, Bill. Mother is Coming. Kansas City: Andrews McMeel, 2018.

For this week's FoxTrot Friday, I admittedly had to do a bit of stretching in one way or another . . . but you'll see that the payoff in the final comic here is worth it.

When we're looking for Shakespeare in FoxTrot, we often find it in the older kids' coursework. And where we're not told absolutely specifically that there's Shakespeare there, we can make a fair (at least to the brain of the Shakespeare aficionado) assumption.

That's the case here. Surely there's some Shakespeare included in the "tons of homework" Mrs. Fox mentions in the first panel: 


Although Shakespeare isn't usually part of Jason's curriculum, it is part of his world. Here's something of a Gravedigger Scene from Hamlet:


I don't know about you, but it only takes the first syllable of Shakespeare's name for me to start thinking about the Bard. Stir in a little Taylor Swift, and it's hard not to have a very subtle Shakespeare allusion:


In the next comic, there's a little backstory for all of the Shakespeare assignments in Peter's courses:


Finally, we have a clear and direct Shakespeare reference. Because he did not do well on a Hamlet exam last year, Peter has a plan for this time around:


One of the wondering things about FoxTrot is that even the ones that have to be stretched to detect even a modicum of Shakespeare are immensely enjoyable.

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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.

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