Friday, December 6, 2024

Shakespeare in FoxTrot's Big Dweeb Energy

Amend, Bill. Big Dweeb Energy. Kansas City: Andrews McMeel, 2024.

We've reached the end of our FoxTrot Fridays—for now. We've come to the last published volume of FoxTrot, but Bill Amend has (and we're all most grateful for it) kept on writing and drawing and working Shakespeare in from time to time (and Bardfilm in particular is most grateful for it).

Two of the comics in Big Dweeb Energy are tangentially connected to Shakespeare; one comic is titularly tied to the Bard.

First, then, we have Paige complaining about having to read over seventy pages of a book by the next day. Depending on the Shakespeare play she's been assigned (for it must be—almost certainly is—a Shakespeare play) and the edition, she could be being asked to read nearly the entire play (ShakespeareGeek's "My Own Personal Shakespeare" edition of Macbeth would get her almost through Act II; page 75 of the first Arden edition of Macbeth is just thirteen pages shy of the end of the play). If that's the case, perhaps her complaint is somewhat justified.

Andy Fox has her own perspective on the assignment:


Andy definitely has a point—who could stop thirteen pages shy of the end of Macbeth?

Paige may not realize it, but all her study of Shakespeare has paid off in manifold ways. In the next comic, we see that she has learned valuable things about acting (if not about iambic pentameter), and that knowledge comes in handy:


The last comic takes us to Peter and what he's learned about physical comedy from all his study of Shakespeare. And the comic takes its title from a Shakespeare play to boot!


We've come a long way from the first Shakespeare references in FoxTrot—the use of Hamlet and King Lear back in 1989 (for which). And it's been a valuable and amusing journey that is not yet at its end.

Many thanks to Bill Amend for over thirty years of entertainment and enlightenment. We all encourage you to keep up the wonderful work!

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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