Yes, it seems like I'm becoming a completist when it comes to Shakespeare in The Dick Van Dyke Show, but I promise that I'm including only those references to Shakespeare about which I have something to say. You'll notice I didn't mention the time Buddy said, "Well, that concludes our little series of Shakespearean plays" in "The Sleeping Brother" (Season 1, episode 27). But when the Shakespeare is a bit less incidental than that, I say, "Bring it on."
Allow me to set the stage for this moment. Sally and Buddy, Rob's fellow writers, have discovered what appears to be a memoir relating how Rob and Laura got engaged and went on a honeymoon. Rob, serving in the Army at the time, has only one three-day pass, and he needs to decide whether he should use it to take a honeymoon with Laura or to go back to his hometown to break it to a woman with whom he has if not an engagement at least an understanding.
It's an opportunity for the show to give us a flashback episode. This clip takes us from reading the memoir back to the events the memoir presents:
Links: The Episode at IMDB.
Rob Petrie's narration is intriguing:
And, as Hamlet once said, "Hark! Here comes Dorothy, and I wish I was dead."It's not the words Hamlet is purported to have said that's interesting; it's the easy introduction to the quote that fascinates. It flows so trippingly off the tongue that it seems like a cliché—the kind of thing people are saying all the time, whether seriously or in fun. It's a filler phrase—a marker of a transition into other matters. Shakespeare is so pervasive in the culture that one of his characters can easily, unquestioningly serve this function. Indeed, I could see that becoming a running gag.
Let's see where we go next.
Links: The Episode at IMDB.
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(and to support Bardfilm as you do so).
(and to support Bardfilm as you do so).
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