Thursday, November 27, 2008

"I am Shylock! Know Ye Not That?"

Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country. Dir. Nicholas Meyer. Perf. William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, DeForest Kelley, Nichelle Nichols, James Doohan, Walter Koenig, and George Takei. 1991. DVD. Paramount, 2004.

All right, after this post, we'll move from The Undiscovered Country to other matters.

The previous post mentioned a broadcast of Merchant of Venice on the day before Kristellnacht. The intent seems to have been to incite the general populace to anti-Semitism.

It vaguely reminded me of an incident in the lives of Queen Elizabeth and Shakespeare.  In 1601, Shakespeare's company was paid to put on a production of Richard II the day before a failed insurrection.  The play addresses the successful deposition of an unpopular monarch, and the theory is that the leaders of the insurrection (the Earl of Essex and his crowd) thought that the play would rally the people to their cause—or, at least, give them courage to go through with a dangerous and deadly—and, for Essex and many others, fatal—operation.

Afterwards, in extreme pique, Her Majesty purportedly said, "I am Richard—know ye not that?"

Fortunately, the players—and the author—escaped severe punishment.

The idea was similar in Germany in 1938.  The problem was that it was successful, rallying the people to attack the supposed Shylocks among them.

Why couldn't they have broadcast As You Like It, in which the terrible ruler becomes miraculous converted in the forest and turns his throne over to the good guys?

For more connections between Star Trek and Shakespeare, head to Shakespeare and Star Trek Complete.

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

No comments:

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