Monday, August 23, 2010

Shakespeare and Star Trek Incomplete?

“The Devil in the Dark.” By Gene L. Coon. Perf. William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, DeForest Kelley, and Nichelle Nichols. Dir. Joseph Pevney. Star Trek. Season 1, episode 25. NBC. 9 March 1967. DVD. Paramount, 2007.
More than a year has passed since Bardfilm put together the definitive and complete post on all the Shakespeare that appears in Star Trek.

Alas, we spoke too soon.

This week, Bardfilm will be filling in the blanks and adding these new comments—retroactively, as it were—to the "Shakespeare and Star Trek Complete" post.

Picture the scene for this Shakespeare allusion. A single guard paces the battlements. Strange things have been happening in this Elsenore-esque place. Hearing a noise behind him, the guard turns and delivers a line—the first line, in fact—from Hamlet: “Who’s there?” (I.i.1):


The only problem is that the Francisco analogue blows his line. Instead of a good and proper "Nay, answer me: stand, and unfold yourself" (I.i.2), we get an "It's your relief, Sam." Ah, well. You can't ask for everything! At least we get the setting and the first line, even if no further allusions to Hamlet appear in this particular episode.

P.S. We don't even get a "For this relief, much thanks" (I.i.8), though it would be an entirely appropriate response to Francisco's altered line.
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