Sunday, August 29, 2010

Star Trek's Q and Lady Macbeth

“True Q.” By René Echevarria. Perf. Patrick Stewart, Jonathan Frakes, LeVar Burton, Michael Dorn, Gates McFadden, Brent Spiner, Olivia d'Abo, and John de Lancie. Dir. Robert Scheerer. Star Trek: The Next Generation. Season 6, episode 6. Syndicated television. 1 November 1992. DVD. Paramount, 2002.
Allow me another genuinely micro micropost.

"True Q" offers another example of Shakespeare that has become part and parcel of ordinary English conversation. Q incidentally quotes from Macbeth, giving us Lady Macbeth's "What's done is done" (III.ii.11-12). I only wish the writers had followed it with Lady Macbeth's similar—but, oh! How different—later quotation: "What’s done cannot be undone" (V.i.64).

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

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1 comment:

Mark said...

Hmmm... "What's done is done" is a pretty common phrase. I wonder if it has Macbethian origins? (Yes, I just made that word up.) Interesting. Good catch.

August 29, 2010 at 12:18 PM

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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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