Tuesday, March 21, 2017

A Bit More Shakespeare in Pearls Before Swine

Pastis, Stephen. King of the Comics: A Pearls Before Swine Collection. Kansas City: Andrews McMeel, 2015.

We've occasionally seen Pearls Before Swine dip into Shakespeare for comic effect.

We've seen pun-based takes on Hamlet's soliloquy and threats cobbled out of Julius Caesar.

We've had an encounter with difficult verse lines from Romeo and Juliet.

We've even had Shakespeare translated for modern audiences.

And now, in browsing through a book at the bookstore, we find two more connections between Shakespeare and the Pearls cast.

The first one is part of a series that . . . well, Stephen Pastis has thoughtfully provided a panel of context for it:



The second takes us back to Hamlet's soliloquy . . . with a bit of a twist.



The Shakespeare aficionado might say, like Isabella in Measure for Measure, "O, it is excellent / To have a giant's strength; but it is tyrannous / To use it like a giant" (107-09). But that might be gilding the lily.

Click below to purchase the book from amazon.com
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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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