Saturday, July 29, 2023

Shakespeare in FoxTrot's Eight Yards, Down and Out

Amend, Bill. Eight Yards, Down and Out. Kansas City: Andrews McMeel, 1992.

Note: I'm backdating this post from its actual composition date of 29 November 2023 so that it fits into the chronological journey through all the FoxTrot volumes.

On my first pass through Bill Amend's Eight Yards, Down and Out, I didn't find any Shakespeare. But I thought perhaps I should try one more time, just to be sure.

And, yes, with a bit of squinting, I can just see a bit of Shakespeare.

For example, Shakespeare relates to the question in the detail above from the comic below. What does literature have to do with life? If we rewrite that to be "What does Shakespeare have to do with life?" we find the answer "An awful lot!"


In the next comic, Peter and Paige are complaining about the amount of homework they have to do, and Peter tries to top Paige by noting that he has "a stupid poem to analyze." I'd like to imagine that the poem in question is one of Shakespeare's sonnets—and that Peter will learn just how not stupid it is once he gets around to analyzing it. 


Finally, Peter and Denise are studying—sort of:


Apparently, Denise is knowledgeable about the renaissance, which I take to mean the English Renaissance, which I take to mean, at least in part, Shakespeare.

It just shows what you can miss when you're not paying attention!

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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.

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