Friday, August 18, 2023

More Deleted Scene Shakespeare in The Office

"Money." By Paul Lieberstein. Perf. Steve Carell, Phyllis Smith, Ed Helms, and Leslie David Baker. Dir. Paul Lieberstein. The Office. Season 4, episode 4. NBC. 18 October 2007. Deleted Scene. DVD. Universal Pictures Home Entertainment, 2018.

Last time, we saw that some Shakespeare can be found in the deleted scenes from The Office (for which, q.v.). That was in Season Three; it's time for Season Four.

In the episode from which this scene was deleted, Michael Scott has been having problems with his personal finances and is reluctant to tell his girlfriend about them. The solution? Why, procrastinating by talking about Shakespeare, of course! [Note: Not that we at Bardfilm know anything about that proclivity.]

It seems that Michael wants to talk about the authorship question, but his approach to it is somewhat garbled. When he asks, "Who do you think was the actual writer of Shakespeare," he seems to be asking about a play titled Shakespeare rather than inquiring about who wrote the works attributed to Shakespeare.

Whatever he means, no one is interested in following up: They're not picking up what he's putting down. 


I'm happy to find these Shakespearean moments in the deleted scenes from The Office. If any of you die-hard Office fans know of any others, please let me know!

Links: The Episode at IMDB.

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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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