Thursday, September 21, 2023

Shakespeare Allusion in Season Eight of The Office

"Special Project." By Amelie Gillette. Perf. Rainn Wilson, Mindy Kaling, Ed Helms, Leslie David Baker, Kate Flannery, Lindsey Broad, and Oscar Nuñez. Dir. David Rogers. The Office. Season 8, episode 14. NBC. 9 February 2012. DVD. Universal Pictures Home Entertainment, 2019.

In Office time, it's been six years since our last (possible? probable?) Julius Caesar allusion (for which, q.v.). 

In the intervening time, Dwight seems to have brushed up on his Shakespeare.

In the episode, Andy has made a decision about who gets to travel to Florida for a special project—and Dwight doesn't like it. But he knows that a straightforward approach won't work. Instead, he praises Andy's decision (while asserting that he doesn't understand the logic of it) and riles up his fellow employees to bring Andy's decision into question.

Does that sound familiar? 

If not, what if I add that Dwight says, "Andy is an honorable man"?

I can't be the only Shakespeare / Office fan who finds in the setup an allusion to Mark Antony's surreptitious attack on Brutus in Julius Caesar during Caesar's funeral. Let's take a look:


I acknowledge that that is an allusion rather than a quotation, but it seems entirely in character for Dwight to employ the sneaky rhetorical strategy of Anthony in his own plan to bring down Andy.

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.
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