Monday, March 30, 2026

The Dick Van Dyke Show Offers a Summary of Romeo and Juliet

“The Curious Thing About Women.” By Frank Tarloff. Perf. Dick Van Dyke and Mary Tyler Moore. Dir. John Rich. 
The Dick Van Dyke Show. Season 1, episode 16. CBS. 10 January 1962. DVD. Allied Vaughn, 2023.

We've covered a small reference to Hamlet and a general Shakespeare joke in The Dick Van Dyke Show, and now we get a stronger connection to the plot of a Shakespeare play.

In this episode, Laura Petrie (Mary Tylor Moore's character) is castigated by Rob Petrie (played by Dick Van Dyke) for opening his mail and reading it.

Actually, it's more that she opens it and reads it and then summarizes its contents for him. He describes how he feels by way of an analogy:


Yes, "A couple of mixed-up teenagers run away from home and end up dead" is a pretty good thirteen-word summary of Romeo and Juliet . . . but a little something is lost along the way.

We're not yet at the point where the show is ready to quote direction from Shakespeare, but the time may come. I'll keep you updated!

Links: The Episode at IMDB.

Click below to purchase the entire run of the show 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.
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