Wednesday, September 9, 2026

Once More unto the Hamlet in The Dick Van Dyke Show

“See Rob Write, Write Rob Write.” By Lawrence J. Cohen and Fred Freeman. Perf. Mary Tyler Moore and Dick Van Dyke. Dir. Jerry Paris. The Dick Van Dyke Show. Season 5, episode 12. CBS. 8 December 1965. DVD. Allied Vaughn, 2023.
An alert reader who is both a Shakespeare aficionado and familiar with The Dick Van Dyke Show let me know that I had missed one Shakespeare reference in that show's five-year run. Moreover, I was inaccurate in staying that there were no Shakespeare references in Season Five of the show.

Note: For full disclosure, I'd admit that the alert reader was me—I missed a note I had taken during my viewing of the show. I may have missed more, but that's one I didn't miss while viewing but did miss while doing the write-ups.

In "See Rob Write, Wright Rob Wright," Laura writes a children's book in order to sell an artist's (unrelated) work. When Rob—the professional writer—reads it, he gets on a pretty high horse, rewrites it, and insists that his version is by far the superior.

The Shakespeare comes in when Laura presents her story to Rob:


It's only a word—the title of a Shakespeare play—but it counts!

And there—for real this time (as far as I'm aware)—you have it. All the Shakespeare in The Dick Van Dyke Show!  

Links: The Episode at IMDB.

Click below to purchase the entire run of the show from amazon.com
(and to support Bardfilm as you do so).

No comments:

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