Nearly everyone reading this has seen Star Wars. Most of us have had at least some exposure to William Shakespeare's plays. A handful of us are doubtless interested in the various conspiracy theories regarding the authorship and intent behind the Bard's works. This post only covers the first two interests. Sorry.

Image source: Amazon

Ian Doescher describes himself as a fan of both Star Wars and Shakespeare, and says he was inspired to combine these interests after seeing another Shakespeare play re-imagined in a new setting. He re-wrote the story as a 3,076-line iambic pentameter script, including a few stage directions and other notes.

The content of the script has several nods to fans of both Shakespeare and Star Wars. Many soliloquies clearly reference well-known Shakespearean lines from various plays. There are also winks to Star Wars as well, particularly in the form of this line by Han Solo at the end of the Cantina scene:

[To innkeeper:] Pray, goodly sir, forgive me for the mess.

[Aside:] And whether I shot first, I'll ne'er confess!

My opinions

Some of the references to the larger Star Wars universe seemed jarring, as though they were shoe-horned in to meet some predetermined quota rather than fit the needs of the script. Many of the soliloquies seemed too long and melodramatic even by Shakespearean standards and disrupted the flow of the story rather than enhancing it, although I could be wrong in this respect since I am no expert in the source material here.

Setting those complaints aside, this is a superb mashup of genres that generally works better than I would have expected. As noted by the author, George Lucas was heavily influenced by Joseph Campbell's The Hero With a Thousand Faces, which was in turn a work analyzing the history of mythology and literature including Shakespeare. The themes of heroism and tragedy and the character archetypes are universals.