Just found this at the library, and now that I've read two pages I felt compelled to come and recommend it heartily to everyone!

I can't even imagine the work that went into translating Star Wars into a Shakespearean play. This is fabulous stuff!

William Shakespeare's Star Wars, by Ian Doescher -- Amazon

Where's the {like} button here??




Seriously-- thank you. I can see that a copy of this is in my DD's future.

I knew my people would understand!

Does she, by any chance, do speech team? I could totally see this for a humorous interp. piece! (It's what I would have done, if it had been around -- as it was, I did Alice's Restaurant and the bulldozer bit from Hitchhiker's Guide.)

How fun, I did the bulldozer bit into an iambic pentameter verse in college. I have a token protest against Star Wars, because too many think liking it is enough to be considered a scifi fan (ditto Tolkien and fantasy.)

Oh, Zen, I would love to see that! I wasn't so ambitious, and just did it straight.

No, sadly-- only competitive public speaking via 4-H, which just... doesn't..."get" this kind of thing. (Nor, apparently, science topics, no matter how well presented. Meh.) She does pretty well most of the time, but it's soul-sucking to do what "plays well" there. She's got an avant-garde soul yearning for wildly original performance art... and she's trapped in The Museum of Velvet Elvis Paintings.

She has pimped up a LOT of the Bard's works, though-- being inspired by many of the same influences as this author. Right down to particulars, in fact, though we did miss that particular play that year in favor of something else. All the Way I think. That was spectacularly good, (I include the link because it.was.awesome) but I digress.


DD tends to take Shakespeare into the musical theater domain and add a dash of Monty Python, rather than pulling things the other direction. Her latest notion was "King Larry Spectaculus," in which Mr. Las Vegas himself takes on the role of the aging Lear. With showgirls. You don't even want to know what she envisions for Chekhov's Seagull.

I have a feeling that there is something very Baz-Luhrmann-meets-John-Cleese about what goes in on her head.

The girl is BEGGING me to purchase this item for her. She "neeeeeeeeeeeeeds" it. She's already talking about using an excerpt of this or of the RSC-Complete Works, (abridged) as an audition monologue.

Little walk down memory lane here, looks actually more like I was going for something Seussian (twenty five years ago.) I know somewhere I revised this a couple of times, but found the first massiviely scratched out version first.

The start of it:
A man with his robe and a towel had come out
After worriedly glancing and looking about
He saw something coming to knock his house down
Seeing this danger he lay on the ground
And the large yellow object groaned to a stop
Out came a man in a suit, a real fop
They discussed and they argued and they screamed for a bit
"But the order are file away downtown
and for years its been known where this highway was bound"
(skipping some)
Strange mumblings and squawkings gave Arthur some fear
'til Ford leaned over and slipped a fish in his ear
---
Etc.

That is too funny! I might have scored better with something like that. Judges tended to look at me like I'd just fallen out of the sky, for some reason.

Love it.

Lol. I love it.

One of my favorites:
Dick and Jane Hamlet

That just about covers it, all right!