Friday, July 15, 2016

Book Note: Doctor Who: The Shakespeare Notebooks

Richards, Justin. Doctor Who: The Shakespeare Notebooks. New York: Harper Design, 2014.

Have you ever been excited about something you thought could be really great and then found yourself exceedingly disappointed in it?  I mean, besides this blog?

You (probably) know that I'm a Shakespeare fan. I'm also a Doctor Who fan. And I love when the two collide (for one instance of which, q.v.).

The episode of Doctor Who entitled "The Shakespeare Code" is extremely well done. For a while, I showed it to my Shakespeare and Film class regularly as one of the Mystery Shakespearean Derivatives (for which, q.v.). I had high hopes for Doctor Who: The Shakespeare Notebooks.

Ideally, the book would be enjoyable for someone like me—someone with feet in both the Shakespeare camp and the Doctor Who camp. And perhaps it would be enjoyable for someone in just one of those camps. But I think it probable that the enterprise is just too campy.

The book has some "journal written by Shakespeare," but it's mostly "drafts of famous scenes with interpolations by various Doctors.

Here's an example of the former:


And here's an example of the latter:


I'm afraid there's just not too much to thrill in all that.

In closing, here's an example of the "modified quotes from Shakespeare" genre that are sprinkled throughout the text:


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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.
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.

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