William Shakespeare's The Empire Striketh Back: Star Wars Part the Fifth (William Shakespeare's Star Wars)

What if the Star Wars films were written as stage plays by William Shakespeare? In this series (of which this is one volume out of nine covering all the films), we see the same stories familiar to us from Star Wars, but told in Elizabethan blank verse. For fans of both Lucas and the Bard, these books are excellent. They beautifully retell and re-imagine Star Wars, often bringing to the surface the latent content of the series; also, they are full of echoes of Shakespeare's standard works, and you can have lots of fun finding them and tracing them back to their sources. Lay on, Macduff!

“Remember,” Ian Doescher says in the afterword of The Empire Striketh Back, “This isn’t scholarship–it’s fun.”And with sincerest respect to the author of the follow-up to Verily, A New Hope, I disagree. But only because I happen to believe that it’s both. While it’s true that I had my issues with his first installment of William Shakespeare’s Star Wars, it was honestly out of love and respect for both source materials. And after reading his second entry, I can say that it won’t stop there.Doescher has set up two sets of Death Star-sized shoes to fill, and while it’s true that you can’t please everybody, the attention to detail paid by Shakespeare nerds can only be overpowered by the legendary nit-picking of a Star Wars nerd. Being that I’m a little bit of both, I feel properly authorized to examine this new/old trilogy. And to quote the infamous Bill of Kill Bill fame, “I’ve never been nice my whole life, but I’ll do my best to be sweet.”Right off the bat, we’re given two nods to the Bard–including a speech from the murderous Wampa that is easily 50% flat-out lifted from Snug the Joiner’s “Lion Speech” in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. This is only the beginning of what will end up being entirely too many lifts and “nods” to Shakespeare. Immediately I am not sure what to think. I’m looking for the bleakness of the original Empire Strikes Back, given a firmer foundation through the high stakes gore that a Shakespearean tragedy offers. And throughout the play, it’s clear that it has moments like those. But the vast majority is made up of what I’m forever henceforth referring to as “Talking AT-AT Moments”.I was truly intrigued at how Doescher would solve the problem of the grandiose AT-AT battle on Hoth in this installment, and was only somewhat amused to find that the AT-ATs would be portrayed by actors who would berate the enemy, give speeches, and shout out death cries. It’s a cute idea, I guess. But a handful of actors portraying wisecracking, skyscraper-tall death vehicles completely and entirely undercuts Empire‘s more sincere moments (we’ll get to them later).The Empire Striketh Back suffers from a perpetual self-awareness of how cute and novel it is, which ruins any real chance it has of being actually cute and novel. And that’s how we get talking AT-ATs. In Verily, A New Hope, Leia’s “You’re a little short for a stormtrooper” line is replaced with a clever monologue that is well written and does great justice to Shakespeare’s style. In Empire Strikes Back, Han’s esoteric cries of hydrospanners and horizontal boosters only work because they’re quick shouts during a thrilling chase scene. In Empire Striketh Back, they are expanded needlessly into lengthy chunks of asides that can only be described as horribly dull. This mistake is repeated again in the scene during which Admiral Piett witnesses the changing of Vader’s mask, and delivers a monologue that belabors the embarrassingly obvious and over-used metaphor of having masks on both the outside and inside.Now to be fair, I’m not asking Ian Doescher to reach the heights of literary genius that Shakespeare did–that would insane. But moments like these feel padded and superfluous.Despite all these complaints, there are moments where Empire Striketh Back is just sublime. Boba Fett’s first speech (written in Shakespearian prose to distinguish him as a member of the lower class) is, to borrow a phrase from Plato, just epically badass. It appears that nearly all of Doescher’s best moments are saved for the villains. The Emperor’s dialogue is truly fitting for this setting, as he already had something of a grand, Elizabethan bent to begin with. His dialogue (what little there is) definitely feels the most natural, and I’m looking forward to how his character is utilized and written in July’s The Jedi Doth Return.But if there’s one thing that Doescher deserves sincere credit for, it’s his development of Yoda’s voice. Yoda’s already-irregular speech patterns have been adapted to the Japanese 5-7-5 of haiku. It’s a simple decision, and it makes all the difference in the world. You truly appreciate the fact that he and Luke are literally from two different worlds. It’s a blending of East and West that I wouldn’t have thought to use, but there’s no denying that it works beautifully here. Yoda’s sincerity and his simple but gorgeous dialogue makes him the absolute best part of The Empire Striketh Back.It’s not an easy thing to blend two massively popular and important pieces of culture, particularly when they are separated by time and style in the way William Shakespeare and Star Wars are. And the last thing I want to do is discourage or put down a writer who has clearly tried so hard to consolidate the two in such a creative way. Ian Doescher is skilled and talented writer–of that there can be zero doubt. But too much of this series leaves me cold. It’s possible that I’m taking it all a little too seriously (Star Wars nerds are known for that), but all I’m truly asking for is a little more attention to the grand scope of both Shakespeare and the Star Wars universe. Both are massive and beautiful, and it does both a disservice to spend the majority of your work playing the “did you catch the reference?” game.And therein lies my main problem with this series. I mentioned it in my review of Verily, A New Hope, but there’s just too much “wink, wink, nudge, nudge” in these books. And that’s not to suggest that I don’t want this book to be fun. Shakespeare is fun. Star Wars is fun. But Shakespeare and Star Wars also have elemental levels of high drama and tragedy within them–and when we elbow the audience too much, asking “Get it??” over and over, we quash some of those beautifully high stakes.And to Ian Doescher’s credit, there are some truly wonderful moments here. But the majority of the books seem so obsessed with the novelty of what they’re doing that they lack serious heart. That won’t stop me from picking up The Jedi Doth Return in July, however, as this remains a series that belongs on every uber-nerd’s shelf.

The place in the canon of Shakespeare's The Empire Striketh Back is, of course, unchallenged. This is one of the most moving stories ever told, and it shows Shakespeare's genius at an early age.Rather than write YET ANOTHER review of how great this play is, however, I'd like to focus on a less-discussed topic related to ESB. George Lucas' 1980 film adaptation of the play.Lucas failed in several ways in his film adaptation of the Shakespeare classic. Like many Shakespearean movies from the 80s, the most glaring omission is the verse. The verse is as integral to Shakespeare's Empire as it is to any other of his plays, and Lucas, in a fashion that thankfully disappeared by the mid-90s, follows the contemporary trend to ignore the verse of Shakespeare plays. In fairness, hacks like James Earl Jones and Harrison Ford were likely unable to handle the verse with the same finesse as their more-talented costars (I'm thinking, of course, of Billy Dee Williams and Peter Mayhew). On the other hand, we see that omitting the verse causes eccentricities in Shakespeare's stories that ultimately fail on film. For instance, let's look at the most-obvious example: Yoda. Shakespeare was such a genius that he pioneered the haiku form long before it was rediscovered and employed in Japan almost forty years later. Trying to distinguish Yoda's verse from the other characters with his experimental style, Shakespeare produced such memorable lines as this one:"I my own counselShall keep on who's to be trained!A Jedi is wise."Compare this beautiful work of poetry to the movie's sloppy "translation":"My own counsel will I keep on who is to be trained!"Losing the verse mangles the line, producing a distasteful effect of anastrophe. I think it's safe to say that no one likes this alteration to the original. Furthermore, the addition that Jedi are wise never even appears in the movie. George Lucas, in adapting the text, seems completely unaware of the importance of this line; cutting "A Jedi is wise" leaves the audience wondering... Shakespeare's influence on such influential theorists such as Kierkegaard comes back to this line, and the audience is left wondering whether Jedi are wise or not. A simple cut changes the film for the worse.Another omission of the text is the chorus monologue describing the lightsaber fight with Vader. Everyone knows that Shakespeare hated violence more than anything, and never showed weaponry even a little in his plays. Consider, for instance, Romeo's duel with Tybalt in Romeo and Juliet, in which the two men *almost* engage in a pillow fight, only to decide that violence, even feathery, fluffy violence, solves nothing. Rather than preserving Shakespeare's pacifistic style, Lucas actually *shows* the lightsaber fight! I know that movies should take dramatic liberties with their sources, but showing violence onstage is so unlike Shakespeare - this text serving as further proof to that effect - that it's like Lucas didn't even read Shakespeare's play before filming.Perhaps the worst offender is one of Lucas' personal emendations, the groan-inducing lines spoken between Han and Leia at the carbon freezing chamber. "I love you" says Leia, to which Han replies, "I know." While one might argue for the merits of Lucas' writing in places (if one were to forget that the original verse existed for 400 years before the fact), but certainly this line above all others demonstrates that the text was better in iambic pentameter. How could anyone find an exchange like this endearing? It's beyond my ability to reconcile.If only Lucas had kept his directorial paws off Shakespeare's masterpiece, Empire Strikes Back may have been a good movie. Rumors exist that Irvin Kershner had his sights on directing a film adaptation of Shakespeare's masterpiece, but as it stands, I'm not sure the play even stands up to cinematic presentation. Some things are just better left in text.

The second instalment of Ian Doescher's of Shakespearean Star Wars. I think this volume is even better than the first one. The reason being if any story screemed Mcbeth type of themes of darkness such as curruption of the soul, betrayal it is the Empire Strikes Back.The play format with asides and soliloquies give great character insights into the characters, even better that the films. I love the Han and Leia are arguing than there is an aside of what they are thinking and reslly want to say to each other. There is more emphasis on Luke falling to the darkside in his soliloquy. There is even an interesting angle of Leia thinking towards the darkside in her soliloquy during the escape from Baspin. I am not sure about chorus but it is supposed to be play so I guess the need to be there somewhere.Anyone who is a fan of Star Wars and especially the Empire Strikes Back definitely give it a read. Though it has every line for the movie in Yoda I mean Elizabethan speech; it is not a long read and most of all it is FUN!!!

I love Star Wars myself, my Dad loves Star Wars, bought this for him for Christmas. What a great combo, a Shakespeare/Star Wars mash-up!The content is fun, funny, interesting, exciting. To have a new take on a classic story makes it like a new read.I was so excited to find this as it's hard to find new and unusual gifts, this was perfect!As always delivery from Amazon was super fast and I could collect from my local post office which is a fantastic help (as opposed to having to go all the way into town to collect from the main p.o. if I was out when item arrived).

I’ve bought this for my son for Christmas, it was on his Christmas list as he had seen it in a bookshop and said it was brilliant. I know he’s going to thoroughly enjoy reading it, a must for a die hard Star Wars fan.

A refreshing take on the classic Star Wars Trilogy resulting in hilarity and amusement for all.The books are a eye catcher for anyone whom is browsing through my bookcase and the detail of the artwork is really something to be admired. Even the book - the dust cover looks like an old book which is a nice touch.Overall, a very nice - if a little silly - product for anyone who appreciates Star Wars and Shakespeare.

Highly recommended by my Grandson. He's an avid reader and when he saw me after finishing the book. He was so enthusiastic, he found all of the books, great fun and a really entertaining read. He loves the humour, as much as the story. The style of writing really appealed to him.