Book 8 of 2013: William Shakespeare’s Star Wars

"Friends, rebels, starfighters...."  "Once more into the trench dear friends..."

Now admit it, who could resist a book with a title like that?!?  Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope (or, as most of us originally came to know and love it, Star Wars) as a Shakespearean play.  I mean it just cries out to be read!

It was a chance find, the sort one sometimes happens upon when browsing.  And I needed at least one light "nothing" book to read while on vacation.  So I bought this one.  It works out to about an average length Shakespearean play, according to the afterword and is a delightful way to spend part of a day (if you enjoy iambic pentameter and the Star Wars universe that is, so there may be a bit of a limited target audience).  And, as the author says there is in fact some academic/philosophical/theoretical rationale to the project.

One who knows the works of Shakespeare would likely find passages (like the two cited above) that echo specific scenes and passages.  And because of the Shakespearean structure we have monologues!  We see inside Luke and Han and Vader and Kenobi--and also C3PO and R2D2, we hear their thougths and feelings.

Btu lets be honest, I didn't get it for any academic value (which it does have).  I got it because it looked like fun--and indeed it was.