AFTERWORD.

William Shakespeare’s Star Wars.

At first glance, the title seems absurd.

But there’s a surprising and very real connection between George Lucas’s cinematic masterpiece and the thirty-seven (give or take) plays of William Shakespeare. That connection is a man named Joseph Campbell, author of the landmark book The Hero with a Thousand Faces.

Campbell was famous for his pioneering work as a mythologist. He studied legends and myths from throughout world history to identify the recurring elements—or archetypes—that power all great storytelling. Through his research, Campbell discovered that certain archetypes appeared again and again in narratives separated by hundreds of years, from ancient Greek mythologies to classic Hollywood westerns. Naturally, the plays of William Shakespeare were an important source for Campbell’s scholarship, with brooding prince Hamlet among his cadre of archetypal heroes.

George Lucas was among the first filmmakers to consciously apply Campbell’s scholarship to motion pictures. “In reading The Hero with a Thousand Faces,” he told Campbell’s biographers, “I began to realize that my first draft of Star Wars was following classic motifs … so I modified my next draft according to what I’d been learning about classical motifs and made it a little bit more consistent.”

To put it more simply, Campbell studied Shakespeare to produce The Hero with a Thousand Faces, and Lucas studied Campbell to produce Star Wars. So it’s not at all surprising that the Star Wars saga features archetypal characters and relationships similar to those found in Shakespearean drama. The complicated parent/child relationship of Darth Vader/Luke Skywalker (and the mentor/student relationship of Obi-Wan Kenobi/Luke Skywalker) recalls plays like Henry IV Parts 1 and 2, The Tempest, and Hamlet. Like Sith lords, many of Shakespeare’s villains are easily identifiable and almost entirely evil, with notable baddies including Iago (Othello), Edmund (King Lear), and Don John (Much Ado about Nothing). Still others, like Darth Vader, are more conflicted and complex in their malevolence: Hamlet’s Claudius and the band of conspirators in Julius Caesar. Destiny and fate are key themes of Star Wars, as they are in Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Macbeth.

Shakespeare’s plays and Star Wars also feature a host of colorful supporting players. C-3PO and R2-D2 observe and comment on the action like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Chewbacca is as untamable as Caliban. Lando is as smooth and self-interested (at first) as Brutus. Obi-Wan Kenobi is like a wise Prospero (before death) or a haunting King Hamlet (after). Jabba the Hutt enjoys a diet worthy of Falstaff. Boba Fett is like Richard III’s murderers 1, 2, and 3, but with a jetpack and blaster instead of a knife. Yoda’s speech is as backward as Dogberry’s but as wise as Polonius’s.

The works of Shakespeare and the Star Wars movies also share a comparable level of popularity and relevance. All well-rounded postmodern cultural connoisseurs are expected to have at least passing familiarity with both sets of stories, and both have percolated into our everyday language: you’re as likely to hear one of Shakespeare’s enduring phrases (“good riddance,” “faint-hearted,” “elbow room,” and many others) as an encouragement to “use the force.” If Star Wars were an actual Shakespearean play, we would most likely classify it as a fantasy, in the vein of The Tempest. However, it also has elements of a history (the story of the Galactic Empire with all the intrigue of Richard III), a comedy (all’s well that ends well, after all), or, taken as a six-movie arc, the Tragedy of Anakin Skywalker.

I had the idea for William Shakespeare’s Star Wars after watching the original trilogy for the millionth time and (soon afterward) attending four shows at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. I’d already committed every scene and speech of the Star Wars saga to memory, but the Shakespeare festival introduced me to something new: The Very Merry Wives of Windsor, Iowa, an adaptation by Alison Carey of the classic comedy set in contemporary Iowa among a populace happily embracing gay marriage. I saw the appeal of applying the Shakespearean tradition to surprising and nontraditional story elements, and the next morning I woke up with the idea for this book.

My interests in language and wordplay came in handy while attempting to translate so much classic movie dialogue into iambic pentameter. For those unfamiliar with the phrase, iambic pentameter is the metrical form that Shakespeare uses in his plays and sonnets. An iamb is the syllable pattern unstressed-stressed, and pentameter means each line has five iambs, so a line of iambic pentameter sounds like this: da-DUM da-DUM da-DUM da-DUM da-DUM (Simon and Garfunkel’s “I’d rather be a hammer than a nail” is a perfect example). The rhythm of iambic pentameter feels natural and intuitive to me, so I had a lot of fun writing 3,076 lines of it. Geeky trivia: this puts William Shakespeare’s Star Wars at an average length for a Shakespearean play (A Comedy of Errors is the shortest, at 1,786 lines; Hamlet is the longest, at 4,024).

This has been a labor of love, and I’ve enjoyed every syllable.