‘William Shakespeare’s Star Wars: The Empire Striketh Back’

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE’S STAR WARS: THE EMPIRE STRIKETH BACK (10 out of 10) Written by Ian Doescher, illustrated by Nicolas Delort, published by Quirk Books 2014.

There are times that someone with the right kind of talent and right kind of vision come upon an idea that’s so brilliant that you have to wonder why someone else didn’t come up with it first. At the same time, you’re so glad that THAT particular person is executing the project that you’re glad that the universe didn’t bring the idea along sooner. 

That’s the case with “William Shakespeare’s Star Wars: The Empire Striketh Back” by Ian Doescher. Obviously the second book in a trilogy (the first was William Shakespeare’s Star Wars: Verily, A New Hope), it’s easily my favorite Star Wars… anything to come out in the last ten years. A big, completely biased part of that is my great love of “The Empire Strikes Back.” When seven year old me saw it in the theaters, it blew my mind. I had watched and re-read the first “Star Wars” movie and picture book adaptation so many times, played with my action figures in our sandbox, and basically lived and breathed Star Wars in the three years between “A New Hope” and “The Empire Strikes Back.” Watching the sequel in the theater, it took all of my thoughts and visions about Star Wars, and blew the doors open on the possibilities of that universe. I wasn’t stuck with playing out a single storyline over and over again–those characters could go to other planets, face new dangers, find new allies and new enemies…and their world was more complex and exciting for it.

By now, I’ve seen “Empire” quite possibly one hundred times. Even though I still love it each time, and usually say that it’s my favorite movie of all time…I pretty much know it forwards and backwards. Every line, every sound effect, every note of John Williams’ beautiful score. I didn’t think there was anything that could deepen my understanding of “Empire.”

I didn’t think anything could deepen my understanding of “Empire”

Then Ian Doescher came along. His “William Shakespeare’s Star Wars” series takes the scripts from the classic trilogy and adapts them to be like William Shakespeare’s plays. That includes Elizabethan language, stage directions, and even iambic pentameter. There are woodcut-style illustrations, showing the characters in tights and ruff collars. There are wooden AT-ATs (Imperial Walkers) being pulled across the stage on little carts by ropes. It would still be a fun idea, even if it weren’t done as well as Doescher does it. But what he does is brilliant.

Some of the pleasure I find in this book is simply in how he translates lines I already know by heart:

The original lines from the movie:

LEIA: “Why you stuck-up…half-witted…scruffy-looking…nerfherder!!”

HAN: “Who’s scruffy-looking?”

And then Doescher’s version:

LEIA: “Thou arrogant half-wit,
Thou oversized child, thou friend of slime,
Thou man of scruffy looks, thou who herd’st nerfs,
Thou fool-born wimpled roughhewn waste of flesh!”

HAN: “What scruffy? Scruffy, how? Whose scruffiness?”

I love that. I love Elizabethan language, whether in Shakespeare or the King James Bible. It’s a beautifully poetic language, and as someone who reads both German and English, I love the connections between the two. Doescher does Elizabethan well. Better than the example above actually…I just like those lines. They seem even more Princess Leia than Princess Leia. 

“thou who herd’st nerfs!”

Some of my favorite parts in his first book are the soliloquies and asides — the first where a character basically gives a speech revealing their truest selves to the reader/audience, and the second where the character will break from the scene and address the audience directly before going back into the action. Doescher does basically what I expected with this, deepening characters who we already know, giving them an inner life that we didn’t know before. The most remarkable cases of this are with Lando Calrissian and Boba Fett, each of whom is more a sketch of a character in the original movie. Doescher gives them both more lines than they had, but also deeper motivations and more insight into what they’re thinking in the complicated world they’re navigating. Why would Lando betray his longtime friend Han Solo? It’s here. And it’s really wonderful. 

Ian Doescher both surprised and delighted me with some other soliloquies and lines; he gives voice to the Wampa (the ice monster who captures Luke in the beginning of the movie), the aforementioned AT-ATs, and most remarkably, the “Exogorth” — the giant space slug that inhabits an asteroid cave. The Millennium Falcon hides there, then flees after our heroes realize where they’re at. The Exogorth’s last lines:

“Was e’er an exogorth as sad as I?
Was e’er a tragedy as deep as mine?
I shall with weeping crawl back to my cave,
Which shall, sans food, belike become my grave.”

In the author’s notes at the end of the book, Doescher explains some things he did differently with “The Empire Striketh Back,” like reducing the chorus from the first book, instead having characters describe things the audience can’t see offstage. He also explains why he has Yoda break from iambic pentameter. I noticed while I was reading that Yoda was still using his “backwards speech,” but there was something different about the lines. Turns out he was speaking in haiku–an elegant solution to Doescher’s problem of making his language different in a script where everyone is speaking oddly. He also explains that he had Boba Fett speak in prose, and gives examples of Shakespeare doing the same. 

Honestly, there are things on every page that I could show as examples of how this book delighted me. I typically devour books within a day or two, then move on to the next. I’ve savored “The Empire Striketh Back” over a period of several weeks, because I didn’t want it to end. It’s a brilliant, well-executed mash-up that improves on the Bard. The Bard in this instance is George Lucas, but I think Shakespeare himself would have found beauty in these pages. The final installment in this series was just released, and I’m almost done reading it. “The Jedi Doth Return” is one that I both looked forward to and dreaded, because this is the end of this War among the Stars.