Star Wars gets the Willie Shakespeare treatment

“To R2B2B or not to R2B2B"—that is the question in a new book by Ian Doescher titled William Shakespeare’s Star Wars.

The construct is simple. You know how everyone is always going on about how George Lucas’s prose isn’t going to make anyone forget about Ernest Hemingway? Or, for that matter, the guy that wrote the 1978 Battlestar Galactica movie?

Well, imagine if George Lucas hadn’t dreamed up a world filled with talking droids, spaceship-flying sasquatch-thingys, and swashbuckling heros with complete boners for their sisters.

Instead, imagine if no less than the Bard had dreamed up Star Wars.

Subtitled Verily, a New Hope, Doescher’s tome starts with:

It is a period of civil war.
The spaceships of the rebels, striking swift
From base unseen, have gain’d a vict’ry o’er
The cruel Galactic Empire, now adrift.
Amidst the battle, rebel spies prevail’d 5
And stole the plans to a space station vast,
Whose pow’rful beams will later be unveil’d
And crush a planet: ’tis the DEATH STAR blast

From there we move to C-3PO hysterically kicking the action off by intoning “I’ll warrant madness lies herein!” while R2-D2 proves no more adept at Old Englishe than even older, in-galaxy-far-far-away English with “Beep, beep, meep”.

The book comes with vintage-looking woodcut illustrations by Nicolas Delort, as well as directions on how to get to Bard on the Beach for its rumoured upcoming double bill of All’s Well That Ends Well in a Mos Eisley Cantina, and The Merchant of the Millennium Falcon.