William Shakespeare's The Empire Striketh Back

A glooming peace this morning with it brings,No shine of starry light or planet’s glow.For though our heroes ’scape the Empire’s slings,The great rebellion ne’er has been so low.Brave Han is for the Empire’s gain betray’d,Which doth leave Princess Leia’s heart full sore.Young Luke hath had his hand repair’d, remade—

The man is whole, but shaken to the core.Forgive us, gentles, for this brutal play,This tale of sorrow, strife, and deepest woes.Ye must leave empty, sighing lack-a-day,Till we, by George, a brighter play compose.Our story endeth, though your hearts do burn,And shall until the Jedi doth return.

[Exeunt omnes.

END.

Afterword.

A Winter’s Tale, indeed: William Shakespeare’s The Empire Striketh Back. Let me lift the curtain a bit to tell you about four aspects of what you’ve just read.

First of all: what does Yoda sound like in a galaxy filled with Elizabethan speech? This was the question that gnawed at me as I began to write this second Star Wars book. Yoda is famous for his inverted phrase order, but many people who read William Shakespeare’s Star Wars

commented that every character in it sounds a little like Yoda. So what to do? Originally, I had four different ideas:

• Do a complete reversal and have Yoda talk like a modern person: “Stop it. Don’t try, just either do it or don’t do it. Seriously.”

• Have Yoda talk in something like Old English, approximating Chaucer: “Nee, do ye nae trie, aber due it oder due it not.” (My Chaucer admittedly isn’t great.)

• Don’t do anything special, and have Yoda talk like the other characters.

• Repeat Yoda’s lines verbatim from the movie, nodding to the fact that Yoda already sounds a little Shakespearean.

In the end, as you’ve read, I had a fifth idea, which I hope was better than any of these. Yoda is a wise teacher, almost like a sensei—he has something of an eastern sensibility about him. Why not express that by making all of his lines haiku? Yes, I know: Shakespeare never wrote in haiku. But he did break from iambic pentameter in certain cases—Puck from A Midsummer Night’s Dream speaks in iambic tetrameter, songs in several Shakespearean works break meter, and so on. And yes, I know: the five–seven–five syllable pattern I adhere to in Yoda’s haiku is a modern constraint, not part of the original Japanese poetic form. Most haiku are simpler than Yoda’s lines and do not express complete sentences as Yoda’s haiku do—I know, I know! Remember, this isn’t scholarship; it’s fun. For you purists:

If these haiku have offended,

Think but this, and all is mended:That you have but slumber’d hereWhile these haiku did appear…

Second, William Shakespeare’s The Empire Striketh Back introduces us to the first character in my Shakespearean adaptations who speaks in prose rather than meter: Boba Fett. Shakespeare often used prose to separate the lower classes from the elite—kings spoke in iambic pentameter while porters and gravediggers spoke in prose. In writing William Shakespeare’s Star Wars, I did not want to be accused of being lazy about writing iambic pentameter, but with this book it was time to introduce some prose. Who better to speak in base prose than the basest of bounty hunters?

Third, one criticism of William Shakespeare’s Star Wars I heard several times—and took to heart—was that I overused the chorus to explain the action sequences. Some argued that I shouldn’t have used a chorus at all, which I disagree with; when I began writing the first book, the chorus seemed like a logical way to “show” the action scenes without actually showing them, and there was precedent in Shakespeare’s Henry V. However, by leaning heavily on the chorus, I neglected another Shakespearean device, of having a character describe action that the audience can’t see. Here’s an example from Hamlet, Act IV, scene 7, in which Gertrude describes what happened to Ophelia: