William Shakespeare’s The Force Doth Awaken: Star Wars Part The Seventh by Ian Doescher (2017) Book Review

I became a huge fan of Star Wars in 1977, when I was five years old and saw the first film in the theater. I started collecting the toys and everything else I could get my hands on. I stopped being a fan a couple of years ago when I saw The Force Awakens. What a useless, pointless pile of garbage. Disney is all about money and marketing; Disney cares nothing about story, originality or character development. As a result, Disney destroyed Star Wars. I haven’t even bothered to see The Last Jedi. Who cares? It’s done. I was curious, however, to see if Ian Doescher would continue his series of Star Wars Shakespeare books. And I am glad to see that he has, for his take on The Force Awakens, titled William Shakespeare’s The Force Doth Awaken, is so much better than the film.

As with the previous volumes in this series, the story is divided into five acts, with the dialogue done in iambic pentameter. The opening crawl is presented as a Shakespearean sonnet. BB8, unlike R2-D2, does not speak in English, but in droid sounds, though still in iambic pentameter. BB8 is the best of the new characters in the saga, with the others falling quite flat. When watching the film, I found Kylo Ren to be the lamest villain in the history of cinema. He’s just a whiny little bitch. Give him a spanking and send him to bed without supper. But he is a much more enjoyable character in this telling. For example, check out this speech: “Impotence beyond imagining!/O, fie, that I this madness must endure –/A fico for thine errant, bumbling face!/The great First Order bested is by droids,/Who ally ‘gainst us with our own stormtroopers?/Is this the folly-fallen end to which/The galaxy doth run with lout-like haste?/Ay, out upon it! Tilly-vally! Tush!” (pages 50-51). I might have truly enjoyed the movie had he spoken like that. The rathtars were among the many stupid things in the film, but in the book they are delightful, as they sing their lines. Oh, if only they could reshoot the film using this book as the script.

Of course, there are plenty of references to specific speeches from Shakespeare’s work. At one point Rey asks, “What fight through yonder window breaks?” (p. 55), obviously a reference to Romeo’s line in Romeo And Juliet. And Maz does a version of Mercutio’s Queen Mab speech, oddly speaking of herself in the third person: “O, then I see keen Maz hath been with you./She is the vision giver, and she comes/In shape no bigger than an agate stone/On the forefinger of a Jedi Knight” (p. 88). And Han Solo says, “We would be less than kin, still less be kind” (p. 79), a play on Hamlet’s line “A little more than kin and less than kind.” Han Solo also does a version of Henry The Fifth’s famous St. Crispin’s Day speech: “This day is call’d the feast of Odan-Urr./They that outlive this day, and come safe home,/Will stand a-tiptoe when this day is nam’d,/And rouse them at the name of Odan-Urr./They that shall live this day, and see old age,/Will yearly on the vigil feast their neighbors/And say, ‘Tomorrow’s the centenary.’/Then will they strip their sleeves and show their scars/And say, ‘These wounds I had on Odan’s day’” (p. 118). Certainly it is a longer speech than Han ever uttered in any of the films. He concludes the speech, “We few, we happy few, we band of comrades;/For they today who shed their blood with me/Shall be my comrades; be they ne’er so vile,/This day shall gentle their condition, yea./So be ye not afeard, my friends, be strong –/’Twill be our finest victory to date,/This grand Starkiller shall be our kill yet!” (p. 119).

There are some playful non-Shakespeare references in this book as well. For example, early on, Finn says, “Lo, I have walk’d five hundred miles at least,/And I would walk five hundred more, forsooth!” (p. 41). That is obviously a reference to The Proclaimers song “I’m Gonna Be (500 Miles).”

I don’t think that Ian Doescher disliked The Force Awakens nearly as much I did, but he does offer a scene that pokes fun at the movie’s complete lack of originality. The scene finds two Stormtroopers, one much older than the other, talking about events from the original Star Wars film, and how things have changed greatly since then. Trooper 2, as evidence of how things are so different now, mentions Darth Vader: “When I began my job,/I did report unto a dreadful man/All garb’d in black, his face hid ‘neath a mask,/With vicious moods and lightsaber of red” (p. 122). Trooper 1 then asks, “Hath Kylo Ren been all this time alive?” Trooper 2 mentions the Death Star, describing it: “A vast, forbidding base form’d in a sphere,/Which some mistook for some celestial body./It hous’d more soldiers than most armies boast./Its purpose was to crush a planet whole” (p. 123). That leads Trooper 1 to ask, “Starkiller Base existed even then?” Many more similarities between A New Hope and The Force Awakens are pointed out in this scene, which is presented with a wonderful sense of humor. As you might guess, it is my favorite scene of the book.

William Shakespeare’s The Force Doth Awaken: Star Wars Part The Seventh was written by Ian Doescher, and published in 2017 by Quirk Books.