William Shakespeare's The Empire Striketh Back

Now Lando, shalt thou go?

LANDO

—Aye, Luke, for all
Hath been prepar’d. When we find Jabba and
The bounty hunter, we shall tell thee all.

LUKE

I’ll meet thee where we plann’d—on Tatooine—
My homeland that is now estrang’d from me.

LANDO

Good princess, now farewell. Apologies
Most earnest I convey again, and with
Them come a vow: we shall find Han, I swear.

LUKE

Dear Chewie, I’ll await thy signal.

CHEWBAC.

—Auugh!

LUKE

Now take thou care—the Force be with ye both.

[They move to separate parts of the stage.

LANDO

Now ends this troubl’d time of Empire’s rise,
Our time of harsh betrayal, painful loss.
Now have we learn’d what friendship truly costs,
And in the learning lost a comrade strong.

LEIA

Along the way, our hearts were movèd much:
By sacred love, most wondrous to behold,
By bravery that shall outlive the times,
By sacrifice of our most precious friends.

LUKE

Encounters unexpected we did meet
With masters wise and persons unforeseen.
These are the star wars, yet they are not done—
For sure, the final chapter’s just begun.

Enter chorus as epilogue.

CHORUS

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 alclass="underline" 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 here
While 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:

There is a willow grows aslant a brook,
That shows his hoar leaves in the glassy stream;
There with fantastic garlands did she come
Of crow-flowers, nettles, daisies, and long purples
That liberal shepherds give a grosser name,
But our cold maids do dead men’s fingers call them:
There, on the pendant boughs her coronet weeds
Clambering to hang, an envious sliver broke;
When down her weedy trophies and herself
Fell in the weeping brook. Her clothes spread wide;
And, mermaid-like, awhile they bore her up:
Which time she chanted snatches of old tunes;
As one incapable of her own distress,
Or like a creature native and indued
Unto that element: but long it could not be
Till that her garments, heavy with their drink,
Pull’d the poor wretch from her melodious lay
To muddy death.

This device is called on more frequently in William Shakespeare’s The Empire Striketh Back, giving the chorus a needed break.

Fourth, Lando. As much as I like Billy Dee Williams, and as smooth as he was in 1980, in my opinion his character isn’t fleshed out very well. We never know what he was thinking when he was forced to betray his friend, or what made him decide to help Leia and Chewbacca in the end. Filling in some of Lando’s story with asides and soliloquies that show how conflicted he feels hopefully gives him some depth and makes him even more compelling than in the movie.

Once again, writing William Shakespeare’s The Empire Striketh Back was a delight. Most Star Wars fans agree that Empire is the best of the original trilogy, and I hope I’ve done it justice. I say “most Star Wars fans” because in fact, Empire is not my personal favorite. I prefer Return of the Jedi, thanks in large part to two things. First, it is the first Star Wars movie I saw in the theater (I was six). Second, when I was growing up we owned a VHS tape of From Star Wars to Jedi: The Making of a Saga, and I loved hearing about the seven puppeteers who made Jabba move, seeing how the rancor came to life, learning how the speeder bike sequences were done, and so on.