Star Wars: Verily, A New Hope #bookreview

Bibliographic Info 

From WorldCat
Title:  William Shakespeare's Star Wars: verily, a new hope.
Author:  Ian Doescher; Daniel Davis; Jonathan Davis, (Narrator); January LaVoy; Marc Thompson;
Publisher:  New York : Books on Tape, 2013.
Edition/Format:  Audiobook : Fiction : English
Genre/Form:  Adaptations, Parodies, imitations, etc
Material Type:  Fiction, Audio book, etc.
Document Type:  Sound Recording
ISBN:  9780804191807 0804191808
OCLC Number:  869549899
Duration: 3 hr., 29 min.
Performer(s): Read by Daniel Davis, Jonathan Davis, January LaVoy and Marc Thompson.
Subjects:
Shakespeare, William, -- 1564-1616 -- Parodies, imitations, etc.
Star wars (Motion picture) -- Adaptations.
Star Wars fiction.

Background

Being a good librarian who's always looking to improve, I attended the American Library Association's (ALA) Annual conference last summer (2017) in Chicago. It was an absolute blast! It was also my first ALA Annual since I didn't exactly have the means to attend before this past summer. While I heard my colleagues tell stories of the grand buffet of books to be consumed, I really was not ready for it.

Some of these stories include an instance when a colleague packed boxes for the books they intended to pick up at the conference. These boxes were not going to fly back with her, they were headed back to Miami via the UPS store. Now that's what I call planning for a conference.

Opening night at the exhibition hall is like turning children loose in a candy store or turning teenagers loose at a Cici's pizza. Free books for librarians, uh-YES! As luck would have it, I saw this set of William Shakespeare's Star Wars audiobooks as I was about to plunge into the children's section. I probably tripped a few fellow bibliophiles and momentarily lost a colleague, but I scored this impressive tome.

It was not until later on that I inspected the cover at my hostel. (Yes, I stayed in a hostel in Chicago for 5 days this past summer.) This was not just a single title, but a trilogy--the original (IV, V & VI) Trilogy at that! What a score! Three titles in one relatively compact case. I knew this would be awesome!

Review

If the first thing that popped into your mind was, Wow! The Star Wars saga set to glorious iambic pentameter, sweet! You will NOT be disappointed by this audiobook. Ian Doescher marvelously converts the movie script into about 3,000 lines of Shakespearian verse and language, the chorus, fie and anon included.

Verily, a new hope is presented on five discs, representing the 5 acts of the play, naturally. Doescher also claims that Shakespeare and George Lucas are connected by Joseph Campbell. Lucas claims that he rewrote the Star Wars screenplay to align with Campbell's The Hero With A Thousand Faces, making Star Wars one of the first motion pictures to do so explicitly. Many of Campbell's archetypes ( a term actually coined by Carl Jung when he wrote about the Collective Unconscious) are clear in Shakespeare's plays. Well, more accurately, these archetypes are seen in most good literature from all over.

So there you have it! Shakespeare leads to Campbell then leads to Star Wars. Sort of... It's fun anyways!

It is fun to change the format of a beloved work and see to what kinds of interpretations it leads. When a film is represented as a novel, details must be added. When the format changes to a graphic novel, image stills take the lead. It is fascinating to observe the details required to transpose the movie into a play. But when you think about it, a screenplay is very similar to a play. So what we are reading (or hearing) is the script itself.

There are a few interpretive licenses taken with character development. I felt that Leia took on a bit of a flattened role. C3PO received a bit of an insult to his intelligence. And R2D2 received more credit for its role in orchestrating the entire saga.

Notwithstanding, this is an excellent piece to add to any Star Wars fanatic's library; particularly a literary fan. I can't wait to listen to The Empire Striketh Back and The Jedi Doth Return.

We are a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for us to earn fees by linking to Amazon.com and affiliated sites.