A review by lesserjoke
William Shakespeare's Star Wars: Verily, A New Hope by Ian Doescher

3.0

This book is built around a cute idea, but once you get past that basic gimmick of retelling the first Star Wars movie in iambic pentameter -- "In time so long ago begins our play / In star-crossed galaxy far, far away" and so on -- there aren't a whole lot of particularly original spins on the material. Debut author Ian Doescher presents the familiar script as a stageplay in faux-Elizabethan English (to mixed effect for some of the more cinematic moments reduced to exposition from a chorus), and although he includes plenty of nods at real Shakespeare lines, they generally come across as mere word-replacement reference humor rather than anything especially clever, a la Luke's declaiming at the Rebel briefing, "And citizens in Bespin now abed, / shall think themselves accurs'd they were not here." The scansion of the meter works throughout, but the expected sort of sparkling figurative language, the wry and raunchy wordplay that makes the Bard's work so engaging, is fairly sparse.

I think my favorite part of this text would be the audience asides that the writer has added in, including a few Puckish soliloquies in which R2-D2 breaks from his accustomed beeps and bloops to share his thoughts about his companions with us plainly. And it is the same great story as ever, presented in an admittedly fun new fashion. But overall, this strikes me as an experiment which doesn't entirely succeed and ultimately overstays its welcome. I don't feel I need to check out any of the franchise sequel and prequel versions (or unrelated titles like Get Thee Back to the Future or Much Ado about Mean Girls) that Doescher has subsequently produced.

Find me on Patreon | Goodreads | Blog | Twitter