Much ado about something
Can a TV drama truly be Shakespearean? Donal O’Donoghue offers a cautionary tale culled from the annals of make-believe
It is high summer and jobbing TV writer Bill Shakespeare Jr. is feverishly writing the nal pages of his latest screenplay. “My nest work yet,” says BS, as some know him, as he types ‘ The End’, a useful punctuation as many commissioning editors are usually puzzled as to where in fact Bill’s stories actually nish. In the far corner of his stygian study, the writer’s pet cat, Gobbo, oblivious to the genius in his orbit, is dreaming of getting a bit part in the next Disney cartoon.
Writing under a pseudonym, Bill has yet to win the plaudit that other, lesser writers in his estimable opinion, have basked in for years. Yet ‘Shakespearean’ is the only adjective that truly describes his hard-to-define pilot shows which have yet to make it to air. Among these also-rans are the soapy drama Call the Doctor-On-Call in which a young medic falls in love with himself, Big Little ighs, which chronicles the rites-of-passage of a struggling High School wrestler and Unhappy Valet, the beguiling tale of a miserable butler with no hand-eye co-ordination.
In his darkest hour Bill Shakespeare contemplated cashing in on the plot lines of his illustrious namesake: after all it worked for others. ere’s House of Cards redrafted from Macbeth (“is that an allegation I see before me?”), the plane survivors of Lost rewritten as the shipwrecked ensemble of e Tempest (“we are such stu as multi-million dollar contracts are made of ”) and the biker drama, Sons of Anarchy rewired from Hamlet
(“To die, to sleep, perchance to dream of a Harley Davidson”).
Holding his latest masterpiece at arm’s length, Bill thinks of those writers who came before him. David Chase, whose mobster drama, e Sopranos, was regularly described as Shakespearean for its twisted family plots to last year’s HBO hit, Jesse Armstrong’s Succession, in which a King Learlike patriarch still pulls the familial strings in his media empire. “Shall I compare thee to a Shakespearean tragedy?” says young Bill in the belief it might elevate him into the Stratford-sphere.
Yet in the back of his mind, anxiety niggles. With the long-running hullabaloo about authorship of the Shakespearean canon, can we say it’s truly Shakespearean anymore? Maybe it’s more Marlowe-like or perhaps Bacon-esque? “Perhaps I should totally go-double barrelled and be the next William Bacon-Marlowe,” says the man with the golden name. “Probably not,” mewls Gobbo. But his master, not yet versed in the complexities of cat talk, only hears ‘miaowh!’ and beyond that his own life laughing back at him.
The End . . . or is it?