Book Review: 'William Shakespeare's Jedi the Last: Star Wars Part the Eighth'

Cover art by Nicolas Delort (C) 2018 Quirk Books and Lucasfilm Ltd. (LFL) 

On July 10, 2018, Philadelphia-based Quirk Books published Ian Doescher’s William Shakespeare’s Jedi the Last: Star Wars the Eighth, a literary mashup of writer-director Rian Johnson’s Star Wars – Episode VIII: The Last Jedi and the works of William Shakespeare.

The Force,  The Force,

My kingdom for the Force! ­– from the dust jacket blurb, Jedi the Last

Once again, the geeky, witty, and talented author of the William Shakespeare’s Star Wars series takes readers on a delightful journey to the space-fantasy universe created 41 years ago by writer-director George Lucas – with a twist that is in turn radical and logical. He takes a 21^st Century film – The Last Jedi – and presents it as an Elizabethan age stage production from the quill of the Bard of Avon, rendered in authentic iambic pentameter and, in the case of Yoda’s famously inverted dialogue, haikus.

Is this a lightsaber which I see before me, the handle toward my hand? While valiant Rey entreats Luke Skywalker to take up arms against a sea of troubles, the dreadful First Order pursues the Resistance, full of sound and fury.

As he has done in the previous seven parts of the William Shakespeare’s Star Wars cycle, Doescher painstakingly recreates the 2017 Lucasfilm production scene by scene, from the traditional title crawl – presented here as a Prologue spoken by a Shakespearean-style Chorus – all the way to The Last Jedi’s moving (and controversial) denouement on the remote ocean world of Ahch-to. He also follows the great poet-dramatist’s conventions of dividing the play into five acts.

The Star Wars saga continues, with [the] Bard of Avon providing some of the biggest shocks yet! Alack, the valiant Resistance must flee from the scoundrels of the First Order, and it falls to Rey, Finn, Poe, Rose, and BB-8 to take up arms against a sea of troubles. Can they bring Snoke’s schemes to woe, destruction, ruin, and decay? Will Luke Skywalker take the stage once more, and aid General Leia in the winter of her discontent?

Authentic meter, stage directions, reimagined movie scenes and dialogue, and hidden Easter eggs throughout will entertain and impress fans of Star Wars and Shakespeare alike. Every scene and character from the film appears in the play, along with twenty woodcut-style illustrations that depict an Elizabethan version of the Star Wars galaxy. – from the publisher’s website, www.quirkbooks.com

In his afterword, Doescher writes:

William Shakespeare’s Jedi the Last sticks to the character-specific dialogue conventions that loyal readers have come to expect: Finn using F’s and N’s in each of his lines, Poe’s Edgar Allan Poe’s references, acrostics in Rey’s longer speeches, Yoda speaking in haiku, villains reciting villanelles, R2’s asides to the audience, BB-8’s skip code, Admiral Ackbar’s words ending in -ap, Captain Phasma’s words of steel, and even the AT-M6 and AT-AT walkers’ murderers’ scenes. (This time, I borrowed from the murderers’ dialogue in Richard III.  In The Empire Striketh Back, the AT-ATs’ dialogue was borrowed from the murderers in Macbeth.)  

 My Take

Doescher, a Portland (Oregon) writer, was born 45 days after the premiere of Star Wars (aka Star Wars – Episode IV: A New Hope) and became a fan of that “galaxy far, far away” when he saw Return of the Jedi at the age of six. He also fell in love with the works of Shakespeare as a teen in middle school. He began adapting the original Star Wars trilogy several years ago – having been inspired by watching The Merry Wives of Windsor, Iowa at a Shakespeare festival in Oregon, as well as Quirk Books Jane Austen/zombie mashup Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.

Jedi the Last: Star Wars Part the Eighth is a delightful and thought-provoking homage not just to the latest installment of the “main Saga” created four decades ago by George Lucas and continued by his creative heirs at Lucasfilm, but also the man who enriched the English language with his comedies, tragedies, histories, and sonnets 400 years ago.

As a writer, reader, and Star Wars fan, I give this book my highest recommendation. Jedi the Last is truly a wonderful work of literary art, and though it’s billed as a parody, Doescher’s “mashup” takes the task of adapting Rian Johnson’s screenplay into a 17^th Century stage production seriously…but not too seriously. There are plenty of funny lines to lighten up this darkest of the Sequel Trilogy dramas, and artist Nicolas Delort’s woodcut-like cover art and interior illustrations are outstanding, both in their overall quality and their quirky anachronistic charm.