The Bard on Board

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William Shakespeare has created some of the most memorable works in the history of the English language. So when you're a struggling writer, trying to find a good plot, why not take one of his?

A subtrope of Whole-Plot Reference, and also of Setting Update. A lot of Recycled in Space would be these as well (especially the rash of IN HIGH SCHOOL! films like 10 Things I Hate About You (The Taming of the Shrew), O (Othello), and She's the Man (Twelfth Night). Not to be confused with Shakespeare in Fiction.

This trope only applies to works that follow the plot of a Shakespeare play, not to works using his characters or written as sequels. So Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, despite being made entirely of characters in Hamlet, is not this. It would only be so if Rosencrantz was Guildenstern's evil uncle, who killed Rosencrantz's father...

So Alan Gordon's Thirteenth Night (being a sequel to Twelfth Night) doesn't count, but his An Antic Disposition (which follows the plot of Hamlet) would.

Examples of The Bard on Board include:

Hamlet

Film

• The Lion King — Evil uncle kills good king father, son overthrows him. The ending is a little lighter, though.
• Akira Kurosawa's The Bad Sleep Well—Young man gets a prominent position in a corrupt postwar Japanese company in order to expose the men responsible for his father's death. It has its roots in Hamlet.
• Let The Devil Wear Black — Hamlet updated to modern-day southern California as a moody grad student is compelled to take revenge on his uncle for his father's death.
• The Banquet (the 2006 film, not the 1991 film) is the wuxia version of Hamlet.
• Strange Brew is a fairly low-brow version of Hamlet, with, perhaps, Bob and Doug McKenzie as Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern.

Literature

• The Dead Fathers Club is a novel that reimagines the story of Hamlet in modern-day England.

Henry IV

Film

• My Own Private Idaho—The story of two hustlers on a journey to find peace and a long-lost mother, inspired by Henry IV, Parts 1 and 2.

King Lear

Film

• Akira Kurosawa's Ran is an interesting case. He said in an interview that he wrote a draft of the screenplay and showed it to a friend, who read it and said "Oh, it's King Lear!", to which Kurosawa responded, "It's what?" After he read Lear, he edited Ran to match it more closely, and threw in some quotes.
• King of Texas — King Lear set on a ranch in the Old West.
• Harry and Tonto — After his life-long New York City home is torn down, a retired schoolteacher makes a cross-country journey to visit his estranged children in this adaptation of King Lear.

Literature

• A Thousand Acres — King Lear on a Midwestern American farm, where three daughters despise their abusive father.
• Moss Gown is a mix of "Cinderella" and King Lear with a Setting Update to the antebellum Sweet Home Alabama.

Macbeth

Film

• Akira Kurosawa's Throne of Blood was directly and consciously based on Macbeth.
• Scotland, PA, which transplants Macbeth to a fast food restaurant in rural Pennsylvania in the 1970s.
• Men of Respect — After hearing a prophecy, a hitman executes his superiors and rises to the head of a mob family with dire consequences.
  • Men of Respect was a remake of the 1955 film Joe Mac Beth, which also recast the original story with modern-day gangsters.
• The Lion King also borrows from Macbeth, with Scar being Macbeth and the hyenas being the band of assassins he hires. Though there is not much to go for.

Live-Action TV

• The TOS Outer Limits episode "The Bellero Shield" takes some elements from Macbeth without following the plot exactly. The Lady Macbeth role is filled by the greedy, ambitious wife of an idealistic scientist. When a gentle alien accidentally winds up in the husband's lab, he becomes the equivalent to Banquo's ghost; the wife kills him and tries to pass off his Imported Alien Phlebotinum as her husband's invention, only to learn that the alien is Not Quite Dead.

A Midsummer Night's Dream

Comic Books

• The musical The Dreaming

Film

• Get Over It is based on A Midsummer Night's Dream, set in high school. Bonus points for the fact that the School Play Show Within a Show is a musical version of A Midsummer Night's Dream.
• The Woody Allen film A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy.

Western Animation

• One House of Mouse short is actually based on this play.

Othello

Film

• All Night Long — An adaptation of Othello set in the contemporary London jazz scene.
• Othello, a modern language adaptation of Othello that aired on BBC in 2001. John Othello, a cop promoted to police commissioner, is manipulated by his former partner Jago. Stars Eeamon Walker as Othello and Christopher Eccleston as Jago.
• "O" — Odin James(Mekhi Phifer) is the captain of his high school basketball team, while Hugo(Josh Hartnett) plots to undo his popularity.

Romeo and Juliet

Anime and Manga

• Romeo X Juliet, very loosely

Film

• Gnomeo and Juliet Hangs a Lampshade on it in the introduction, where one of the gnomes mention that "this story has been retold. A lot."
  • Not just that. Later in the movie, a statue of Shakespeare himself shows up and talks over the story with the main character, Gnomeo. He even says, obliquely, that the original story was a tragedy and that he hopes Gnomeo's story ends on a happier note, setting Gnomeo further on his quest to make sure his story turns out differently.
• West Side Story is a modernized, musical version of Romeo and Juliet.
• Romeo Must Die — Loosely based on Romeo and Juliet featuring Chinese and black mob families as the Montagues and Capulets and lots of kung fu.
• Love Is All There Is — Romeo and Juliet with two rival restaurant-owning Italian families in New York at constant odds especially after their children fall in love.
• China Girl — Romeo and Juliet in New York City, with rival Italian and Chinese gangs as the feuding families.
• Romeo + Juliet
• The Lion King II: Simba's Pride, when it comes to Kiara (Simba's daughter) and Kovu's forbidden romance.
• Magical Legend of the Leprechauns. Let's say the original Sheakespearean ending is thoroughly reversed.

Live-Action TV

• An in-universe example: In one episode of Higher Ground, the students practice and perform a play written by their classmate, which eerily follows the plot of Romeo and Juliet, despite the writer's claim that he's never read Shakespeare. In the end, of course, it turned out he had, but his friend tells him that it's not a problem copying Shakespeare; writers do it all the time.

The Taming of the Shrew

Film

• 10 Things I Hate About You is based on The Taming of the Shrew, set in high school.
• Deliver Us from Eva—Revolving around LL Cool J's character Ray being paid to date a troublesome young lady named Eva. To some extent, it is a modern, urban update of The Taming of the Shrew.

The Tempest

Anime and Manga

• Mobile Suit Gundam: The Witch from Mercury starts with a parent who escapes a death squad with her young offspring, flees to an isolated and sparsely populated land, becomes the highest ranking person there in her assumed identity Prospera, and orchestrates a revenge plot on the man who ordered the death squad that uses a servant with a name phonetically identical to Ariel, and includes getting their kids married.

Film

• Forbidden Planet, though very loosely.
• Tempest, directed by Paul Mazursky, is a loose retelling of The Tempest set in the 1980s, in which an architect from New York named Phillip Dimitrius (John Cassavetes) suffers a midlife crisis after learning his wife Antonia (Gena Rowlands) has been having an affair with his boss Alonzo. He packs up his daughter Miranda (Molly Ringwald) and takes off for Greece. In Athens he meets (and becomes involved with) a nightclub singer named Aretha (Susan Sarandon), and the three of them retreat to a remote island in the Aegean, where they encounter Kalibanos (Raul Julia), a strange hermit. When Alonzo and Antonia's own visit to Greece takes them by coincidence near the island, Phillip seemingly conjures up a storm that shipwrecks them, which leads to reconciliations all about (and a possible boyfriend for Miranda in Alonzo's son Freddy).

Twelfth Night

Film

• She's the Man is based on Twelfth Night, set in high school.

Other plays and Multiple plays

Film

• The Lion King 1 1/2, which is essentially the first film, but told from Timon and Pumbaa's perspective.
  • Therefore, since The Lion King is Hamlet, The Lion King 1 1/2 must be Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, which is surprisingly accurate given how both works poke at meta.

Literature

• In the Twilight Saga Official guide, Stephenie Mayer says that New Moon was inspired by Romeo and Juliet and Breaking Dawn by A Midsummer Nights Dream and Othello.
• The Consul's Tale ("Remembering Siri") from Hyperion is a literary example.^{[please verify]}
• Simon Hawke wrote a series of books with a young Shakespeare and his buddy solving mysteries that bore a strong resemblance to Shakespeare's plays (which, In-Universe, he wrote much later). The first one was called A Mystery Of Errors followed by Much Ado About Murder, The Merchant of Vengence, and The Slaying of the Shrew.

Live-Action TV

• Several Merlin episodes are based on Shakespeare plots, most notably "Sweet Dreams", which is a Comedy of Errors type story in which a Love Potion goes awry. In "Goblin's Gold", Arthur ends up with donkey's ears, rather like Puck from A Midsummer Nights Dream.

Video Games

• Also in-universe, in The Curse of Monkey Island, a theatre performer on the pirate-infested Plunder Island rewrites a host of Shakespeare plays to better suit the local pirates' tastes, turning them into "Speare!", a revue of mishmashed Shakespeare plots with piratey undertones and new acrobatic stunts.