Much like most people in America, I was first introduced to Shakespeare in my first year of high school. Worse, I was specifically introduced to Romeo and Juliet. A truly wretched play all around, but especially for high schoolers. Teachers always have some vague notion about how it’s going to be the most “relatable” of the plays—and the relative lack of bloody deaths and disturbing family dynamics is just a bonus. They’re totally wrong, of course, but that’s neither here nor there, because they then immediately follow up with the likes of Hamlet and Macbeth. I think I even remember King Lear at one point. Then you become an English major in college and get a crack at some of the more obscure plays and adaptations.
Close to a decade after my first unfortunate encounter with Romeo and Juliet—good golly am I old—and I’ve had the delightful pleasure of not only being hungry to explore Shakespeare as material culture in special collections and the like, but also of discovering the BBC America’s take on Shakespeare in its uproarious show Upstart Crow. (There’s still a cynicism in it all, of course, but it’s noticeably blunted once one understands Foucault’s author function and tosses Shakespeare the man out the window for Shakespeare the Idea™.)
I have always had a penchant for the oddity in comedy, especially meta-comedy, so there really aren’t enough good things I can say about Upstart Crow. The show is about Shakespeare the man, but it all hinges upon Shakespeare the Idea™ with the classic ironic, British twist. It’s a splendid, helter-skelter medley of critical theory, word play, anachronistic rhapsodies on 21st century problems, and the inspirations Shakespeare receives from his friends and family. In short, it’s intellectual comedic gold.
Characterizing Upstart Crow as “intellectual comedic gold” should ring all the little alarm bells in the back of your mind. There’s too much to cram into a little post—definitely a future dissertation just waiting to be made, maybe even by me—but a good number of the punchlines in Upstart Crow are behind the gates of Shakespeare’s cultural capital. Admittance depends on how much of the currency you have (the currency of Shakespeare’s cultural capital), but this loftiness is juxtaposed alongside studio laugh tracks to cue the more ignorant viewer, and the episodes are still peppered with easily-accessed jokes and commentary.
But, even as someone with a relatively cultured knowledge of Shakespeare, I wonder what tidbits have still slipped through because I’m not an actual Shakespeare scholar and didn’t catch nearly all the jokes and witticisms. I mean, it’s not like I’ll need an excuse to rewatch Upstart Crow, but I wonder if I’ll have a moment like I did with Frasier where I suddenly understood the punchline, “When she danced Agamemnon at Jacob’s Pillow,” because I had just learned about some history of modern dance and the origins of Jacob’s Pillow. (Or, for that matter, how all The Godfather references in popular culture made sense after I had, in fact, actually watched The Godfather.)
Cultural capital begets cultural capital and the more you learn the more you learn to question, so that’s why I found the episode “If You Prick Us, Do We Not Bleed?” (and the ensuing public spat between Ben Elton and Mark Rylance) so funny, but Andrew did not:
A character played by Ben Miller called Wolf Hall, who is the “greatest actor of his age” but also rather pretentious. He is tricked into claiming that Shakespeare — played by David Mitchell — did not write his own plays. It’s as wonderfully unsubtle as I’d hope for from the co-writer of Blackadder.
Upstart Crow is like an onion hand-made phyllo dough, a pain-staking process that Elton and co. don’t muck up (GBBS, season 4, episode 5 for those paying attention) and instead produce an incredible comedic confection that is absolute perfection. And because I’ve always been prone to mixed metaphors, like the archetypal USB plug, figuring out which way is actually the “right side up” is how Upstart Crow remains precariously balanced with ample ambiguity and genius. Its blend of obvious and covert comedy casts a wide net, and what self-respecting Anglophile wouldn’t find themselves in stitches over Will’s constant grousing about public transit?
