Monday, June 18, 2012

Richard III in Law and Order

“Aria.” By Dick Wolf. Perf. Paul Sorvino, Chris Noth and Dann Florek. Dir. Don Scardino. Law and Order. Season two, episode 3. NBC. 1 October 1991. DVD. National Broadcasting Company, 2004.
Sometimes the inclusion of Shakespeare is purely incidental.

Such is the case with this Richard III interjection at the beginning of an episode of Law and Order. The rest of the episode has to do with actors, and these two actors, who are fooling about with props and quoting a line from Richard III, merely set the scene. I watched the episode—admittedly, it was a few years ago—hoping for deeper tie-ins to the play, but there wasn't much there.

All the same, it's another way Richard III is frequently used in popular culture: As shorthand for "Theatre."

Links: The Episode at IMDB.

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Bardfilm is normally written as one word, though it can also be found under a search for "Bard Film Blog." Bardfilm is a Shakespeare blog (admittedly, one of many Shakespeare blogs), and it is dedicated to commentary on films (Shakespeare movies, The Shakespeare Movie, Shakespeare on television, Shakespeare at the cinema), plays, and other matter related to Shakespeare (allusions to Shakespeare in pop culture, quotes from Shakespeare in popular culture, quotations that come from Shakespeare, et cetera).

Unless otherwise indicated, quotations from Shakespeare's works are from the following edition:
Shakespeare, William. The Riverside Shakespeare. 2nd ed. Gen. ed. G. Blakemore Evans. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997.
All material original to this blog is copyrighted: Copyright 2008-2039 (and into perpetuity thereafter) by Keith Jones.

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