How Joss Whedon Prepared Me To Love Shakespeare

If you love Joss Whedon, chances are really good that you might love Shakespeare too.

You don’t usually think of a contemporary TV show as something that helps boost your understanding of serious culture. The two are supposed to be antithetical and God knows that most television is rubbish. But Joss Whedon’s shows are different. I was enjoying them for a while before I started thinking about WHY I enjoyed them so much. Given that I have never been that much of a regular TV viewer, why was I drawn to Joss’s work, like a moth to a flame?

It turns out that a lot of the reasons he strike such a chord are similar to the reasons why Shakespeare is so revered, studied and beloved after over 400 years. The reasons why universities around the world can discuss 25 years of one man’s work for centuries and STILL not run out of things to say.

These artists share abundant creativity. The have authenticity and universality. Their protagonists (I’m not sure Jayne counts) have a basic goodness. They are stimulating mentally.

For example:

Creative use of language – Whedon’s work uses phrasing and word choices that are not typical or commonplace. The language is lively, flows, and engages. This is reminiscent of Shakespeare’s plays, which use prose and blank verse with various meters to make listening to the text more stimulating. Think about it: Shakespeare was writing for a theater which had no options for artificial lighting or other special effects, where the artists’ voices and actions were the only stimulation for the audience over plays that typically ran 2-3 hours or more. He had to hold the attention of highly educated and the undereducated groundlings. Creative word play has served both artists well.

Genre-bending story lines  - Whedon’s stories often alternate or even veer crazily between comedy and drama or horror. At the end of Buffy season one, Willow and Cordelia are laughing about their friends camped out watching cartoons and suddenly find that they are all dead, killed by vampires. Later in the series, Buffy is trying to solve the mystery of a girl robot and in the last seconds of the show, walks into her home to find her mother suddenly dead. Bitter fight scenes are often leavened with lines of offbeat banter.

Shakespeare’s plays also defy simple genre descriptions. His “comedies” include a man nearly having a pound of flesh cut from his chest after defaulting on a loan, drunken sword fights and a man framed for madness and confined in a dark place. The tragedy Hamlet includes endless off color jokes. Macbeth’s night porter jokes about alcohol-induced impotence. Shakespeare’s history plays include comedy and horror and frequently distort historical timelines tremendously for dramatic effect.

Strong women – Buffy the Vampire Slayer starts off with a very strong female character but Whedon’s casts are rife with strong characters of all demographics…and weak ones. Basically, humans. And sometimes it isn’t the obvious ones who act incredibly bravely, like Xander talking down Willow when she’s about to destroy the world. 

Shakespeare also showed himself capable of making any of his strong/capable characters male or female, of any race, of any religion. Queen Margaret in the Henry VI/Richard III plays is strong, though ruthless in a way that exacerbates familial tensions to make the War of the Roses even more bloody. King Lear’s daughter Cordelia chose the hard path of honesty in answering her father’s foolish “love test”, is banished for her troubles, yet still comes back to rescue him when her hard-hearted sisters inevitably turn on Lear.

A tendency for the heroes to be good, decent people while not necessarily religious – Whedon’s work gradually engaged my admiration through the years, as I watched more of it. But when I started to LOVE his work was in Firefly. In the Train Job, there is a moment when Mal discovers that the crate his crew just stole contained medication that the locals desperately needed to control a degenerative disease. When he returns it, the sheriff says that “A man might not look too hard at a job he needs but when he finds the details of a situation like ours, he has a choice.” And Mal answers “I don’t believe he does.”

Holy shit, that got me in the feels.

Distrust of distant, overreaching, ruthless authority – For a guy who claims liberal views over libertarian ones, Joss certainly demonstrates a great deal of unease with overreaching, unaccountable government forces. There’s the Initiative in Buffy, the Alliance in Firefly and the whatever-they-ares in Cabin in the Woods. Shakespeare has similar unsettling figures. In “Measure for Measure”, a puritanical judge is planning to execute a man for fornication at the same time he propositions the man’s sister…a nun. Even rulers who are better than the alternative, such as Malcolm in Macbeth, are frequently revealed as cold manipulators.

Aside from plot points and style, I’m starting to look at Whedon and Shakespeare characters which may have substantial similarities:

For example, there are similarities between Buffy and Prince Hal/Henry V. Both frittered away the early years they were meant to spend in training for their roles but then used resources acquired during their early years (for Buffy, friendship; for Hal, a connection with common folks) to become excellent leaders.

Xander is a bit like Shakespeare’s fools, in that he sometimes says crazy things…which are right on the mark. And he always makes a point of coming through for his friends.

Adam, the creature created by the Initiative, is a bit like Edmund in King Lear. Amoral and calculating, he destroys his creator, just as Edmund destroys Gloucester. His end game is to get two large groups to fight to the death for his benefit, just as Edmund seduces both Goneril and Regan and would probably have killed at least one of them.

Sunnydale’s Mayor, AKA the Giant Snake Demon, reminds me of Claudius from Hamlet, who plots Hamlet's death (and the death of his father) whiles smiling amiably.

There’s a lot of food for thought here and I intend to digest every bit of it that I can.

 Resources for the interested:

Books:

"Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human", Harold Bloom.

"Shakespeare After All", Marjorie Garber

"Shakespeare", John Middleton Murray

"Shakespeare Is Hard But So Is Life", Fintan O'Toole

The Great Courses

"Shakespeare: Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies"
Professor Peter Saccio, Ph.D.

"Shakespeare: The Word and the Action"
Professor Peter Saccio, Ph.D.

"Shakespeare's Tragedies"
Professor Clare R. Kinney, Ph.D.