Early Modern Star Wars

As we referred to Star Wars multiple times, I feel a bit responsible to share this with you and provide you with some basic thoughts as well as public receptions on it:

(Doescher, Ian (2013): William Shakespeare's Star Wars. Verily, a New Hope. Philadelphia: Quirk Books.)

I stumbled over it about four months ago (to be honest, I found one page of it on 9gag) and I, as well as many others, thought it was amazing. Basically,  it is an adaptation of George Lucas' fourth episode of Star Wars into a Shakespearean like Early Modern English play with acts, a chorus, even mostly an iambic parameter, soliloquies by R2D2 and everything else to be quite a lot of fun. In addition to that and almost too obvious to notice is that he changed the type of literature from novel to play. I would not necessarily describe it as a parody of Star Wars but as a fusion of two very popular Authors and their way of storytelling. By approaching that, Doescher faced a huge challenge as well as the readers' great expectations; but see for yourselves:

When I read these lines, they make me smile, not only for the comment aside but also for C3PO’s conversation with R2D2 which is probably known by its original. People who read it might enjoy it because of several reasons: It does not just adapt Shakespeare's Early Modern English language, but also stylistic means woven into themes and motives of Lucas. Also, it merges setting and traits of a futuristic science-fiction novel (or movie) with the ones of the Elizabethan age, which creates an interesting and somehow neat charisma.  

Particular striking is that the play focuses on a particular kind of audience. Fist, people have to know the Star Wars Saga and some background knowledge. Second, they must have read at least one of Shakespeare's plays and be familiar with at least his most common key motives. Consequential, the play requires its readers to be educated in a certain direction in order to fully understand its jokes, puns and most basic its language. But this seems to be the case for a majority of readers which could provide interesting information about Shakespeare and his perception in our contemporary world: While he belongs to a classic corpus, there it not such a great distance to common fiction as it sometimes appears to be.

P.S. The afterword describes similarities of Star Wars and plays written by Shakespeare. Maybe this would be worth and interesting to have a look at.