From the Folcher Shakespeare Library, this is Shakespeare Unlimited.

I'm Michael Whitmore, the Folcher's Director.

This podcast is called I Feel Now the Future in the Instant.

Shakespeare adaptations are a proud tradition.

Prokofiev turned Romeo and Juliet into a ballet.

Verdi turned Macbeth and Othello into operas,

and Taming of the Shrew and Twelfth Night have been converted by Hollywood into teen comedies.

But there's a different type of Shakespearean adaptation that's a lot harder to get right.

That's when someone takes an existing piece of popular entertainment and reimagines

it as if it might have been written by Shakespeare. As Ian Desher can tell us, that can be tough

to do. He's the author of six books under the series title William Shakespeare's Star Wars,

based on the hit films featuring Luke Skywalker, Darth Vader, and the rest.

As you'll hear, making this work has taken far more thought and craftsmanship than you might imagine.

Ian is interviewed by Stephanie Kay.

So how did you get the idea to mash Star Wars and Shakespeare?

Did Star Wars just kind of cry out iambic pentameter to you, or what was going on?

Three things happened right around the same time. I rewatched the Star Wars trilogy with some good friends of mine.

Not too long after that, I read Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, which is one of the first mashup books that really became popular.

And then right after that, went to the Oregon Shakespeare

Festival with my family. And I was at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, sort of with Star Wars and

mashups bouncing around in my brain. And the idea just came to me. Wouldn't it be fun and weird to

rewrite Star Wars as though it were a play written by Shakespeare? So you started writing, and at first,

...