Upstart Crow: Shakespearean Sitcom

To celebrate the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare's death, the BBC produced a slew of programming to honor the Bard. Thankfully, they also allowed Ben Elton to write a sitcom to satirize the Bard. For six episodes, I giggled my way through Upstart Crow, a gloriously irreverent and surprisingly thoughtful homage to the man responsible for some of the most well-known stories in the English language.

Set in 1592, the show follows a bumbling Will Shakespeare (a perfectly cast David Mitchell), who is trying to establish himself as go-to playwright. We see him at his London lodgings, where he is attended by an illiterate manservant, Bottom (Rob Rouse), and the hyper-literate daughter of his landlord, Kate (Gemma Whelan, in a startlingly different role from her usual swashbuckling on Game of Thrones). Kate desperately wants to become an actress, and one of the series' throughlines is the silliness of that ambition in a time when only men can frolic on the stage. We also get to see Will's home life when he travels to his humble abode in Stratford, where his wife, Anne (Liza Tarbuck), lives with his parents and children. No matter his location, everyone thinks Will is far too verbose, says things with twenty words when three would suffice, and are constantly needling him about his unlikely plots and boring verses.

Will's colleagues include the acting troupe tasked with putting on his plays, his fellow playwright, Kit Marlowe (Tim Downie), who keeps stealing Shakespeare's work (a nod to the ever-present argument about Shakespeare authorship), and Robert Greene (Mark Heap), the Master of the Revels who hates Shakespeare's work and calls him an "upstart crow," thereby lending the series its title. The theme of each episode is one of Shakespeare's works, and Ben Elton cleverly crafts some impossible tale of how Will is embroiled in a fiasco that could ultimately serve as the inspiration for one of his plays. While the first episode's Romeo and Juliet theme is not too much of a stretch, the fifth episode's homage to Macbeth is insanely innovative and reveals how much Elton must love the original works to create such a brilliant parody.

Upstart Crow humanizes Shakespeare and gives us more reasons to love his work. It both mocks and celebrates his language, reminding us that Shakespeare could be both flowery and ribald, exalted and earthy. The dialogue in each episode is a fascinating blend of the 16th and 21st centuries, and the references to various plays and television shows are sprinkled in so liberally that it will take repeated viewing to catch them all. This is a series that will appeal to Shakespeare afficionados or create afficionados out of novices. It follows an extremely traditional sitcom format, and yet there is nothing traditional about the wit and verve that has gone into crafting each complicated storyline. It feels like required high school viewing, a reminder to English literature students that underneath the dense vocabulary and blank verse, there are brilliant characters, complex (often silly) plots, and a real man, who was trying to make a life for himself by spinning stories.