William Shakespeare's Get Thee Back to the Future!

by Ian Doescher

  MARTY Indeed. What are these garments thou dost wear?

  DAVE It is my custom thus to be array’d

  When I unto my bus’ness office go.

  Art thou all right?

  MARTY —Methinks so. Or shall be.

  Enter GEORGE and LORRAINE MCFLY, holding tennis equipment.

  LORRAINE I’ll wager thou must grant to me a rematch!

  GEORGE A rematch—wherefore, dear? Say, didst thou cheat?

  LORRAINE Nay, sweet one.

  GEORGE —Well, hello.

  LORRAINE —Good morning, all.

  [Marty falls to the floor in surprise.

  MARTY Sweet Mother! Father!

  GEORGE —Didst thou hit thy head?

  LORRAINE O, art thou well, my gentle youngest child?

  MARTY You two look wonderful, and Mom—so thin!

  LORRAINE My thanks, good Marty. [George pinches her.] O, you rascal, George!

  Good morning, sleepyhead. Ho, Dave and Linda.

  DAVE Good morning, Mother.

  LINDA —Greetings to you both.

  I nearly had forgotten, brother Marty:

  Your girlfriend Jennifer hath call’d on thee.

  LORRAINE She is so dear a lass; I like her so.

  Is not tonight the night of thy big date?

  MARTY What hast thou spoken, Mother? Say again?

  LORRAINE Are ye not headed for the lake tonight?

  Thou hast been planning for a fortnight’s span.

  MARTY Did we not speak about this, Mother dear?

  How shall we to the lake? The car is wreck’d.

  GEORGE ’Tis wreck’d?

  DAVE —What is this wreck’d?

  LINDA —What happen’d to’t?

  DAVE When hath this awful accident occurr’d?

  GEORGE Be silent, all. The car is surely fine.

  DAVE Why am I ever last to know such things?

  Enter BIFF TANNEN, outside, waxing the McFlys’ car.

  GEORGE Behold, big Biff, who waxeth presently.

  [To Biff:] Take careful heed unto my words now, Biff,

  We shall have two full coats of wax this time,

  Not only one as thou hast done before.

  BIFF The second layer I am just completing.

  GEORGE Biff, nay—I’ll none of thy dissembling words.

  BIFF Good sir McFly, apologies I render—

  I should have said the second was just started.

  GEORGE That Biff, a funny character indeed—

  E’er trying to mislead and get ahead.

  Since high school I have had to watch his moves.

  Yet, if he ne’er had enter’d our two lives—

  LORRAINE Ne’er would we two have fallen deep in love.

  GEORGE Thou hast it right, my one and only love.

  [Biff enters the house carrying a box.

  BIFF My patient sir, this minute hath a package

  Arriv’d for thee—a box most full and heavy.

  Good morning, Marty! ’Tis, methinks, thy newest—

  The clever book thou hast been long expecting.

  [George and Lorraine open the package together.

  LORRAINE My dearest, thy first novel come at last!

  A Match Compos’d in Space, by George McFly.

  GEORGE ’Tis like the simple words I ever say:

  When thou dost put thy mind unto the task,

  Thou mayst accomplish nearly anything.

  [Biff hands Marty a set of keys.

  BIFF Good Marty, take the keys thou shalt be needing—

  Thou art all wax’d and ready for this evening.

  [Exeunt Dave, Linda, and Biff. George and Lorraine stand aside while Marty walks to the garage. He opens the door to reveal a black truck.

  MARTY Is all my dreaming suddenly come true?

  Enter JENNIFER PARKER.

  JENNIFER Shall thou give me a ride, thou handsome man?

  MARTY Sweet Jennifer, of women thou art first:

  Intelligence to put the wise to shame,

  Good humor rife with educated wit,

  Compassion as would move a saint to tears,

  And beauty that would make e’en Helen green.

  How, like a balm upon my weary soul,

  The sight of thee doth fall upon mine eyes.

  Within thy smile, I see our future plain:

  Our wooing whilst our fervent youth remains,

  Our courtship when we both are budding scholars,

  Our romance growing with the passing months.

  My Jennifer, when trouble comes along,

  Disrupting the skill’d pilot of our love—

  Thou shalt, as if thou wert a captain brave,

  Steer us to calmer seas and safer shores,

  Wherein our love may dock with confidence.

  Thou shalt create a bargain with Poseidon,

  Employing all thy tools of navigation:

  Forgiveness as the compass of the heart,

  Unending grace to act as rudder sure,

  And love that serves as ship and mast and hull—

  The vessel that doth keep us always safe.

  Kind Jennifer, we shall support each other

  Through all the trials of the turning world.

  JENNIFER Sweet Marty, such a speech and such a welcome.

  Thou look’st on me as though I’d hid from thee,

  And in full seven days hast seen me not.

  MARTY So have I not. At least, ’tis so to me.

  JENNIFER Love, art thou well? Does all proceed aright?

  [George and Lorraine wave at Marty and exeunt.

  MARTY My parents whole, my life somehow improv’d—

  Yea, ev’rything is wondrous in th’extreme.

  [They kiss.

  Enter DOCTOR EMMETT BROWN, strangely clad, arriving from the future in the DeLorean.

  DOC O Marty, thou must voyage hence with me!

  MARTY Where shall we go?

  DOC —Once more back to the future.

  [Doc rummages through a trash can.

  MARTY What art thou doing, Doc? What is thy plan?

  DOC Some useless refuse must I use anon:

  Thereby I shall fill Mister Fusion up,

  That I may have the necessary fuel.

  Home energy reactors useful are!

  I prithee, quickly climb inside the car.

  MARTY Nay, Doc. I have but lately here arriv’d.

  My Jennifer is here, and we are bound

  To take my newfound truck and yonder drive.

  DOC Bring her withal, for this concerns her too.

  MARTY Of what art thou most vaguely speaking, Doc?

  What shall befall us in the coming years?

  If we are changed to aught, is’t to an ass?

  DOC Nay, Marty, ye do flourish, by my troth.

  It is your children who are my concern.

  We must do something for your children. See?

  MARTY Though we may understand it not, we’ll go.

  [Marty and Jennifer climb into the car.

  Doc, we’ve no room upon this shorten’d street.

  Go farther back, I pray, an thou wouldst have

  Enow of road to realize eighty-eight.

  DOC Be ready for audacious episodes—

  Whither we go, we have no need of roads.

  [The DeLorean rises into the air and flies away. Exeunt omnes.

  END.

  AFTERWORD

  Back to the Future has been one of my favorite films since its 1985 debut. I was eight years old at the time, and I loved the movie from the first time I watched it. The DeLorean was awesome, Michael J. Fox and Christopher Lloyd were hilarious, and the story was incredibly entertaining. We bought the movie on VHS, of course, and I watched it regularly.

  For years, people have been asking me, “Will you ever write a Shakespearean adaptation other than Star Wars?” The truth is that, for a long time, I didn’t know. Several movies and television series have been recommended to me, and Back to the
Future was a frequent suggestion. When Quirk Books called and asked me if I was interested in bringing my Shakespearean quill (it’s really a laptop) to Back to the Future, I didn’t take long to answer.

  Observant readers, especially those who know their Shakespeare, will notice a few special touches throughout this book. Marty has two speeches that are quite lengthy; in fact, they are each exactly eighty-eight lines long, for obvious reasons. In Act I, when we first meet George and Biff, George’s lines of iambic pentameter all have an additional, eleventh syllable, which scholars refer to as a “weak” ending because the line ends on a nonstressed syllable. Biff’s lines contrast with George’s in that scene, all ending on stressed syllables (the norm for iambic pentameter). In Act V, when their roles are reversed, their rhythms are, too: Biff’s lines have weak endings and George enjoys strong ones.

  Something you may not have noticed is that the first letters of certain speeches form an acrostic. The first instance is in the chorus prologue, at the beginning of the story; read the first letter of each line to see what it spells out. Then hunt for two other acrostics hidden in the book.

  Back to the Future’s soundtrack includes many classic songs, and I tried to pay homage to all of them as best I could. This includes giving Huey Lewis’s famous cameo a series of lines inspired by Lewis’s song catalog (in the film, he’s the one who tells Marty his music is “too darn loud”). Finally, in Act IV I gave dialogue not found in the movie to two minor characters; this continues a tradition I started in my William Shakespeare’s Star Wars books.

  While working on this project, I noticed how completely Marty McFly stands at the center of the movie. Most scenes begin and end with him in the shot. This raised a few challenges in rewriting the story as a play. In a theatrical production, the last person on stage in one scene rarely is the first person to enter in the next scene; the actors need a chance to change costumes or set up for the next scene. I tried my hardest to make sure that an actor portraying Marty on stage would have breathing room between such appearences, which often meant ending or starting a scene with another character’s soliloquy.

  Thanks for joining me on this journey through time. Where will the future take us? What’s coming next in the space-time continuum? Your guess is as good as mine. But I’m certain that wherever we’re going, even if we don’t need roads we’ll still need Shakespeare.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Thank you:

  To my parents Bob and Beth Doescher, my brother Erik, his wife Em, and my nieces Aracelli and Addison.

  To the team at Quirk Books: Rick Chillot, Nicole De Jackmo, Brett Cohen, Jhanteigh Kupihea, Christina Schillaci, Kelsey Hoffman, Ivy Weir, Jane Morley, Doogie Horner, and the rest of the crew.

  To Josh Hicks. I’m sorry I punched you in the arm in 1994.

  To the Brooklyn Park Pub writing group, who let me crash their party: Tom George, Kristin Gordon, Chloe Ackerman, and Graham Steinke.

  To wonderful friends who provide support and laughter: Heidi Altman and Scott Roehm, Jane Bidwell, Murray Biggs, Travis Boeh and Sarah Woodburn, Chris Buehler and Marian Hammond, Erin and Nathan Buehler, Melody and Jason Burton, Emily and Josiah Carminati, Jeff and Caryl Creswell, Joel Creswell and Sibyl Siegfried and Sophie, Katherine Creswell and Spencer Nietmann, Jeanette Ehmke, Mark Fordice, Holly Havens, Mona and Roland Havens, Jim and Nancy Hicks, Anne Huebsch, Apricot, David, Isaiah and Oak Irving, Jerryn Johnston, Alexis Kaushansky and Ruby, Chris and Andrea Martin, Bruce McDonald, Joan and Grady Miller, Tara and Michael Morrill, Lucy and Tim Neary, Dave Nieuwstraten, Omid Nooshin, Bill Rauch, Julia Rodriguez-O’Donnell, Helga, Michael, and Isabella Scott, David and Sarah Shepherd, J.C. Smith, J. Thomas, Naomi Walcott and Audu Besmer, Ryan, Nicole, Mackinzie, Audrey and Lily Warne-McGraw, Steve Weeks, Ben and Katie Wire, Ethan Youngerman and Rebecca Lessem, and Dan Zehr.

  To my spouse Jennifer, who told me she “might actually read this one.” She is the best partner a guy could want and loves me even when one (or both) of us is tired, hungry, or cranky. To my sons Liam and Graham, who are both teenagers now and helpfully remind me how old I am and how thin my hair is getting. Thank you, boys. Your old bald dad loves you.

  READER’S GUIDE

  You don’t need to be a Shakespeare scholar to enjoy William Shakespeare’s Get Thee Back to the Future. But if you’ve come to this book with more knowledge about Marty McFly than the Bard of Avon, this reader’s guide may help deepen your understanding of the language and structure of the book, all of which is inspired by Shakespeare’s work.

  Iambic Pentameter

  Shakespeare wrote his plays in a specific syllabic pattern known as iambic pentameter. An iamb is a unit of meter, sometimes called a foot, consisting of two syllables, the first of which is unstressed, or soft, and the second of which is stressed, or emphasized. Together the two syllables of an iamb sound like “da-DUM,” as in beyond (“be-YOND”), across (“a-CROSS”), and McFly (“mick-FLY”). Pentameter is a line of verse containing five feet. So iambic pentameter consists of five iambs, or ten syllables alternating in emphasis. A famous example of this meter, with the stressed half of each iamb in bold, is:

  I’d rather be a hammer than a nail.

  However, as much as we associate Shakespeare with iambic pentameter, he broke the rule almost as much as he observed it. The most famous Shakespearean line of all has eleven syllables, not ten: “To be or not to be, that is the question.” That last -ion is known as a weak ending, or an unstressed syllable. Shakespeare often used weak endings, added two unstressed syllables where there should be one, and left out syllables.

  Let’s see iambic pentameter in action with this speech from Act III, scene 2 (see this page).

  MARTY Nay, Doc, I yet may prove I speak the truth.

  The bruise thou hast, upon thy head of white,

  I know whence it hath come, yea, and wherefore;

  Thou didst unfold to me the tale entire.

  Upon the precipice of thy commode.

  Thou stood’st, intent to fix a timepiece there.

  Thou fell’st and knock’dst thy head upon the sink.

  Then did a picture come into thy mind:

  Thy miracle, the flux capacitor,

  Which maketh possible time travel. Truly,

  Believ’d I not before, yet now I do.

  If you read this speech aloud, you may notice that the dialogue sounds unnatural if spoken according to how the individual lines are broken. Rather, punctuation should guide how lines of iambic pentameter are spoken, as if the speech were written as prose. Consider lines 84–86: “Thy miracle: the flux capacitor, / Which maketh possible time travel. Truly, / Believ’d I not before, yet now I do.” These two sentences are split across three lines and, when read, each line should naturally flow into the next. (By the way, line 85 contains an example of a weak ending.)

  What about words with more than two syllables? The trick with multisyllabic words is to figure out which syllable in the word has the primary emphasis. Let’s consider the word plutonium: The primary emphasis is normally on the second syllable, plutonium. In iambic pentameter, it makes sense to pronounce it as two iambs, “pluto-” and “-nium.” The final syllable -um provides a secondary stress that fits the meter nicely.

  To Thee or Not to Thee?

  Shakespeare’s work is well known to be full of archaic pronouns (think thee and thou) and verbs ending in -est and -eth that can sound jarring to a modern ear. Consider this your crash course in these unfamiliar terms.

  • thou: second person singular pronoun that’s the subject of a sentence, as in “Thou art predictable as time itself.” Modern writers would use you.

  • thee: second person singular pronoun that’s the object of a sentence, as in “Get thee back to the future.” Modern writers would use you.

  • ye: second person plural pronoun that’s either the subject or object of a sentence. Modern writers would use you.

  • thy: second person singular possessive before a word starting with a co
nsonant, as in “thy head.” Modern writers would use your.

  • thine: second person singular possessive before a word starting with a vowel, as in “thine assistance.” Modern writers would use your.

  In general, the -est ending (sometimes shortened, with an apostrophe, to -st or just -t) is added to a verb whose subject is the pronoun thou: “Thou didst” or “thou stood’st.” The -eth ending accompanies verbs whose subject is he or she or a singular it: “It groweth closer, like a comet that / Doth make its way across the starry heav’ns.”

  Another note about verb endings: In Shakespeare’s time, the -ed at the end of a past tense verb was sometimes pronounced as a separate syllable. Whereas a modern speaker would pronounce the word believed as two syllables, back then people would have pronounced three syllables: “be-liev-ed.” When such a word needed to be shortened to fit the meter, Shakespeare wrote it as a contraction: believ’d. In modern editions of Shakespeare—and in William Shakespeare’s Get Thee Back to the Future—an accent over the e indicates that the -ed should be pronounced as a separate syllable: believèd.

  Other Shakespearean Hallmarks

  The following features of a Shakespearean play are all found in William Shakespeare’s Get Thee Back to the Future.

  • Five acts. Plays in Shakespeare’s time were structured in five parts, drawing on the tradition of ancient Roman plays. Acts can contain any number of scenes.

  • Minimal stage directions. Shakespeare left it to the performers to determine who should do what on stage. I tried to do the same when writing William Shakespeare’s Get Thee Back to the Future, but this play has far more stage directions than one of Shakespeare’s would, to ensure that action sequences are clear. Shakespeare never had his characters try to jump-start a time-traveling automobile by wiring it to a clock tower in a thunderstorm, after all.

  • Rhyming couplets at the end of scenes. A rhyming couplet is a pair of consecutive lines ending with a similar sound. For example, Act I, scene 3, lines 153–154 (see this page): “ ’Tis strong and sudden, sent by heav’n above, / It may just save thy life, this pow’r of love.” Shakespeare ended his scenes this way to indicate a narrative shift to the audience, similar to a final cadence in music.