Shakespeare and Science Fiction

What is William Shakespeare’s role in a genre of literature—science fiction—that flourished centuries after his plays first took the stage?

It turns out that Shakespeare and his plays crop up in science fiction in a number of surprising places, from classic stories like Isaac Asimov’s “The Immortal Bard” to TV shows like Star Trek and Doctor Who. And it’s not just these more recent works: a production of Macbeth figures in Mary Shelley’s apocalyptic novel The Last Man, written in the 1820s.

Our Shakespeare Unlimited podcast interviewed Sarah Annes Brown, a professor of English literature at Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge, England, who is co-director of the university’s Center for Science Fiction and Fantasy. In her 2021 monograph, Shakespeare and Science Fiction, Brown explores why Shakespeare and his plays turn up so often when science fiction writers imagine humanity’s future. Here are some excerpts from her conversation with Barbara Bogaev.

SARAH ANNES BROWN: I was thinking recently that Shakespeare’s almost like that kind of artifact you get in some science fiction film. He takes on the guise of whoever is looking at it, and it reflects back something of yourself, because you get so many different kinds of Shakespeare. He’s so much an icon and a myth that he can be reinvented for each new writer.

BARBARA BOGAEV: And are there stories of Shakespeare being so exceptional that he’s not human, he’s an alien?

BROWN: Well, there’s one very interesting little story, which is by a writer that I hadn’t come across before, called Adrienne Martine-Barnes, and this story is called “The Elements So Mixed.” It builds up what I was saying about how it’s great, I suppose, in science fiction, when aliens appreciate Shakespeare, and perhaps not so great when they co-opt Shakespeare. This is an extension of that idea, because in this story you have an Earth ambassador, Emilia, and she goes to an alien planet and her alien colleagues on the planet start to talk to her about this being called the Wordcrafter.

They say, surely you have a Wordcrafter on your planet. It’s this amazing writer who gets incarnated in every single alien species in the galaxy, and always writes these wonderful works, but writes them rather differently for each species. And in the end, after thinking, maybe this is Christ or Buddha, she realizes that it’s Shakespeare.

So it is optimistic, if you like the idea of Shakespeare being really exceptional, but on the other hand it’s not so optimistic, because Shakespeare, although exceptional, is no longer specifically, uniquely human. In so much science fiction, Shakespeare is used as an absolute icon of humanity and, in fact, Doctor Who describes Shakespeare as the most human human that’s ever lived.

BOGAEV: Reading all of this work, has it changed your mind in any way about Shakespeare? Or any of the plays?

BROWN: I think one different lens through which to see the plays is a connection that has occurred to me through doing work on representations of AI, or artificial intelligence. This made me think about why it is that Hamlet seems to lend itself particularly well to this aspect of science fiction. I think one reason might be that when you watch Hamlet or read Hamlet you get this sense that Hamlet is almost real, he almost seems to be stepping outside the play, or to be aware that he’s a character in a play, and you almost feel that he is becoming a person.

It’s that sort of poignant effect, that, of course, we know isn’t a real effect, which is quite similar to what we get when we are contemplating artificial intelligence, whether in life or literature. The sense that it could almost be real, it could acquire consciousness, it could suddenly develop an independent life. So that was one aspect of the project that made me perhaps look again at some of the possibilities in that play.

I think one other thing it’s made me reflect on in Shakespeare, is the way Shakespeare so often seems to be addressing future audiences or invoking the future. In Julius Caesar, there’s a reference to this story being acted many times in the future, in different countries and different languages, and that reflective touch lends itself well to being played around with by science fiction writers. In the sonnets, you get a reflection on how people in the future will read his lines and find them clumsy or archaic, and I think that, too, has almost a science fictional quality about it.

I’m really stretching, perhaps, the term “science fictional,” but there are these intriguing little glimpses into the future that Shakespeare seems to want to give us in his plays.

>>  Listen to the full Shakespeare Unlimited interview

Sarah Annes Brown is a professor of English Literature at Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge, England, and is co-director of the university’s Centre for Science Fiction and Fantasy. Her research interests range from Ovid and Shakespeare to the Victorian novel and modern science fiction. She has written several pieces on the influence of classical literature on the genre. Her first book, The Metamorphosis of Ovid: From Chaucer to Ted Hughes (1999), traced the presence of Ovid’s Metamorphoses in English literature, and she has returned to the reception of classical texts in several subsequent publications, including Tragedy in Transition (2007) and A Familiar Compound Ghost: Allusion and the Uncanny (2012). Her most recent monograph, Shakespeare and Science Fiction, was published by Liverpool University Press in 2021.