Fragments of Shakespeare

Bardfilm here!

I recently saw Baby Driver, and it had a tiny fragment of Shakespeare in it. Over at Bardfilm, I write a lot about Shakespeare and film, but sometimes the references are so tiny that they don’t merit a full write-up. But now that I’ve seized control of Shakespeare Geek, I can throw up something here quickly.

Yes, that was poorly phrased, but I’ll let it go.

In Baby Driver, one of the bad guys is searching for one of the good guys, and says, “Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou, Romeo?”

So it’s the usual confusion of what wherefore actually means—it persists even though SG and I dealt with it in one of our Shakespeare Knock-Knock Jokes (for which, c.v.). In this case, though, I think it’s meant to be a marker of just how uncultured the bad guy is. It helps contribute to what makes him a bad guy. Not only is he a villain and a cad, he doesn’t even know what wherefore means!

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