by Greg Mayer

Christopher Plummer, the distinguished Canadian actor, has died. Playing many roles on stage, film, and television, he had won an Oscar, two Tonys, and two Emmys during his very long career. The New York Times‘ obituarist, while noting that most will remember him for his role in the film version of The Sound of Music, writes that he was “a Shakespearean foremost.”

Given my own, perhaps odd, combination of cultural tastes, I recall him best as General Chang, the Shakespeare-quoting chief of staff to Chancellor Gorkon of the Klingon Empire who desires peace with the Federation in Star trek VI: The Undiscovered Country. The title is a phrase from Hamlet, and Gorkon, as well as Chang, is a Shakespeare-quoter. Plummer speaks lines from several of Shakespeare’s plays, including lines he has spoken on stage and screen in performances of those very plays.

Chang opposes peace, and Plummer’s final line in the film, as Federation starships breach his ship’s defenses and blow it to smithereens, is “To be, or not to be.”

If you watch the whole of the preceding clip, you’ll hear several more lines of Shakespeare from Plummer. The following are two slightly different compilations of some of Plummer’s Shakespearean lines from throughout the film, including from the preceding clip.

The second, with references:

To perhaps explain the prominence of Shakespeare in the mouths of Klingons, Gorkon (played by David Warner, himself a prominent Shakespearean) says, at 42 seconds, “You have not experienced Shakespeare until you have read him in the original Klingon”; right afterwards Plummer says “To be, or not to be” in Klingon.

Alas, poor Christopher; he has come not to be.