Star Trek’s newest Paramount+ series, Starfleet Academy, has been infusing its coming-of-age cadet tale with tidbits of lore from across the franchise. In addition to recruiting new viewers, the series has thus far been rewarding longtime fans, and, in case you missed it, Episode 8 just paid off a 35-year-old deep-cut Klingon joke.
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“The Life of the Stars” explores healing via theater following the traumatic Miyazaki incident. But thanks to Picard research consultant, Jörg Hildebrand, who shared screencaps from the episode on Bluesky, we can also see three pages from a Klingon translation of Hamlet on a Starfleet terminal. It’s a great punchline to a joke in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, over three decades in the making, that one hasn’t fully experienced Shakespeare until they’ve read the original Klingon.
Star Trek: Starfleet Academy Finally Gave Us Some Klingon Shakespeare, and it Only Took 35 Years
The original line comes from General Chang, played by Christopher Plummer in 1991’s Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country. A Shakespeare-quoting Klingon warrior obsessed with human literature, Chang declares to Captain Kirk and company, “You have not experienced Shakespeare until you have read him in the original Klingon.” Poking fun at Western literature nerds everywhere who claim the original pronunciation is the only real way to read the famous English playwright.
Believe it or not, the canonical history of the Klingon language is rather complicated. Marc Okrand created the official Klingon language for Paramount. Only the words and grammar introduced by Marc Okrand or used in movies, TV shows, and his authorized books (such as The Klingon Dictionary) are considered canonical. However, the real-life Klingon Language Institute, dedicated to studying Okrand’s language, has produced many noncanonical texts, including a translation of Hamlet, known as The Klingon Hamlet (or The Tragedy of Khamlet, Son of the Emperor of Qo’noS). That’s all to say that while dedicated fans took the line and ran with it, the Klingon Hamlet was never canon.
Today, nearly 40 years later, Starfleet Academy’s “The Life of the Stars” finally made it official. During a classroom sequence, a Starfleet display labeled “Active Mode: Theater” briefly shows pages written entirely in Klingon script. Looking closely at the pages, you can see several character names among the alien glyphs, one of them being very distinctly “Hamlet” and another being “Ghost.” Hildebrand’s post links the Hamlet reference directly back to The Undiscovered Country. It even references the Klingon Language Institute’s version of the text, saying, “We can now finally experience Shakespeare in the original Klingon … Or we can just buy the book.”
If you want to try to spot the reference yourself or catch up on Starfleet Academy, you can stream the series on Paramount+.
Did you catch the Klingon Hamlet reference while watching? Leave a comment below and join the conversation now in the ComicBook Forum!
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Official art by Bastien Lecouffe-Deharme -
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