Welcome to The Noble Heart of Star Trek!
This website began as a final project for a university Hamlet seminar. There are dozens, if not hundreds, of references to William Shakespeare and his works made throughout the various reincarnations of Star Trek. This project attempts to examine his play Hamlet in the six series and the films.
There are several reasons why Star Trek often references Shakespeare:
By including these references, it is as if the creators and writers of Star Trek are saying that Shakespeare's works will still be famous in the 23rd century and beyond. This serves as a testament to their belief that Shakespeare is an important and influential writer.
The Star Trek novel Losing the Peace, which is set during The Next Generation, reveals that, after World War III, a new collection of Shakespeare's works, The New Britannia Complete Shakespeare, is published and that this volume comes to symbolize the resiliency of humanity and its culture in the face of destruction. In other words, Shakespeare represents the human ability to overcome trials and tribble-ations – excuse the pun.
Finally, Shakespeare is something everyone (even aliens, apparently) can enjoy, not only because we have read his plays in school but because they capture the human condition so well. His characters experience love, revenge, death, and many other situations and emotions that people readily relate to and identify with.