“Th’ unruly camp”: The savage Shakespearean beauty of Deadwood

The HBO Western Deadwood has always been described as “Shakespearean” but it took me a while to learn why. My kids were little when the show premiered in 2004 and because I knew the show held, “as ‘twere, the mirror up to nature,” I didn’t want to spend time in the brutal world Deadwood reflected. But on the show’s 20th anniversary this year, I finally binged all 36 episodes (plus the two-hour follow-up movie made in 2019) and discovered that Deadwood is the story of the transformation of a violent frontier town into a more-or-less civilized community, using a robust theatricality and a Shakespearean level of language both beautiful and profane.

As Shakespeare did with his History plays, creator David Milch — a graduate of Yale in English and former lecturer there — based Deadwood on actual people and events central to the founding of the titular South Dakota town and then extrapolated characters and invented narratives to suit his artistic purposes. Milch also depicts, as Shakespeare did, characters from all walks of life, using, as he put it in his 2022 memoir Life’s Work, “the patterns of speech and distinction between people who had what was called book learning and people who didn’t.” Milch’s research told him that “the people who had book learning tended to speak in an almost Elizabethan way,” and cites “the Bible, Shakespeare, Dickens, Victorian literature, plus adventure stories” as examples of the kinds of writing 19th-century frontier folks might have had access to; “access,” Milch clarifies, that “wasn’t strictly tied to class.” Milch knows well that language helps define character, and that “trying to get those rhythms [of speech] right was a challenge, but it was one I very much enjoyed.”

Milch also reveals that “most of the show is written in iambic pentameter,” and you can feel that bounce and energy in the dialogue. These folks don’t talk like laconic characters in a Western; their speech is energetic and circuitous, filled with blunt Anglo-Saxon curse words and racist and misogynistic slurs used in casual everyday speech. In fact, the very first time we see Deadwood’s protagonist, Sheriff Seth Bullock, he’s writing in his journal, calling to mind Suffolk’s line in Henry VI, Part 1, “I’ll call for pen and ink and write my mind.” We see immediately this is a man for whom words matter, and as the scene subsequently reveals, so does justice, decency, and fairness.

Deadwood’s second scene introduces a character famous from both history and popular culture, though when Calamity Jane was played by Jane Russell and Doris Day, she was never this foul-mouthed and flatulent. As written by Milch, and embodied by Emmy-nominee Robin Weigert, this revisionist Jane resembles Shakespeare’s fallen lords Toby Belch or John Falstaff, with all hints of former glory mostly buried under layers of drunkenness and insecurity. But her speech is an energetic and poetic brew of invective and declamation, featuring lines (“The sun ain’t rose on the day I paid heed to what you say”) that must have been enormous fun to perform.

But Deadwood’s breakout character is Al Swearengen, the brothel owner and eventual civic leader who combines the tavern ownership of Mistress Quickly (from the Henry IV plays, Henry V, and Merry Wives of Windsor), the pimping of Pandarus (from Troilus and Cressida), and the murderous machinations of Iago and Richard III. Swearengen doesn’t hesitate to bully and kill to get what he wants, but as the town of Deadwood grows, he illustrates Milch’s idea that “people come to govern their own behavior as much through language as through law.” Swearengen becomes in Deadwood the power behind the municipal throne: rigging elections, bribing officials, building unlikely coalitions of “strange bedfellows,” and even manipulating the press by dictating stories in the language he wants the public to hear. Though he doesn’t hesitate to use violence when necessary, Swearengen’s “words generate meaning not because of any intrinsic quality,” according to Milch, “but because of the context of emotional association in which they were expressed.” In this lawless territory, Milch “wanted to show language complicating itself as one of the alternatives to statute.”

As Rolling Stone critic Alan Sepinwall describes it, Deadwood is about “the imposition of order on chaos” (which, as it happens, is also an outstanding definition of art). That chaos includes Deadwood’s extraordinary cast of characters, an epic tapestry of European and Chinese immigrants, prospectors, sex workers, homesteaders, pioneers, assorted rogues (frequently rich predatory businessmen), and uneducated vagabonds. They range from the tragic Doc Cochran, the only doctor in the camp, haunted by the carnage he saw and lives he was unable to save in the Civil War, to the obsequious fool E.B. Farnum, the buffoonish proprietor of Deadwood’s only hotel and its puppet mayor (appointed by Swearengen), who as early as the fourth episode cleans blood off his hotel floor while delivering a comically bitter monologue, like a perfect combination of Lady Macbeth and the Porter.

In fact, by the time actual touring Shakespearean actors arrive in Deadwood’s third season, they seem like a hat on a hat. As Matt Zoller Seitz, the author of The Deadwood Bible: A Lie Agreed Upon, writes in Vulture, “The show was always half a theater piece” that expressed itself in a rich vein of Shakespearean speechifying and wit. It’s not just the lengthy monologues delivered by both leading and supporting characters to inanimate objects, graves, or their own reflections in muddy puddles; it’s the frequent narration and stage directions spoken aloud as dialogue and the occasional epigrammatic witticism (the following printable examples are all from just a single episode — Season 2, Episode 10 — credited to writer Sara Hess):

• • “Here’s Tom.”
  • “They congregate outside Cochran’s cabin.”
  • “And thus the uncharted journey continues.”
  • “I am a sinner who does not expect forgiveness, but I am not a government official.”

Another similarity between Deadwood and Shakespeare? Sometimes, because of Milch’s tortured syntax and 19th-century circumlocution, I confess that I can’t always tell what the characters are saying!

Make no mistake: Deadwood is still a violent, brutal show, but there are moments that are extraordinarily moving, such as when adversaries become unexpected allies, or when the community comes together to mourn, or when the entire town turns out to watch the first group of Deadwood’s children parade down the muddy thoroughfare on their first day of school. Deadwood isn’t an easy watch, but thinking about it in Shakespearean terms helped me enjoy and appreciate even more what I’d been missing.