O Blogpost, Blogpost, wherefore art thou Blogpost? …

What’s in a name? That which we call a Blogpost 

By any other name would still be homework

And still retain that dreaded hopelessness 

Which I feel without that title.

Like all English 10 classes before me, I studied William Shakespeare’s great play, Romeo and Juliet but in PLP we wanted to answer the driving question: how has William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet remained relevant to contemporary storytelling? 

Keystone 1, a theme book, was our way to discover and record the themes shown in each act of Romeo and Juliet. The power of love and hate, revenge, naïveté of youth, are three main recurring themes that I talked about in my theme book. By reading the lines, I was able to engage with the text and by writing what I thought Shakespeare was trying to communicate, I extended my thinking. I used my Shakespeare sheet to help me understand some of the words. 

• Keystone 2, was part of the theme book that involved watching and connecting modern adaptations of Romeo and Juliet to specific acts, scenes and sometimes specific lines in the original play. Gnomeo and Juliet, Romeo + Juliet, and Warm Bodies were three adaptations I watched for enjoyment and also used to show my understanding of the themes and how they still appeal to modern audiences. One of the themes that was shown in the play and the adaptations was the theme that love and hate are powerful. In the play, the love Juliet had for Romeo made her make a naive decision to trust the Friar and take the poison. In Warm Bodies, the power of love was the cure for the zombies and started to bring them back to life near the end of the movie. 

To end the project, we had four classes to come up with an idea, script, storyboard, film and edit our own adaptations of one scene from Romeo and Juliet. This was Keystone 3. I was looking forward to this part of the project since we learned about it a few weeks before, but when it was time to start I was concerned about a timeline and the fact that my group could not decide on an idea. Collaboration was difficult because even when we came up with an idea, only one other member was willing to meet before or after school in order to create a project we could be proud of doing. The one day we did meet before school, only one team mate came on time, and the other two came 30 minutes late. Personally, I made some strong connections between the themes in the original play to our own script. We submitted a video that meets the requirements but with more time we would have had a better final product.

I have always heard about this story, I did not know the details, and did not know why it was still a big deal now. This play is relevant because it has connections we still use in movies, books, articles that are still being made now. You would not think that a love story between two garden gnomes and a story between a Zombie and a human could be connected, but they are because they deal with themes and ideas that still matter today.