Hello and welcome to my post about our humanities 10 Romeo and Juliet project. You may think of romeo and Juliet as some boring play and an even more boring english unit, but this project was actually a lot of fun.
This was the final video for the project, where we took the part of the play we chose and remade it with a modern audience in mind. My group recreated Act V Scene III. Our story was reworked with each family from the original being the leaders of worldwide drug empires.
You can read the script for the original act 5 scene 3 at this handy website that even has some translations for the wacky old Shakespearean English.
Throughout this project, we watched some modern versions of Romeo and Juliet that if you didn’t already know they were connected you would never guess (except Gnomeo and Juliet, you could probably guess that one) in order for us to grasp some of the more important concepts or ideas from the play. The main messages that we were on the lookout for were: the nature of free will, honour and obligation, the naivety of youth, the power of love and hate, violence and death, gender roles, revenge, and the multiplicity of identity. Our short video above had elements of the power of love and hate, violence and death, honour and obligation, and revenge.
Because of our current school system, and the new variants of COVID-19, this project was cut very short, like, an extra week on top of the already shortened project, so we really didn’t get the full scope of things (for the better or worse) but we read and watched adaptations of all the most important scenes. The parts of the movies we watched included: Romeo and Juliet; Directed by Franco Zeffirelli, Romeo + Juliet (1996), West Side Story (1961), Gnomeo and Juliet (no resources unfortunately), and Warm Bodies (2013). You can feel free to watch any of these and try to figure out the connections to the original Romeo and Juliet yourself!
Now the driving question for this was “Why does Shakespeare continue to be relevant to a contemporary audience?”. This question is quite complex, despite you maybe being able to give a light answer like “oh it’s taught in schools” but here’s mine. Not only are his plays considered to be beautiful works of poetry and literature, but also they provide some great concepts and realities related to each of them. I mentioned each of these concepts earlier in the post, and see that these concepts can help to teach and understand pieces of literature or texts more deeply and help further your comprehension of more intelectual or deep messages within different mediums such as films, books, or something like a game or even an advertisement.
Thanks for tuning into another one of my mindless rants about a recent project,
later!