Why does Shakespeare continue to be relevant to a contemporary audience?

That was the driving question for my most recent project about Romeo and Juliet. In this project, we read important scenes from each act. This project was a relatively short one. We only had five classes to work on it. We spent three classes looking at different adaptions of the play as well as reading the play itself. The other two classes were used to create our adaption video of Romeo and Juliet. Our adaption video was based on an act that your group got assigned.

In the first three classes, we spent time breaking down the texts of Romeo and Juliet. We were looking for the themes and topics of each act. During this time we also watched several adaptions of Romeo and Juliet. I made several connections between the text and the adaptions in my theme book. I was given a theme book to fill out during the project. Doing these things helped me comprehend the text of Romeo and Juliet thoroughly. As well as finding the importance of each act and scene. I found that watching the different adaptions of the play helped me visualize what was happening throughout the text. The theme book allowed me to, connect critically and respond to text in personal, creative, and critical ways.

During the last two classes, we had the task to, finally create our own Romeo and Juliet adaption. My group consisted of Keenan, Julien, Sophia and Ethan. We chose to recreate act V. In the act, Juliet is faking being dead when Romeo comes and finds her dead with Paris watching over her. Romeo and Paris fight, Romeo ends up killing Paris then Romeo kills himself because he thinks Juliet is dead. Finally, Juliet wakes up from her coma and sees Romeo dead. Because of that, she kills herself because she does not want to live without him. In our adaption Ricoh and Julien are lovers. Julien is in a drug-induced coma, Julien is also in a hospital bed. Ricoh walks in to find her in a coma, but there is also one of his gang members there to kill her. They fight and end up both dying then Julien wakes up and kill’s herself. Making this film allowed me to construct personal connections between the text and the world.

To answer the driving question “Why does Shakespeare continue to be relevant to a contemporary audience?” I think Shakespeare is still relevant to a contemporary audience because of how he writes about timeless themes such as love and hate. The themes and emotions he portrays in his writing can still teach us today about how we feel as humans. Another reason I think he remains relevant is because he could convey multiple strong themes in each story. Such as in Romeo and Juliet there are many themes such as Love and Hate, youth and age, languages vs reality and many more.

Overall I learned a lot from this project. It had its ups and downs but in the end, I enjoyed learning about Shakespeare and Romeo and Juliet. I hope I can build on this knowledge in the future and continue to grow as a student and a person.