Zombies, Gnomes, and Shakespeare

Hi Blog. Did you know that “Wherefore art thou Romeo” doesn’t mean “where is Romeo?” but rather “why is Romeo?”. Maybe you did, however I did not know that and originally planned to open this post with something kinda dumb like “Wherefore art thou blog post?”. After a bit of research I found out what that line actually meant, but it’s not a surprise I didn’t originally know this because it’s actually one of the most misinterpreted lines from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. Which brings me to why I’m here typing this post and you are reading it. My newest project I’m working on is about the play which that often misunderstood line is from. After the first week of working on it, here I am writing a formative post.

In class we are going through the script for Romeo and Juliet but to improve our understanding of the plot even more we’re also watching two productions of the play: Baz Luhrmann’s 1997 more modern adaptation, and the more accurate to the original version by Franco Zeffirelli (1968).

I think watching the movies definitely helps visualize what’s actually going on behind the poetic Early Modern English and rants that Romeo and Mercutio often go on. More modern versions can help people understand what the main themes in the story are and how they apply to a different setting. Only now am I realizing how many of the movies that I have watched in the past are based of of Romeo and Juliet. Yes there are more obvious ones like Gnomeo and Juliet or Romeo + Juliet that already tell you this in the title but one example is an adaptation of the classic story told in the setting of a zombie apocalypse. If I’m looking for a movie to watch, zombies always seems to be a selling point for me.

The movie I’m referring to is “Warm Bodies” and as I said, have seen before without knowing that it is based off of what I am now studying in class. I discovered this while searching for examples of modern versions of Romeo and Juliet to inspire me to write my own for the first milestone of the project. With the question of “what makes a classic?” being the focus of the second milestone (which is the fourth episode of my podcast),

I think having so many recreations of it (including a zombie themed one) is one of the things that makes Romeo and Juliet a classic. In the movie, rather than the two lovers being from feuding families, one is a zombie and one is a human. To be fair I did watch this movie a while ago but I should have realized it was a R+J story when the characters names were R (or RRrrrrr because he is a zombie) and Julie. Anyway, what I’ve learned this week is that the classic story of Romeo and Juliet isn’t just found in my grade 10 classroom but also in places I didn’t even expect.