What if Friar Lawrence was actually a creepy youth pastor? What if Capulet was a park ranger and Montague was a car dealership manager? What if no one knew basic internet safety? These questions are ones that have kept me up late for many moons and ones that I finally got to bring to life in our latest humanities project, “Romeo, Romeo, Are we still talking about Romeo and Juliet?”
To start, I really enjoyed this project. It’s a shame it was so short because I would’ve liked to spend a bit more time working on it and learning about Romeo and Juliet. I found it was interesting to learn more about this classic story and how it influenced storytelling so heavily.
To begin, we read through some of the play as a class, omitting the less important parts and just summarizing them briefly. Through the five acts, we went through the important events and plot lines, decoding old English as a class. Although it was written in what originally seemed like a foreign language, I found it pretty easy to understand through class discussion and summary. While reading through the acts, we were working on our theme books and saving important quotes.
In the Themebook, we had to find a quote relevant to one of the listed themes, write about the topic and idea, and write about a connection to a Romeo and Juliet adaptation. There was a minimum of two adaptations needed and I was really hoping to achieve extending on my Themebook so I included four adaptations. The project was about Romeo and Juliet told through the lens of modern adaptations, so we watched two in class, then I watched two on my own time. I connected it to Warm Bodies, Gnomeo and Juliet, West Side Story, and Romeo + Juliet. I think it was really interesting to see the Romeo and Juliet narrative being told in such different modernized ways and connect it back to the original story. My personal favourite is definitely West Side Story. I find the filmmaking, storytelling, and characters so engaging. If you haven’t seen West Side Story, (the old or new version,) I definitely recommend. Although, I must say that Gnomeo and Juliet is a close second favourite.
Battling against time, we moved into the main assignment and final project. We had to make a modernized version of a Romeo and Juliet scene. I was in a group with Mickey, Max, Mateo, and Pelayo. We got assigned the final death scene, which was exciting because there was a lot of ways we could’ve gone with it. In the end, we decided on this insane concept of them both being murdered by Friar Lawrence. We got to our planning and then got to work filming.
In our planning stage, we realized there was a difficult character to group member ratio we had to work around by having some people playing multiple roles. It didn’t help that our Rodrick, Mickey, wasn’t at school the day of filming so we needed a last minute cast change. Our cast was as follows:
Rodrick (Romeo) – Mateo
Julia (Juliet) – Claire
Youth Pastor Paul (Friar Lawrence) – Pelayo
Mayor (Prince) – Mateo
Lady Capulet – Max
Montague – Max
Considering we filmed the whole thing in like 2 hours, it could’ve gone worse. Looking back, I would definitely have made some adjustments to the original plot but we can’t change it now. After editing pretty heavily, (don’t worry, the missile strike was totally real,) it turned out to be a semi-cohesive story with the same family resolution at the end that we see in the original story. If you’d like to watch the video, here it is.
The driving question
how has William Shakespeares Romeo and Juliet remained relevant to contemporary storytelling?
As seen in the many adaptations available, the plot devices in Romeo and Juliet still heavily influence modern storytelling. We can see the ideas and themes of the story in many books, movies, and other modern texts. Stories heavily inspired by Romeo and Juliet, like West Side Story have the themes of sacrifice, love, obligation, and many other aspects of Romeo and Juliet clearly seen in the movie. Even less obvious adaptations like our video still have the theme of the power of love and hate shining through and in the overall message.
Well that’s it for this blog post, thanks for reading, and stay tuned for semester two blogs coming up. I hoped you enjoyed reading about Rodrick and Julia and that you enjoyed their story and learned some basic internet safety.
“For never was a story of more woe
Than this of Julia and her Rodrick.”
Sincerely,
Me
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