Romeo and Juliet

During the course of the past few weeks my group and I had been working on a modernized version if Romeo and Juliet. We had taken a scene from the book, and chose a theme to base our scene on. In order to make the scene modern we edited many lines, and made them similar to the way the characters from our theme actually spoke. We designed new props, and changed the characters clothing.

Throughout the 1590’s Shakespeare wrote many plays and sonnets. Some of his work included Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth, etc. His way of writing was, at that time, the way people actually spoke. People back then used to speak, what we call today, Elizabethan dialect. Elizabethan dialect is not very different from Modern English. With Elizabethan dialect, word order was pretty flexible. And Shakespeare wrote dramatic poetry, not standard prose, which gave some greater license in expression. However, Elizabethan remains a sibling of our own tongue, and hence, accessible.

Although the Elizabethan dialect differs slightly from Modern English, the principles are generally the same. There are some (present day) anomalies with prepositional usage and verb agreement, and certainly a number of Shakespeare's words have shifted meanings or dropped, with age, from the present vocabulary. The English language has varied a lot since the beginning of time. Now day’s meanings of words have been changed. Many slang words have been created to adapt to the different cultures, and different communities. Many literary terms have been created, and are used in everyday conversations. The difference between the languages creates a rift in translations.

Our main focus was to attract a modern audience. In order to attract that new audience, my group and I cut many of the lines. These days’ people do not “beat around the bush.” When talking we tend to, directly, get to the point of our conversation, or topic. In order to get straight to the point we summarized most of the lines, especially those lines that were about a paragraph long. We also created new outfits for the characters. We dressed them in modern clothes, women tend to dress in revealing clothes; where as, boys tend to dress in baggy pants. Our props for the filming process were also different. We created a modern vision of our project and somewhat brought it to reality. We were able to capture the essence of our vision. Although we improvised on many of the props, we were still able to create a scene that followed our theme.

Although this project took many days, the end result was good. Having the idea of transitioning from and old audience to a new audience wasn’t easy. However, we were able to master it and overcome most obstacles. I am sure that our project will be able to reach the expectations of the viewers and readers.