Shakespeare was an English poet, playwright, and actor. He is still widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language, with a large majority of his literature being classics. Just as every English class does, in PLP we read one of his plays, The Taming of the Shrew.
First we comprehended the play and describe our thoughts about if it was a true classic in an essay.
Is The Taming of the Shrew a classic
Then in groups created an animation that adapted the play to a new time period.
To write my essay I not only had to fully understand the play but understand Shakespeare and the time period he experienced.
Shakespeare lived and wrote during the Elizabethan era. This was considered the golden age because England experienced peace and prosperity while the arts flourished.
Although this was true, it still was not a good time for women. In class we studied historical perspectives of woman at this time.
From reading the play and searching online I made a list about woman at this time:
- The customs in the time period for marriage was that the father was to give his daughters up to suitors that he thought fit mostly determined by financial status.
- Women in the upper class where educated through tutors but there was no school for girls and lower class women would never get an education.
- They were expected to wear gowns and never pants. A pale complexion was desired and most wore white makeup.
- These women were raised to believe that they were inferior to men, there was little dispute on the matter and if so they were publicly shamed.
Women were viewed as nothing but objects by society at this time, so it’s no surprise that, that was projected into Shakespeares plays.
In an article we read about Shakespeares evolving attitude towards woman I discovered that leading into Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare started to understand woman.
While he was writing the Taming of the Shrew, this was not the case. At the time it might have been perfectly normal the way Kate was forced into submission, but today it seems nothing less then cruel.
To create our animations we were given a scene and chose a time period to adapt to The Taming of the Shrew. My group, Willa, Parker, Calum and I, had scene 3 and luckily got the 50s
The 50s were a time of family and consumerism but you can read more about that in this post.
Using my knowledge of historical perspective, I now compared woman in the two time periods as you can see in this short video.
https://youtu.be/K1NshcNCVJ4
We found three main ways to adapt the play to the 50s by changing the characters, setting, and literature. As a group we decided to keep the Shakespeares language but change as many key words as we saw fit.
We also made sure the story line made sense for the time period:
In act 1 instead of lucentio and hortensio teaching Bianca Spanish and guitar we had the men teach her cooking (jello salad) and piano.
In act 2 instead of having petruchio come to the wedding on a horse dressed in informal wear we thought it would make more sense if he came in a gross car (hunk of junk) and was drunk.
From this unit I took away a deeper understanding of literature and what makes a classic. How to use historical perspective effectively and compare and contrast time periods. Finally I know how much time and what skills goes into making a successful animation