Romeo and Juliet, why is it relevant?

This past month or so, we have been doing a project on a topic that almost everyone who’s been to high school is familiar with : Romeo and Juliet. We did do all of the basic learning for this subject, we read the play, we discussed it, etc. But, we also took a fun spin on it and made our own versions. This project was a ton of fun and I can’t wait to tell you about it.

The driving question for this project was why does Shakespeare continue to be relevant to a contemporary audience? I think that the best answer I could possibly come up with for this would be that Shakespeare, specifically Romeo and Juliet, is still relevant because of how the story has shifted and evolved through time, and how it has struck inspiration in certain people so they remake it, keeping it alive.

Connecting this story today is something that we did do in this project, even as we were doing class reads we were connecting the story to modern day things just by reading it together. But the biggest way we connected this old story to today was when we made the remake videos.

The video you see above was just one of the videos produced from our class fro this project. We were split into small groups for this final result type thing, and we were to adapt the story a bit and connect it to something you’d see everyday in todays day. My group had a difficult job as our group numbers were really small for the scene we were doing, so we couldn’t have more  than 2 people in a shot at once, and as you saw most of us played 2 characters. But all of that didn’t stop us and we did have a final result in the end, no matter how messy it was.

Throughout this project there was tons of things that we did that I could say represent my learning, but one that really stood out would be my theme book book. The theme books that we were tasked to fill out were books that we filled with connections and thoughts on the scenes that we read from Romeo and Juliet. Another quick thing that we did that I would say helped me learn would be my discussions about the play, where we got in small groups in class and talked about what happened in the scene and how we felt. (here is the link)

So in conclusion this is one of those projects that basically everyone does, but not everyone gets the experience to do what has been done so many times and redo the same story on your own, especially in high school. I think that this experience was really great and this may be one of my favourite projects that I’ve ever done.

Thanks for reading my blog post!