What’s Romeo and Juliet?

Shakespeare masterpiece Hamnet is one of Bill Gates’ favourites books. William Shakespeare had influenced our culture, English literature, and, our beliefs and philosophy for more than 400 years. But after so many years, does Shakespeare still matter to the modern world? Why does Bill Gates like Shakespeare so much? In this post, we will be talking about the relevance of Shakespeare and how he had impacted us.

Answer to the driving question

In this unit, our driving question was: “Why does Shakespeare relevant to a contemporary audience?”. In brief, Shakespeare’s main influences can be catergrorized into three parts: English literature, art and music and philosophy.

English Literature

Throughout his life, Shakespeare wrote over 150 sonnets, 37 plays and invented over 1700 words that we still use today. He wrote the finest poems by selecting the perfect words/phases to present his emotions. At the same time, he was the first one to connect and compare different plays so he could write creatively. Not only was Shakespeare good at writing stories, but his themes and ideas also encourage many people to create new stories. According to Wikipedia and Guinness Books of World’s Records, there are 410 Shakespeare adaptions and around 1100 projects that credit Shakespeare’s writing.

Drama, Art and Music

Many people consider Shakespeare the father of drama as his plays paved the way for drama productions and acting. In addition, he created new genres that have mixed tragedy and comedy. The brand-new genres were like a revolution in storytelling and theatre which enhanced its effect on audiences. Meanwhile, Shakespeare’s plays have also influenced music and art through emotional experiences (Siegel). At the same time, Shakespeare had many acts associated with music and arts, which directed contributed to the growth of art and music.

Philosophy

Arguably, Shakespeare is a philosopher. Throughout his plays and sonnets, he brought up many questions that we don’t have easy answers to. His question involves justice, honour, free will, fate, love & hate, etc…. He managed to smoothly blend in his questions and doubts into his plays; his characters are often in a complex situation where there are no perfect answers. By comparing ourselves with his characters, we would be searching for solutions that solve the problem. Although he never told us the answer nor did he has the answers, Shakespeare taught us to think differently and encourage us to think deeply. Through understanding Shakespeare, we will gain a more mature perspective and find the value/purpose of life.

The language we speak today contains a lot of Shakespear’s effort; meanwhile, his philosophy is still constantly influencing our everyday life. Therefore, Shakespeare and his work are still relevant to us and modern society.

My learning journey

This unit was the shortest yet the most challenging one I had in the first semester. In this unit, we investigated the five acts of Romeo and Juliet and its film adaptations; moreover, we created our adaptation of Romeo and Juliet to represent our understanding.

Theme book

In this milestone, we analyzed and investigated Shakespeare’s purposed message then connect critically with film adaptations. When I first read Romeo and Juliet, I had no idea what Shakespeare is talking about in his play; however, I manage to understand the meaning and the message with the help of my friends. Meanwhile, I also found it challenging to compare and connect film adaptations with the original script. The adaptations are diverse and different from the original script, which made similarities and differences not so appealing. Overall, I am proud of my work because I have grown and learned a lot through the challenges and difficulties. If I have to do this again, I would look for the professionals’ comments because their points of view are often valuable. I would also look for directors’ and writers’ intentions when creating the adaptions because it would give me a more complete understanding when I compare and connect it.

Video

After we had a firm understanding of the five acts of Romeo and Juliet, we started to create our own video. Creativity and originality were our two main focuses in this milestone; our main goal when creating this video was to demonstrate our understanding and apply it to modern society. Because the first semester was ending, we only had two to three classes to plan, film and edit the video. Surprisingly, everyone in my team worked well under pressure. We didn’t face any obstacles when we film the video; however, it took us a significant amount of time just to export and edit the video. Although we have done a great job, I don’t believe it is perfect. If we have to do this video again we would probably:

Organize our story flow
Adjust audio to the same volume
Include more props and costumes
Record different point of views
Enhance our emotions when acting

At the start of this unit, I thought Romeo and Juliet were non-sense and had nothing to do with us; however, my paradigms have shifted after studying it in detail. I can relate to the characters in Romeo & Juliet and appreciate the hard work Shakespeare put into his plays. Without Shakespeare, our ideology and philosophies should never be complete.