Romeo and Juliet was a tragic love play that was written around 1596 by a guy who lived during the time of Queen Elizabeth I. So why am I writing a blog post about him in 2023? What more could we possibly learn from a 400-year dude who wrote plays all day? Well, we were about to find out as we took a deep dive into the play and themes of Shakespeare’s most famous play, Romeo and Juliet.

“How has William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet remained relevant to contemporary storytelling?” That was the driving question that we would be investigating for the next 3 weeks. Before we could start figuring out how Romeo and Juliet were still relevant today, we first needed to actually read the play.

If you have ever read a play by Shakespeare, you will know it’s written a bit differently from our modern English. This was the first problem I encountered on this project because before I could even decipher the themes of Romeo and Juliet, I first needed to figure out what he was even talking about. The most useful tool to help with this was the little descriptions that were added to the side of the screenplay highlighting small details I may have missed. For the rest of the text, I mainly relied on using previous context to fill in the gaps that just didn’t make sense to my brain. This meant that even if a specific sentence didn’t make any sense, I could still understand the overall scene. 

Once we knew the tragic story of the two star-crossed lovers, it was time to try to decipher what Shakespeare actually meant. This was done in the form of a theme book where we used quotes from the play to back up our theme statements. Overall, I’m quite happy with how my theme book turned out. I used a strategy where I quickly wrote my general ideas down in a rough draft. I then came back to it after a bit of time to refine my ideas and format them in a way that flowed well. Throughout my theme book, I used this strategy to make revisions of my work very quickly, and allowed me to create strong arguments more concisely than I normally would have.

Despite all that, we still haven’t figured out how Romeo and Juliet remained relevant to contemporary storytelling. To figure that out, no better place to look than at modern film adaptations of Romeo and Juliet. For this, I watched 3 adaptations. Warm bodies, Romeo + Juliet, and last but certainly not least, Gnomeo and Juliet. Once we had finished our bag of popcorn, it was time for our turn. Our final project was to make our own modern adaptation of one of the scenes of Romeo and Juliet. I was placed in a group with Dana, Declan, Theryn, and Sylas. After a lot of discussions, we decided to try to recreate Juliet’s fake death scene, while also branching out to Friar Lawrence’s solution and Romeo’s death.

This group project was interesting because of the amount of different ideas people had. Most of the time when it comes to these projects the hard part is coming up with a decent idea. Once you have an idea everybody would just run with it. However, for this project, there were many different ideas that all had there own upsides and downsides. We had quite a hard time trying to figure out which idea to run with. It was at these times that I was very thankful to have many people alongside me, as each had different visions of what they wanted the final film to look like. This really helped make us see the benefits of different ideas before we made our decision, and prevented me from having tunnel vision on a single idea that I liked. This favouritism towards certain ideas is something I think I can work on for future group projects, as having an open mind toward ideas can help diversify and include more people.

The other thing I noticed while making the film was the challenge of comminution. While having people with wildly different ideas, when it comes to filming and editing everybody needs to be on the same page. This skill of communicating my ideas is another skill I don’t think I did the best in this project, and want to continue to work on it in the future. I think I’ve always been pretty bad at communicating what is in my head to make sense to others. In the past, I’ve sometimes found myself just giving orders, and telling people the full plan afterward, like on a need-to-know basis. However, I’m learning now that having people generally on the same page is a really big advantage in group settings. People can’t give advice or new ideas on a project they aren’t even familiar with. Letting people know what my ideas are early on I think is important so they can give more critique and, hopefully, end up with a better product overall

Overall, Romeo and Juliet cover the general themes of love, conflict, and tragedy, all of which still resonate with audiences today. As we can see with our adaptation, these central themes are so universal that they can be rewritten and reworked many times over. Throughout the years, Romeo and Juliet have shaped the landscape for modern storytelling. It is because of this, even in modern society today, the story of Romeo and Juliet will still be relevant and talked about.

That’s all I have for this final project of semester 1 (I can’t believe we’re already halfway through the school year). This project was pretty short, but I thoroughly enjoyed it, and I really like how our short film turned out. 

See you next time,

Nolan🌹