Our group was assigned to adapt act 1, scene 3 as well as all of act 3 of Shakespeare and Fletcher’s The Two Noble Kinsmen. At first, tackling the task at hand seemed daunting. How was I, just an eighteen year-old, freshman college student to take the work of the infamous William Shakespeare and change it without accidentally butchering it? In our discussion of how we were to modernize the text, we came up with a few initial ideas and questions we’d have to ask ourselves. Would we want to keep the old Shakespearean feel of the text or change it altogether? Which characters are extraneous? Or, can parts be combined? In the end, we decided to modernize the text while keeping the original old, Shakespearean energy through using slightly old-fashioned language. We wanted to make Shakespeare’s story more accessible to a modern day audience without veering too much from his tone and overall portrayal of the characters. We were not looking to abolish the atmosphere the original play creates.

Our first job was that we needed to revise or remodel the prologue. After some discussion, there was definitely at least one agreed upon opinion about the prologue as it already existed: it is unnecessarily long and wordy. Despite its length, however, we all really liked and appreciated how Shakespeare and Fletcher gave credit to Chaucer, and so we credited not only Chaucer, but Shakespeare and Fletcher as well while condensing what was being said to a much more concise and to the point prologue.

The task to create an abridged Two Noble Kinsmen showed its challenges once we began adapting the actual text of the play. For example, in deciding to eliminate the sub-plot of the story, we thought it would be interesting to keep aspects of the Jailer’s Daughter. Though her character is almost entirely unnecessary to the overall plot, she adds a kind of twist to the story. One way we were able to remove the sub-plot, but keep the Jailer’s Daughter to some degree, was by taking speeches said by the schoolmaster, and turning them into summary monologues to be recited by the Jailer’s Daughter.

To make the job of adapting the play more manageable, we began by splitting up act 3 into four parts for each of us to work on a preliminary revision of the text. My assigned part was the third part of the act, which includes the end of scene 5 and the beginning of scene 6. I found the trickiest part of condensing these lines to be how to keep the essence of Palamon and Arcite’s discussion while only holding on to the completely essential lines. In the end, I decided to omit much of their back and forth discussion before they actually fight. Instead, Palamon and Arcite now have a much more consolidated conversation that still gets the point across, just in less words. Much of what is being said in the original beginning of scene 5 is about adjusting their armor, and though of course their armor is a crucial aspect of their fight, instead of actually having the conversation, it would be shown in the presentation of the play.

I think that’s one of the great things about plays. Rather than having to state everything, you can use acting to your advantage, and in having to condense this play, we had to keep that in mind. Shakespeare, in his day, didn’t intend for his plays to be read, they were meant to be watched. Therefore, what the characters were saying did not have to always make sense; it had to flow well and sound elegant because the audience could grasp the story through simply watching. With our adaptation, we want the same to be true. Though it may seem that by taking out certain parts, we are taking away from the original play, if our adaptation was to be preformed, much of what may have been lost in words would be made up for through acting.

Being given this assignment to take a famous playwright’s work and adapt it to a modern feel has made me pay extremely close attention to the language used to portray various characters. There is a distinct tonal difference used between Palamon and Arcite that I tried my best to maintain in my adaptation. While simply reading a play, small details like these are often overlooked and blend into the background of the play. While in the past, I have done much work with analyzing Shakespeare’s plays, I have never been given the task to actually make it my own, and after having done so, I definitely have gained a new appreciation for the effort that must go into writing a script.