Shakespeare is sometimes difficult for students to read. Whether it is the language of the time, the random words that Shakespeare uses, or the hidden puns in his works, Shakespeare confuses many young students that read his works. One work by Shakespeare is called The Two Noble Kinsmen. This work was written with the help of John Fletcher. The thing that differentiates The Two Noble Kinsmen from Shakespeare’s other plays is that this play was never performed for the screen! This is where our class, called English 181: Friendship, came in. It was our job to take this work and adapt it for screen. So where should we start?

The first step of this process was brainstorming. We had to decide what we liked and disliked about other Remakes/adaptations that we had heard about or seen. The first Remake I thought about was a movie trailer remake about Twilight in the Kung Fu Panda world. In this Remake, Edward was the panda, Po Ping, and Bella was the tiger, Master Tigress. The two had fallen in love, just like Edward and Bella in Twilight. This Remake was extremely funny, but it had a lot of originality to it. For this reason, we decided as a class that whatever remake we do, it will have at least a few parts of the original work in it. As a class, we also decided that we had to keep all the important features that distinguished this work from other works.

The next thing we had to decide was what amount of the original work would be considered plagiarism. In order to discover this, we were asked the question “What is the difference between Shakespeare and Fletcher’s The Two Noble Kinsmen, and Chaucer’s The Knight’s Tale?” Although we saw a lot of similarities between the two works, Shakespeare and Fletcher added a lot of their own ideas to the work that had not appeared in Chaucer’s The Knight’s Tale. One of thing that Shakespeare and Fletcher emphasized was knightly hood and friendship. They did this by contrasting the relationship between Pirithous, Hippolyta, and Theseus with the relationship of Arcite, Palamon, and Emilia. Chaucer does not do this. By seeing this, we were given an example of how to adapt a play by putting our own spin on it, while continuing to keep the important details.

Finally, it was time to decide how we, as a group would adapt the Two Noble Kinsmen. My group members consisted of Ama Asare, Meghan Hickey, and Sakile Taylor and we were responsible for adapting Act 2. First we had to decide what context we wanted our adaptation to be placed in. This was easy because all of us agreed that Shakespeare would be easier to understand if we adapted his play into a modern text for a modern audience. For this reason, we decided that placing the characters in a High School setting would be the best place for this work. The High School would be called Thebes Regional High School, and Palamon and Arcite would be two seniors that are best friends. The only problem I had with this was having two boys (Palamon and Arcite) fighting over a girl. I thought it would be more likely if two girls were fighting over a boy. After some group discussion, we decided to keep Palamon and Arcite as guys because this was an important detail that we did not need to mess with. Next we decided that King Creon would be an evil coach (named Coach Creon) and that the two boys would be on the football team at Thebes Regional High. (We thought that this would be the best way to show the two boys ‘fighting’ for Thebes, but not liking their leader). This week the boys were going to have a game against the opposing team in which Theseus, a fierce quarterback, was a part of. Although the boys want to quit because of how mean Coach Creon has become, they decide to stay and play for Thebes. Although the boys play in the game, they end up losing the game. (This scene was made to parallel the loss of Thebes against Theseu’s home nation).This causes Coach Creon to yell and call them names, provoking Arcite and Palamon to hit the coach, sending them to detention. While in detention, the Principal of the school (known as the Jailer in TNK) realizes that he has left his jacket in the detention room and asks his daughter (known as the Jailer’s Daughter in TNK) to go get it for him. Although the Principal’s Daughter falls in love with Palamon when she first sees him, he does not notice her because he and Arcite are looking out of the window gazing at a girl in a pink dress. (Although not known yet, this is Emilia, sister of Theseus). The boys compete to see who will succeed in winning the chance to be with Emilia. Although Palamon does not get the chance to meet face to face with Emilia in Act 2, Arcite gets invited to a party at Theseus’s house and there, he meets and talks to the beautiful Emilia for the first time, in hopes of wooing her before Palamon.

One question we had to ask in this adaptation is which characters should stay and which should be cut. In the end, we only cut two characters. (The third and fourth countrymen). We felt that adding lines for these characters would be a waste because the other two countrymen could say them. Another question we had was if we should translate Shakespearean text into modern text word for word. Instead of doing this, however, we decided to just translate a few parts because some parts were monotonous and did not add anything to the adaptation. There are many parts, however, that we did use word for word from Shakespeare’s version. For example, the Principal’s daughter states “I love him beyond love and beyond reason” when talking about Palamon at the end of Act 2. This quote was taken exactly from Shakespeare’s text. We also used many analogies. For example, Palamon and Arcite were soldiers for Thebes in the original TNK, and in our adaptation Palamon at one point states “He treats us like we are soldiers, fighting on the battle field.” We thought that instances like this would add to the story and help connect our version of TNK to the original one. Two more questions we had to think about were how Arcite should get out of detention (or banished in the original TNK) and how we should introduce Emilia. For these scenes, we decided to stray away from Shakespeare. For example, Arcite gets out of detention because of an Emergency at home that he must attend to and Emilia is seen by Palamon and Arcite through the window of the detention room while she is watching her brother Theseus play a football game at Thebes Regional High School. Finally, the last question we had to ask is if we should keep the scenes in which Palamon and Arcite confess their love for each other. Although this is an important scene, it was hard for us to see a guy nowadays telling another guy how much he loved him. For this reason, we changed a lot of the wording. Instead of Palamon and Arcite stating how much they love each other, they talk about how they would always be ‘bros’ and how even after college they will continue to keep in touch with each other.

All in all, I believe this project was a very fun experience. Not only did we get to make our own production of a work, we also got to read more Shakespeare. Although Shakespeare is hard for me to understand, whenever I DO understand his works, I enjoy them. I believe that my group worked well together and with their help, this adaptation of Shakespeare and Fletcher’s The Two Noble Kinsmen is DEFINITELY ready for screen.