For our adaptation, we decided to take a modern take on Fletcher and Shakespeare’s “The Two Noble Kinsmen.” This play, published in 1634, was based off of “The Knight’s Tale” written by Geoffrey Chaucer. As Fletcher and Shakespeare took Chaucer’s main plot and turned it into a play that fit with the times, Ama, Danetta, Sakile, and I did the same. I will first describe the story we decided to tell of two noble schoolboys, and then I will discuss our process and how we worked in a group together.

Our story followed two friends, Palamon and Arcite, in the journey of navigating the halls of Thebes Regional High School. Palamon and Arcite both played for their high school football team. One day, after the two boys had gotten into fight with their coach, they had to spend the day in detention. Looking out the window, both young men fell in love with a girl named Emilia, which leads to a series of conversations and events in which Palamon and Arcite battle for her love. In the end of our rendition, Arcite ends up with the girl.

In the beginning of writing this adaptation, my group was very good at coming up with creative scenes and ideas. In our brainstorm, we first discussed what time period we wanted our story to take place in. We decided on modern day. We then decided where we wanted it to take place. Since we are al students, we all agreed on having it take place in a high school, a setting we are all familiar with.

Next, we discussed what we wanted to do with the characters. Since we knew we were going to cut out most Shakespeare and Fletcher’s language, we wanted to keep as much of him as we could, so we chose to keep all the specific names, such as Emilie, the same, but change the characters that were refereed to by their title. So, we made the jailor into the principal of the high school, the jailor’s daughter into the principal’s daughter, the countrymen into two fans, the wo-er into a suck-up student, and the queens into two girls. By doing this, I believe we did justice to Fletcher and Shakespeare’s decision in their play.

When we all agreed on characters and setting, we starting writing the play itself. We went about doing this by reading each line of the play line by line and either cutting it out if we thought it was not important, or making each line more modern. This was at times difficult because the language was so different from today that we could not think of how we could change it. In these instances we had to look further along in the story, to see what exactly we had to set up.

After we completed the introduction of most of the characters, we found that adapting the rest of Act two was much more difficult then expected. I attribute this mostly due to our decisions regarding the first parts. Because we were thinking of adapting this into to a TV show or movie, rather than a play to be performed on stage, the characters were introduced in very different places both geographically and chronologically. Originally, as future directors and producers, we felt this would add variety and be pleasing to the eye. However, when it came to the later scenes in which everything begins to become connected, it was much more difficult to figure out what should happen. For example, we had a lot of trouble writing how Arcite finally meets Emilie. After talking and brainstorming, we decided they should meet at a party after the game.

After completing this adaptation project, I am most proud of both the originality of our idea and how we chose to go about rewriting the lines. We cut a lot out due to our feelings that many speeches and conversations tended to drag on and were not accurate with how society interacted today. Also we decided to keep little phrases word for word from what was originally written. For example, in one of the Principal’s Daughter’s speeches, she says, “I love him beyond love and beyond reason.” We thought this language was beautiful and we wanted to keep it. What is different, however, with our language that we kept compared to other groups, is that, in most cases, it is not clear that they were Shakespeare’s words because we put it in a much more modern context.

I think our group worked extremely well together. We came up with the idea together and we were all very excited about it while writing it. We laughed a lot when deciding how to make Shakespeare’s very old language into something a teenager from the 21st century would say, but we also took our work very seriously and have a great final product that we all are very pleased with. When we came to a bump in the road regarding how to adapt a certain part of the story or character, we brainstormed out loud, and everyone contributed to the discussion with different and creative ideas. This collaboration left us with a very interesting and adapted story of “The Two Noble Kinsmen” that has a little bit of Ama, Danetta, Sakile, and I in it.