This unit of our semester will focus on The Two Noble Kinsmen, a collaborative text written by William Shakespeare and John Fletcher.  We’ll spend time talking about: the play as an object of literary study as well as a friendship text; adaptation and revision; collaboration and the composition process in the early modern period; and what we can learn as writers from the play’s content, form, and other particulars.  We’ll also engage in composition and collaboration ourselves.

This is where we began.  Composition and collaboration.  As you likely know, Shakespeare and Fletcher pull the plot for their work from Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale, a courtly romance in rhyming couplets that opens the Canterbury Tales.  Chaucer himself pulled story elements from Boccaccio’s Teseida.  As a class, we’ve discussed the processes and effects of these adaptation in preparation for our own.

The Two Noble Kinsmen has enjoyed a relatively rich performance history on the stage, but it’s never been adapted for screen.  This is our task:

You are working on a production of The Two Noble Kinsmen.  Because of time and budget restraints, your script needs to be as short as possible, with as few actors as possible.  Knowing that the play is meant to be a tragicomedy, you should also be concerned with making sure that any humor “carries” for your audience, taking into account archaisms and the like.  Similarly, you want to make sure that your audience gets the narrative and what you deem the play’s most important themes, and therefore you will want to cut any extraneous or confusing material.

You can find our assignment sequence here.
You can follow our progress and join in the fun in Act One here.

Our group-adaptations are finished!  
Click the links to read work from Group 1, Group 2, Group 3, and Group 4.

Student reflections forthcoming!