Reflection on the Production of The Tale of Super-Love

Two Noble Kinsmen itself is adapted from Chaucer’s The Knight’s Tale. Even after reading both the versions of the play, the hardest part of this project for me was to come up with an idea that was different from what had already been done. All the other groups in class had come up with amazing ideas on their adaptation and we were not even confident if we wanted to change it to modern English.

When I read Shakespeare, what stands out the most for me is the language. It is not hard to understand his dialogues but at the same time it’s not a piece of cake either. Constantly referring to footnotes in the book and Internet sites, reading Shakespeare keeps you engrossed. However for our adaptation project we felt like we should experiment and see how Shakespeare would sound in modern English. Also that would make the play more accessible to people.

We also decided that we wanted to make the play for a comparatively younger audience and what’s more entertaining to kids than superheroes? Spiderman, Superman, Batman and people are still open to more. This would completely change people’s perspective towards Two Noble Kinsmen. People have seen high school triangles, or adult love triangles but a love triangle between two super heroes, was our unique selling point.  We tried to keep the story line as close to the play as possible. This made our adaptation even more challenging. It would have been easier to change the storyline and add the superhero element because then we could include whatever we wanted to justify situations. The real challenge was to add the superhero element and keep the story the same. We had to justify the storyline, them going to prison, the battle in the end where one superhero looses, which required us to be creative and come up with smart situations.

We divided our scenes and worked on them individually. We added our own dialogues; we gave the two kinsmen super powers. It was pretty exciting choosing powers for them. We debated on whether we should allow them to switch from human to superheroes and if Emilia should have powers too. The entire process was extremely entertaining and it pushed us to think out of the box. I dint believe I had it in me to come up with ideas like this before.

In terms of its similarity to the play, I feel like our adaptation is closer to the Knight’s tale than it is to Two Noble Kinsmen, in terms of story. We did not do this intentionally but the situations we added to justify the superhero element made the play more like its source text specially when we edited the Jailers daughter. We edited the Jailer’s daughter not because she is not important but because she would not have a significant role if the two kinsmen were changed to super heroes.

The few weeks I spent working on this project were very interesting and productive for me. I enjoyed reading and understanding Shakespeare like this. It was creative and different. Our interacting sessions with the group were fun. I think jointly we have come up with a decently innovative way of looking at Shakespeare’s Two Noble Kinsmen.