For our screen adaptation of Shakespeare we decided to do a high school version based in Thebes Regional High. We adapted act one scene two and the entirety of act two. Instead of being cousins, Arcite and Palamon are just best friends who play football together.  Creon is their coach, the jailer is their principal, the jailer’s daughter is the principal’s daughter as expected, and Emila is the hot girl that they both desire to date. In the adaption, Palamon and Arcite are planning to quit the football team because their coach Creon mistreats them and the team. They end up staying on the team because Valerius, the manager of the team tells them that their rival school with the amazing quarter is going to play them and they don’t want to let their school down. In act two, the principal speaks of retiring not about death as the jailer is speaking of and tells his pupil student to look after his daughter for him. Palamon and Arcite also speak of their friendship with each other and Palamon first notices Emila but refers to her as the hot girl in the pink dress. Arcite and Palamon bicker over her as in the original play but our adaptation shows how ridiculous they actually sound. Instead of leaving jail, Arcite has to leave detention and go home and Palamon is required to stay there because he needs to “think about his actions”. The jailer’s daughter sees Palamon and goes on her creepy rant, professing her love for Palamon whom she barely knows.

Like in Fletcher’s version The Two Noble Kinsmen, Arcite and Palamon can be easily confused and mixed up because they are just like each other. They have the same qualities as the original Aricite and Palamon, but speak in an informal manner calling Emila hot and using some slang. In this adaptation we characterized the jailers daughter as creepy, stalker-ish, and obsessed with Palamon. She is the typical crazy girl in high school that longs to be with someone she knows will never want her. Her long speeches about her love for Palamon shows this. She even says that she will “follow him” and “be his shadow”.

We used the general idea and essence of the original play but changed the names, wording, and the setting. We kept the same names for most of the main characters but changed the names of the characters in the subplot (i.e. we changed the country men to fans at a football game, the jailer became the principal, and the wooer was changed into the suck-up student). For wording we shortened most of the phrases but still generally captured each line. Our wording brought out the ridiculousness of Palamon and Arcites arguments. I find it ridiculous that they would argue over a girl and in the original its even more ridiculous that they are willing to duel and kill each other just for her love when they barely know her. The wording in this piece also made me less sympathetic for the jailers daughter because she seems much more creepy and disturbing. Are wording also made me realize how funny her character actually is. We completely changed the setting to appeal to younger and modern audiences because most of us can relate to the high school experience and the importance of sports to high school athletes.

Although this was a fun and insightful project, there were areas of difficultly. Firstly we had to decide whether we were going to keep all of the lines and characters because of the budget restraints that were set. We kept all of the characters because we thought each one was significant in their own way and brought something interesting to the story. Keeping the wooer (the stuck-up student) in our adaptation wasn’t necessary but he brought something different to the story. Instead of focusing on the main plot the entire time, it give the reader a break from the main plot and let him or her think and read about something else. We also didn’t cut any specific scenes or moments out but instead we abridged them. Cutting any particular scene would further remove us from the original story. We didn’t want to do this because our setting already distanced us enough from the original play. Another problem we ran into was wording. Some of us wanted to use more slang to appeal to younger audiences while others wanted to stick closer to the Shakespearean wording. At first we started writing our adaptation with many slang terms than shifted to more accepted English. We had to change this because our adaptation seemed like two different people wrote it. We came to an agreement and used some slang terms but stuck to mostly accepted English. We added some of Shakespeare’s original language to add comedic relief. Overall there were some minor disagreements but we worked it out and got the product that we wanted.