Task

You belong to a group of literature students who are currently studying William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. Many of you are having problems understanding the language and are getting frustrated by this. There must be another way to study and understand the language in a more interesting and appealing manner than just reading the words, right? Looking around the class, you chance upon a comic book placed on one of the desks in the class and suddenly you have an idea to put the 2 together....

You might pause and ask yourself - Comics? Shakespeare? Do those 2 even go together?

The answer is: Yes! It is no different from reading a play and performing it on stage. A play is always meant to be performed and a different approach to represent the play would make it more appealing and offer a fresh perspective. We all know that Shakespearean language can be difficult to read, so why don't we make it easier for ourselves to understand? As comics are very easy to read and appealing, making use of visuals and images to interpret the text would make it more accessible and reveal underlying aspects of the text such as imagery, symbolism, personification etc.

Making use of the ComicLife software, each group would create a few pages of comic strips to detail the plot, structure, character, dialogue in their allocated Act. In a comic strip, the 2 most important features are the pictures and the words.

So where would you find the relevant pictures? You can use existing images from the Internet or you can even create them by acting out the scene in the Act and taking photographs to represent the characters and the settings.

The words? Well, the dialogue of the play would suffice! Taking the dialogue of the play as the words of the comic would allow you to pay closer attention to the text and to decide for yourself which line or phrase is more important to be included in the comic, as opposed to including every single line in the play. By emphasizing on the important quotations in the play as the words for the comic, you would also be indirectly creating a resource for yourselves to revise for the examinations.