Shakespeare 101

As of yesterday, I have a new appreciation for Shakespeare and all of his works!! The Element's apprentices have been given our new assignment! To do a production, like the Reduced Shakespeare Company, where we act out each of Shakespeare's plays in 3 minutes! 

 At first, this sounded pretty simple. Basically summarize the play in 3 minutes- we can do that. But, then I realized that meant distilling a 3 hour play into 3 minutes, and we can't just rattle of the plot summary. I looked at the list of his plays, and I have only read about half of them, and that might even be stretching the truth. We need to understand what is happening in each play thoroughly, to be able to wrap it up in a shorter form.We also need to come up with interesting and unique ways of presenting each play, and then put it all together. 

As I mentioned before, the Reduced Shakespeare Company took this challenge on and produced, The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged). I was watching the clips of their performance on Youtube, and I was inspired to say the least. They use Shakespeare's language mixed with modern language, so you get the feel of Shakespeare while understanding everything! As I was working, the enormity of this project started to dawn on me. The part I can look forward to is being a real Shakespeare scholar; being able to know all of his plays inside and out is exciting!