Romeo And Juliet Comic Vs Play

In my variant of the play Romeo and Juliet, I had decided to keep many elements of the original play the same, including the tragic ending. This means my comic is aimed at a preteen audience of around twelve to thirteen-year-olds. Attempting to stay on track with the original storyline, the characters’ names, family relations, and means of death were kept the same or very similar to the play. Although many aspects of the rendition may ring true with the original script, I took the creative liberty to tweak the storyline. The setting takes place in Verona, as did the Shakespeare version of Romeo and Juliet. However, instead of being set in the Elizabethan era, the characters act in contemporary times. This was changed because of the specified audience. Everyone is familiar with modern times so the reader would be more comfortable reading about something they have lived through instead of history learned from a textbook. Despite the fact that it is morally wrong to kill someone in the twenty-first century, I still had Romeo kill Paris to emphasize how mad he is driven by love. However, to cushion the actions and make killing others seem plausible, the two opposing households became two opposing organized crime organizations with Prince Escalus as the police.

And because of this, some of the characters’ personalities stray from the original text, such as Benvolio and Mercutio. Even if their personalities were a bit erratic inconsistency, their positions in Romeo’s life were equal to the original story. For instance, Friar Lawrence was still a father figure to Romeo, as he was the person Romeo consulted for advice, but it would have been out of place for a mafia member to visit a Friar, and thus Friar Lawrence became a