‘To tweet or not to tweet’

Emma brought this to the team’s attention early last week. The Royal Shakespeare Company is giving Romeo and Juliet a 21st-century makeover on micro-blogging site Twitter. Such Tweet Sorrow (STS) started on Monday 12th April and runs for 5 weeks. Actors are improvising a story loosely based on the tale. They respond to each other, to the "audience" and to real world events in real time entirely by tweeting!

Here’s the premise.

"Two families in the same town have loathed one another for years. But a boy from one and a girl from the other fall in love - deep, sweet and destructive. You know the tale of Romeo and Juliet but now you can see it happening live and in real time - in modern Britain and on Twitter. Six characters live the story over the five weeks of Such Tweet Sorrow and you can experience it with them."

We have been following the events with differing degrees of enthusiasm (one of us, mentioning no names, is particularly obsessed) but we would like to hear what you think about Shakespeare being presented to young people in this way. Do you think engaging students with literature by any means is good, or do you think (as one commenter did on the BBC article) that Shakespeare would be ‘turning in his grave’?

Here’s what we think:

Ali: I think it is a valuable way of engaging young people with Shakespeare. The story is translating effectively into the 21st century; the language and events are being captured well, making it immediate, current. I loved watching the live election debate and seeing characters from Romeo and Juliet (STS) tweeting about it at the same time.
It’s great to have so many different versions of such a popular play and proves how enduring Shakespeare’s writing is – he did write for the masses after all and this Twitter version is a way of showing that continuing popularity. I noticed that in the last few days Romeo has been using quotes from the play directly in his tweets as well as more modern language – it works well (like it did in Baz Luhrmann’s film version).

Becky L: Although I am not well versed in the ways of Twitter, it seems the kids these days are and I think any way of communicating the sheer excitement of Shakespeare’s plays to them in a format they connect with is great. It’s not meant as a replacement for studying the play text, simply as an engaging supplement and I think this novel way of hooking them into the plot is really welcome! You’re right Ali, Shakespeare wrote for Joe Bloggs and I think he would love it!

Becky S: I use Twitter a little bit anyway (more for celebrity-stalkingfollowing purposes rather than actually tweeting stuff myself), so when I heard about Such Tweet Sorrow, I definitely thought it was worth checking out. And so now I am obsessed (I was probably more excited than I should have been when BenVoli0 requested to ‘follow’ me the other day) … like I needed a reason to spend any longer on the internet than I do already. Even though we all kind of know how it’s going to turn out, it’s fascinating to see it all unfold and watch the characters interact with the audience and with the news events of the day. If you’d like to see what’s going on but you don’t have a Twitter account, you can easily catch up with the day-by-day summary at http://www.suchtweetsorrow.com/story/.

Here are the relevant links:

The BBC article which caught our attention:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/arts_and_culture/8615432.stm

The story of Such Tweet Sorrow:
http://www.suchtweetsorrow.com/

Right, back to that encyclopedia!