Shakespeare's Influence Today

I have been learning some very amazing details, facts and other knowledge from my professors.

In my Shakespeare class, my professor—David Baker—told the class, as well as showed us, how Shakespeare’s poems and plays seem very familiar to the movies, advertisements and TV shows we view today. Shakespeare is known for making plays that would appeal to the masses. H

e wanted to make money and his plays worked so well that his storylines and plots are basically still used today.

For example, I just recently watched a movie with my girlfriend, and it was very similar to Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet.” The movie is “Warm Bodies,” and it is basically a movie about how a male zombie becomes “human” again through the process of loving a normal, alive female.

The story seems original and unique. The director—Jonathan Levine—just took the current popular culture craze—zombies—and made a sort of funny, love-story about it. It seems simple enough, but after one lecture by David Baker, I could immediately see the connection between “Warm Bodies” and “Romeo and Juliet.”

The most obvious comparison is the fact that the two main characters fall in love and want to be together, but the female’s family and the zombie’s new, dead “family,” keep them from being together. The two sides—humans and zombies—are fighting each other, similar to the feud between Capulet and Montague. The feud lasts until the very end of both the play and the movie.

The scene in the movie that demonstrated how eerily similar it is to “Romeo and Juliet” involved the alive female standing on balcony—which overlooks the fortress or city she is in. She wonders where “R,” the name designated to the zombie, is. While she wonders, R is secretly hiding below her window and balcony, waiting for Julie, the female’s name to appear.  The scene is eerily similar to Act 2, Scene 1of “Romeo and Juliet.”
The names are obviously similar and the scene is basically the same in both the movie and the play. The movie demonstrates how Shakespeare still appeals to the masses. His poems and plays are the perfect starting point for anyone trying to make a great movie, advertisement or TV show in today’s world.