(Just Like) Romeo & Juliet

Cave drawings, clay tablets, papyrus, wax tablets, parchment, paper, the printing press, bound books, paperbacks, audio books, e-readers. For centuries humanity has used linguistic symbols to transmit and conserve information. From silk in China to dried palm tree leaves in India, various materials have been used for recording and transmitting information.

With the proliferation of books came the need to study them. When time and resources are in short supply, readers look for a summary, an abstract, a condensed version, the "Reader's Digest" format: short, sweet, and to the point. As a student, I reveled in the existence of Cliffs Notes, guides that present and explain literary and other works in short order. Cliffs Notes owe their start to Coles Notes, published in Canada. Nebraska native Cliff Hillegass obtained the American rights in 1958 and the rest, as they say, is history, spawning an entire genre that includes Spark Notes, For Dummies, Complete Idiot's Guides and now...Shakespeare via short cartoons with Elizabethan English translated into contemporary slang in just about seven minutes, courtesy of Cliffs Notes.

Oh, the wonders of the modern age.

And yes, just to clarify, I am here to praise CliffsNotes Films, not to bury them, for this good will live after them.

Things evolve; it is the way of the world. There are those who will find these versions of the work of the Bard of Avon blasphemous and insulting. Is it Shakespeare if it isn't done in Elizabethan English? Is is still Shakespeare when is it made into a movie, or made into a movie and contemporized? Does it matter how the message gets out? As Marshall McLuhan famously said, "The medium is the message." The form of the medium tends to embed itself in the message, creating a relationship whereby the medium influences the perception of the message. I readily admit I recall Polonius' advice to Laertes about "Neither a borrower nor a lender be" best by remembering the musical version of Hamlet from Gilligan's Island. Does it make the message of Hamlet any less important that it was delivered through a comic medium?

Each of us has a marvelous approach to storytelling, and we all do it differently. CliffsNotes Films is using this technology to reach out to audiences in a new and entertaining way. Does it matter how the story is told, as long as it is told? After all, "All the world's a stage..." (As You Like It, Act II, Scene VII).