Fiona Barnes-Brisley

A Midsummer Night's Dream (Shakespeare: From Stage to Page)

Act II Scene II of the comedy A Midsummer Night's Dream is explored in this book. This scene encapsulates the chaos that unfolds after Puck mistakenly applies the love potion on the wrong victim. Much inspiration came from the collage-like style of Monty Python. The book uses vibrant colours which express the exaggerated, extreme emotions that occur throughout the scene. Scale is used to create surreal, fantastical spirit, and pacing is also used for comedic effect. One unique quality of this book is that the typeface, or voice of Lysander completely changes upon being given the love potion, causing visual surprise. A halftone pattern is used in backgrounds to allow for bold gradients, depth, and the playing of scale depending on emotional intensity. Photographed characters show their emotions through facial expressions and an established system of typographic treatment that distinguishes the emotion and intensities of their voices. This system is consistently used throughout all three books, but each book is given a unique ambience of its genre. Using scale, composition, weight and distortion, various emotions, volumes, and intensities are shown. The project also mimics experiences of theatre onto the printed page. Echoes on a stage are mimicked by soft type that fades into the background during soliloquies. Characters enter and exit through folded flaps which bring a character onto or out of the boundaries of the page, or the stage. Sudden sounds are brought into our space through pull-tabs which express the sound travelling from its source to its destination. Additionally, the project seeks to encourage reflection and comprehension of the ever-relevant stories. Each play is given a supplemental workbook that playfully presents prompts and invites the reader to draw, write, doodle, and express their responses to the scenes. Unlike a traditional textbook-workbook duo, this workbook aims to be friendly, creative, visual and inviting. The pages of the workbook can be torn out, shared, hung on the chalkboard, and placed back into their scene's folders in the books. Also, at the back of the scenes themselves, three vellum sheets are given which provide scene-specific prompts that evoke reflection on the play. These can be written on and shared, and once again stored in their folder.

“This project seeks to transform the text-only Shakespearean scripts often seen by adolescents as boring, dated or challenging into something lively, modern, digestible and exciting. Using emotional expression that aims to connect the reader to the story through facial expressions, typography, colour and composition, the project's goal is to take Shakespeare's work from the stage onto the page. Through a survey on the subject of preconceived notions of Shakespeare and reading, research was made on the views of his work, which tended to be either positive, or negative. An interview with a past high school English teacher inspired the use of Shakespeare's original English which is often not as difficult to understand as students may think. This interview also revealed the importance of Shakespeare's plays being watched and performed rather than simply read. It was this idea that inspired the idea of visualizing the play expressively through print. This project is one of three books created in the Shakespeare: From Stage to Page collection. Together, the project aims to immerse adolescents into a story’s world, connecting with their emotions and senses to elevate the story’s bond with the reader. Expressive typography, emotions, colour and interactivity work together to bring Shakespeare’s work from the stage onto the page”