Submit Your Shakespeare Video Clip to the Show Us Your Shakespeare Competition

Have you heard about the No Fear Shakespeare video competition? Show Us Your Shakespeare is a competition that allows anyone to submit a video no longer than three minutes that features a scene from your favorite Shakespeare play. What's that you say, you don't have any Elizabethan clothing or a stage on which to wear them? No worries, my overly anxious comrade; what is so exciting about this competition is that anything goes. (Within reason.) For instance, I've always wanted to stage a production of Macbeth in monochromatic settings and costuming with the intention of turning it into a 1930s Warner Brothers gangster movie. You could pick the scene from Macbeth in which he hears his future foretold by the three weird sisters and simply set your camcorder to black and white mode.

Be creative, man. Instead of choosing Hamlet's "To be or not to be" speech, choose the scene in which Polonius is giving advice to Laertes and shoot it in the same style and with the same kind of saccharine music that you've seen the same kind of fatherly advice scene done in a thousand television shows. Are you old enough to remember the ABC Afterschool Special series? Turn this touching scene between Polonius and Laertes into something suitable for that.

Or let's say you enjoy futuristic dystopian films. It would be beyond easy to take practically any scene from Titus Andronicus and futurama it. Remember, the sci-fi movie Forbidden Planet is just The Tempest set a few thousands years in the future. Is your favorite television show one of those dumbass sexed-up teen shows like The O.C.? Take any of Shakespeare's romantic comedies and doll it up to look like everything from Degrassi High or Desperate Housewives.

You say love reality TV shows? By taking either that approach or a mockumentary approach like This is Spinal Tap, you could do amazing things in three minutes with just about any scene at all from a Shakespeare play. You have until 2:00 AM E.T. on June 1, 2008 to get your video entry posted to Show Us Your Shakespeare. The prize awarded to the best video is a $100 Barnes and Noble gift certificate and a complete set of No Fear Shakespeare books.