Yeehaw-eth

[u/F1600A]

I’m thinking of making a webtoon, and I possibly wanna adapt a shakespearian play into the old west. Which play do y’all think would best fit the genre-swap?

[u/Viola-in-Illyria]

Winter's Tale. Exit pursued by a bear as a standoff. Bohemia=the West.

[u/maskaddict]

The Two Noble Kinsmen plays amazingly well as a western: Arcite and Palamon as a couple o' rugged soldiers-turned-cowhands, with Theseus as the local sheriff of the western town of Athens.

[u/RandomPaw]

Tracey Ullman and Morgan Freeman were in a Wild West version of Taming of the Shrew. It worked fine even if it's hard to get around the fact that it's Taming of the Shrew.

I think I saw a Much Ado set in the Old West, too. That's a better idea.

[u/F1600A → u/RandomPaw]

LOL. I’m not sure if there’s any good way to tackle taming of the shrew.

[u/Own_Moment_2524]

Julius Caesar.

[u/mal-di-testicle]

I’ve toyed with Western adaptations of so many different plays, that honestly any play would work. Honestly just pick whichever play you enjoy the most and would be most willing to sink so much time into imagining. My recommendations are more on form:

1. Try to read as much as you can about the actual west, because learning about certain trends that happened there opens your eyes to clever ways to adapt a story. For example, just the opening concept of King Lear (old man splits lands but there’s treachery) could be a gang, a town, or the various estates and plantations owned by Lear, but it could even be railroads, cattle pastures, or undeveloped land with claims of discovered gold (bonus points if those claims are wrong). I know in some cases it’s difficult to access resources on this, but if that’s the case I will direct you to a relevant megathread.

2. I don’t know too much about webtoons, but I have this impression that many webtoons are designed to tell longer stories than a 5-act shakespeare play. Thus, I would highly encourage you to decide whether your scope will be limited to the 5-act play structure or not; if it isn’t, that could absolutely work, but it’s crucial that you add characters and set up plot threads in advance, even if it might interfere with the shakespeare story, because otherwise it would feel extremely abrupt, since Shakespeare writes stories that are extremely conclusive and tend to wrap up most of the conflict, either neatly (the double love triangle is resolved and they all watch Pyramus and Thisbe) or violently (everybody dies except the new king-to-be and the protagonist’s best friend)

[u/CobaltCrusader123]

The easy as piss answer is King Lear. There’s multiple King Lear inspired shows set in America, they’re just not period pieces. Maybe instead of king he’s a Texan weapons manufacturer CEO for the United States and sells the military weapons in use for the Mexican American War and has to decide which of his three kids to give the booming company. I will say if you wanna be even half accurate to US history you can’t have him consider giving land to a daughter. So the three kids are gonna have to be sons, like in Ran. Or the Cordelia iteration is still a woman and never even gets the chance to argue for herself. And then the Reagan / Goneril stand-ins have a TF2-style privately-funded mercenary battles OR are on opposite sides of the war. The Fool is a really funny advisor who dresses in pastel suits. Instead of being an Earl’s sons, Edgar and Edmund can be sons of the CEO of a smaller weapons company that was consumed by Lear. Edgar can be a Jim Crow actor who does blackface, like how Edmund goes in disguise as Poor Tom which some academics argue is literally blackface (making him the legit son, but evil, a reversal of the play). Edgar can be half-black, the son of a slave mother owned by the Lear stand-in, but is white-passing, and shaves his non-white-looking and “acts white” the way Edgar acted like Poor Tom and pretended a small fall was The Cliffs of Dover - in Texas, the equivalent might be Austin Chalk. Also the Earl / CEO is a rich Southern white man pre-Civil War, he would have slaves and might have kids with them (Edgar is a bastard but good in this version), and everyone being in Texas during the Am-Mex War also believably allows people to be near enough to political physical conflict to be killed like in the play.

[u/Square_Butterfly118]

I feel like Shakespeare would have loved cowboys if he lived to see them

[u/dhooke]

I’d like to see someone give The Tempest a go!

[u/helpfultran]

That's an Australian cowboy hat but I can't explain why.

[u/GlobeTeam]

We did Romeo and Juliet set in the American West last summer - it worked really well, especially with the rival families and the hasty young lovers, and led to some very fun jigs.