My piece is a drawing using only pencil on copy paper. It is called “Enter Bastard.” The picture shows the struggle the reader/viewer encounters at the beginning of the play when given close to no outside information about Edmund of whether to empathize with him or see him as a villain. Cover the right side of the picture with your hand, and you see a poor innocent boy who is crying because he is regarded in a negative way due to his illegitimate birth. Looking at the left side of the face, one has no choice but to feel for this person. An illustration is a good parallel to the beginning of the play, when we are first introduced to Edmund in Act 1 Scene 1, because with this simple drawing we have no background information except that this person is a bastard. We start off this play with only that information about Edmund, and so I illustrated the two different ways a bastard’s life could go; either becoming a pitiful character with no inheritance and no love due to something that can’t be controlled, or (when covering the left side and only showing the right side) a vicious, vengeful, scary, psychopathic man.
-Zoe Kushlefsky