MackThe Internet of Things (IoT) is a vast wireless network made up of devices – from simple sensors to smartphones and wearables – connected together – collecting or transferring data with no human intervention. Shakespeare’s work is a vast wireless network made up of plays, poetry and people that requires no human intervention. His work is regarded with a freedom that allows people to time transfer the plays into their own time. Building a faster network connection and helping to foster a system of interrelated, interacting-connected things and people who are able to give and receive data in stages over a human network without human intervention, or interference.
Shakespeare’s early connection
It was in 1986 that a family discovered a notebook. It was a 24-page 11 1/2-by-8 inch notebook to be exact. The was described to the public as a rather “miserable looking” one. It had been found among the stored undergarments of an aristocratic English family. However, in the pages of the notebook, were brief notes thought to have been jotted down by a theatre goer 500 hundred years ago! in 1600. The notes were written down during various performances of William Shakespeare’s plays.
The family immediately took the 24-page notebook to Sotheby’s for valuations, as you do. The notebook was valued at $213,000 (150,000 pounds), which is $531,658 in 2021 dollars.
The entries were thought to have been the earliest known extracts from Shakespeare’s work. The discovery made Shakespeare fans and scholars quite happy. Written between 1594 and 1603, at least 13 years prior to the death of William Shakespeare, there were over two pages of quotations and near-quotations from Part I of King Henry IV.
Would reaction to this discovery be any different today? Yes, given the pervasiveness of social media and real time information. It would have gotten a lot more attention.
But would this reaction make us understand Shakespeare any differently? Not really. Then as in now, a valuable discovery was and would be realized. These type of discoveries would continue to be valuable to different groups in different ways.
A hundred years ago, what motivated scholars and student’s understanding of Shakespeare. To better understand the times you have t research what people were thinking at the time.
Pure talk and network mobility
I found an article in the 1902 Evening Argus, a local Michigan paper that went into detail about a lecture on Shakespeare’s Hamlet given by a Miss Wadsworth. They didn’t print her first name. Only to describe her as the great Shakespearean scholar.
Let us set the scene. It is a humid Saturday afternoon in June of 1902. The club women of Owosso, Michigan and their friends in parlor of the Congregational Church to hear the closing Shakespearean lecture given by the great Shakespearean scholar, Miss Wadsworth. It is standing room only, it is hot. The ladies and their friends might have been aided by an electric ceiling fans. At that time powered by alcohol, oil, or kerosene. In a wicked irony or a Shakespearean set of circumstances, air-conditioning was invented that year , in 1902 , but it wouldn’t be marketed to the masses for another 31 years, until 1933.
The week of lectures have been a literary feast for the ladies and their friends. The great Miss Wadsworth saved the best Shakespeare play for last – Hamlet. One of the most revisited plays in Shakespeare cannon.
Fun facts about Shakespeare’s Hamlet. The tragedy of Hamlet was partly founded on a work by a Danish historian. Shakespeare devoted more time to writing this play than any other. He began writing it in his youth and finished it in his mature stage.
Miss Wadsworth began the lecture by describing the original Danish version of Hamlet as uncouth in matter and style and barbarous in the last degree.
How did Miss Wadsworth and her contemporaries 100 years ago understand Shakespeare and was it any different from how we understand it now. That is all a matter of interpretation.
And continues ” an example of Shakespeare’s great delicacy in purifying everything he has touched. He makes the persons christians, clothing them with sentiments and manners of a much later period than they have in the [Danish] tale; though he [Shakespeare] still places the scene at a time when English paid some sort of homage to the Danish crown, which was before the Norman conquest.”
In 1902 the concept of purity , had been women into the from national and racial to the evangelical . At the turn of the century, Shakespeare was understood to have purified everything he touched.
If you’re on a Network, then you’re still connected.
Any different now? We still are obsessed with the idea of purity. Society continues to conflate sexuality with morality.
Shakespeare will continue to be those — blank spaces for projections for groups and individual fantasies.
We can understand Shakespeare as a playwright and poet who wrote for common people and the masses; and we can understand Shakespeare by understanding what they, who read what Shakespeare wrote, stand for.
Like a great wireless network, Shakespeare’s plays allow great download and transferring times. What is keyed-in to people understand of Shakespeare, his work having a pure quality of perfection and clarity. The operating system that handled this download is our value system. Over the last 500 years, this is been the operating system used to sign on and understand Shakespeare.