Could Shakespeare Be Shakespeare If All He Had Was The Internet?

My guess is no.


We don’t know who Shakespeare was, but of all the possibilities the one that has Bill as the itinerant actor is probably the least likely. More likely, it seems to me, is that Shakespeare was a member of the noble class and probably well heeled. So he’d probably take one look at the web and say what a colossal waste.


The Internet is for marketers, not for creators like Shakespeare. Fortunes are made on the Internet by being conduits, portals, and “connecting” people (FB seems more and more to me like the party line my folks when I was a kid: You pick up, listen in, but you don’t have to say anything, so I put connecting in quotes.)


Was the Big BS interested in “connecting” people? Doubt it. He was more interested in disconnecting people from their wretched lives, for a couple of hours. He was more interested in looking at the human condition (in portraying treason, treachery, and love) so that we might better see the pitfalls and possibilities in being human. Where does this happen on the Internet? “I’ve had the shits all day. Thank God for Blackberry and texting.” We might be able to monetize texting, but not the crap Bill wrote.


Bill’s talent was a verbal one, not a visual one. Even a play-goer had to create the play in his mind through words rather than simply perceive special effects and explicit images. If you don’t believe this explain how the use of men to play female parts was explicit.


I suppose he might have been a rapper, if rap was iambic pentameter, but vulgarity was really not his bag.


Shakespeare, being an upstart crow, could not make a living being a poet. I say that, not because I am in his class as a poet, but because no poet can make a living with poetry.


Shakespeare could not make a living as a playwright unless he was willing to be his own angel. Money has ruined the theater, so we now get recycled material that made money before, so maybe it will make money again. And where on the Internet do you see new plays, anyway?


Given that actors no longer speak in verse, I doubt he would be in show business at all. He might be a director, but I don’t think there is much evidence he was into directing.


I don’t know what he might be doing if he had to earn a living today. Maybe he might own a small circus or have a country and western band spinning stories in song behind a chicken wire stage to protect from thrown beer bottles in a small bar.


I suspect that this question is put to aspiring high school guidance counselors at the end of their six year education training course. The smug answer, pleasing to all (wink, wink), is, “Why he be a guidance counselor, of course!” What a crock.

And if William Shakespeare wasn’t able to do what he did, if he had to take up another line of work, odds are in America (at least) he’d be unemployed.

So if you’re feeling down abut being out of work for the past three years, just look beside you to the scruffy looking hippy in an Elizabethan ruff collar and wearing a codpiece to keep his johnson from flopping out. The dude’s been out of work for the past four hundred years – with no prospects in sight.