Dave Barry in Cyberspace by Dave Barry

Author:Dave Barry [Barry, Dave]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Ballantine Books
Published: 2010-09-20T05:00:00+00:00

Gertrude: What?

It goes on like this for scene after scene, act after act, until finally the main characters, driven insane by the fact that they’re all speaking gibberish, kill themselves.

What was Shakespeare’s problem? How could a person produce so much writing—38 plays, 157 sonnets, 2 major narrative poems, and 8 screenplays—and not manage to produce more than four sentences, total, that a normal person can understand?

The answer is that Shakespeare did not have word processing. He had to write everything out by hand, and, like most people, his handwriting was almost totally illegible. The actors in his plays were forced to guess what their lines were, and by the time the words got into print, they had almost nothing to do with what Shakespeare originally wrote (for example, Hamlet was supposed to be a comedy about a man who marries a camel).

And the problem is not limited to Shakespeare. Even today, hardly anybody can read anybody else’s handwriting. Oh, sure, we all start out writing legibly, in elementary school, when we have to write on that special writing paper with the lines really far apart, so that a capital “A” is approximately the height of Danny DeVito. Also, we learn to print, and the teachers force us to form each letter clearly and legibly, like this:

“Oh oh oh,” said Jane. “Look look look. Spot made a big doot.”

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