Shakespeare Didn’t Have the Internet: Oh Noes!

By On 02/11/2011 · 11 Comments

Thank you, John Orloff, for another history lesson:

There’s no Internet in 1600. He had no library. No books. There were no public libraries. You cannot write about 16th century law accurately because you’re gifted. You can only do that because you understand 16th century law. I just don’t believe the genius theory.

Whether Shakespeare “understood” the law is highly debatable, of course. But never mind that. Also, there were libraries in 1600: in and around London, they were owned by private subjects who let their friends, acquaintances, and acquaintances of acquaintances use them. John Dee’s library, for one; Sir Robert Cotton’s, for another. But never mind that.

Here’s the really key point: Shakespeare didn’t need the Internet in 1600 because he had the London of 1600, which was not unlike a small Internet you could walk around in.

Want to learn about botany? Walk over to Lime Street and talk to the Dutch And French apothecaries there, part of an international network of naturalists. Want to see what the rich and fashionable are into, or what exciting spices and luxury items can be had elsewhere in the world? Take a walk around Thomas Gresham’s Royal Exchange. Want to know more about fencing, or smoking, or speechifying, or what have you? Hang out in the aisles of St Paul’s Cathedral, swarming with hustlers and gossips — a veritable real-life Wikipedia of early modern pop culture. Need to know about Venice? Why not talk to one of the many Italians, some of them glassblowers from Venice, who lived and worked near Bishopsgate, where they would gather to gossip in the evening during what a visiting Italian observer described as their “Rialto hour”?

And want to figure out a bunch of legal terms? Why not talk to some of the legal professionals crowded into the neighbourhoods just outside the West gates of the city, Ludgate and Newgate — or chat to them before or after one of the many plays Inns-of-Court students liked to frequent?

For a wonderful, concise description of this world, read the introduction to Deborah Harkness’s splendid The Jewel House: Elizabethan London and the Scientific Revolution. She makes three points which are absolutely crucial to understanding just how misguided Orloff’s notion of early modern city life is:

“men and women living in the City expected that their work would be publicly known even if it were not published, because it would be studied and evaluated by other Londoners” (8)

“London’s urban sensibility fostered a belief that residents had specific types of expertise that could and should be exploited to benefit particular individuals and the City as a whole. London was home to all kinds of experts — from ale makers to zookeepers — who could be called on by students of nature to provide specialized assistance in their inquiries. And one did not have to call very far to catch their attention, since London’s compact size facilitated exchange and interaction.” (9)

“London’s urban sensibility confirmed that work done in collaboration with others was both necessary and desirable in a thriving city.” (9)

And this community functioned on remarkably democratic principles. Not only does Harkness stress the importance of conversations in the vernacular as the primary means of communication (as opposed to publication in printed Latin), but she also draws a clear contrast between a gentlemanly and an urban outlook. The latter, exemplified by the naturalist Clement Draper, informed a practice of knowledge exchange “where practitioners shared ideas and experiments irrespective of wealth, class, or university training” (13).

In sum, there’s a simple answer to the question of how Shakespeare could possibly have known so much stuff without the Internet: he lived in London in 1600. He didn’t need the Internet. He lived in it.

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11 Responses to Shakespeare Didn’t Have the Internet: Oh Noes!

  1. Shakespearean Mythbusting II: The Fantasy of Astonishing Erudition | dispositio says:
    12/11/2011 at 6:30 am

    […] Shakespeare Didn’t Have the Internet: Oh Noes! […]

    Reply
  2. James says:
    05/11/2011 at 3:30 am

    Can I make a tangential point? Orloff claims that James Joyce did not believe that Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare. This is absolutely, comprehensively wrong. Joyce read Shakespeare autobiographically. According to Joyce’s biographer Richard Ellmann, the lurid interpretation of the plays that Stephen Dedalus gives in Ulysses (which is based on the sensational but entirely speculative theory that Shakespeare was cuckolded by his brothers) was close to Joyce’s own interpretation of the plays. The theory might be entirely baseless and wackily idiosyncratic, but it’s not in the least bit anti-Stratfordian.

    Reply
  3. Knit Witted says:
    04/11/2011 at 11:07 am

    Disappointed with John Orloff… Where is his citation to support the “fact” that “There’s no Internet in 1600.” Surely being a scholar, he knows only documentary evidence tells the truth. Logic tells me he cannot possibly know that fact simply because he wasn’t alive in 1600 to know whether or not the internet existed. Shame on Mr. Orloff for inventing facts.

    Reply
  4. Tony says:
    03/11/2011 at 11:50 am

    This is exactly why I refuse to accept the genius theory as applied to the writers of “Law & Order.” In fact, I suspect that the unbelievably prescient Oxford left these scripts to be “discovered” by future generations as a retroactive character assassination of Edward Coke. Prove me wrong, establishment stooges!

    Reply
  5. Rory McKeown says:
    03/11/2011 at 10:36 am

    Holger could not have written this blog; he is not an aristocrat. I demand that the real writer step forward!

    Reply
  6. JM says:
    03/11/2011 at 9:48 am

    Steven Paulson wrote:
    “Nice try Holger, but one thing I think we can all agree on is that only a nobleman would possess the intellectual curiosity to go out and ask someone a question….”

    Are you then implying, Steven, that “Sketches by Boz” and other, even greater tomes of literature could actually have been written by an uneducated former pauper named Charles Dickens? –And that his storehouse of knowledge was found in books and in travelling the streets of London? Preposterous. Who is this mysterious, inimitable “Boz”-REALLY?

    Reply
    • Nick Milne says:
      04/11/2011 at 12:44 am

      [Indulge me, I beg you; I haven’t had this much fun in a long time :)]

      With regard to the true authorship of the Sketches by Boz, all evidence points to the matchless James Boswell (1740 – 1795), whose meditations upon his time in London and the individuals whose society he enjoyed have proven so enriching to readers interested in that city.

      The discovery of his private papers at Malahide in the 1920s saw a number of his personal journals published for the consumption of an enthusiastic public, but orthodox scholars failed to realize that those papers constituted only what had been left over after the same collection had been thoroughly plundered almost a century before. The Anglo-Irish publisher John Macrone had been on holiday at the castle in 1831 and discovered the trove of papers in an attic while seeking a place to smoke his pipe in defiance of his hectoring wife. The papers found in that dusty trunk were of two characters; the smaller part were the personal journals and recollections that would be rediscovered later, but the greater consisted of dozens of bound manuscripts and an assortment of loose, diminutive works, all of them largely fictional pastiches of life in London as Boswell had seen it.

      For indeed, the Sketches, as Macrone described them upon the commencement of their publication in 1833, began their lives as yet further episodes from Boswell’s endless wanderings about the streets of the Capital. The most famous of his fictional engagements with the City and her denizens, of course, can be found in Boswell’s Life of his greatest creation – the ironical lexicographer, Dr. Samuel Johnson – but the short vignettes that Macrone appropriated were those which had been cut from that impressive tome for want of space. The decision to excise them was made all the more simple by the degree to which their style differed from that of the rest of the book; they were written at a time when a particularly vicious case of the pox had seen Boswell heavily dosed with laudanum, and the work produced during this period was scarcely recognizable as his own. Many of the larger, discrete manuscripts were noted to originate from this period as well.

      Macrone was immediately presented with a problem: the texts he had purloined were clearly set in a London far removed from the one in which he wished to propagate them, and contained many references to political and social matters that would immediately date them in the eyes of an astute reader. Inasmuch as they had an excess of things undesirable, so too did they lack much that was desired: nowhere at all were to be found any mention of the defeat of the Corsican Tyrant, the reigns of those august monarchs George IV and William IV, the widespread adoption of the steam engine in transport, or any one of a hundred other minor details that lend verisimilitude without straining plausibility.

      By way of a solution, Macrone – no mean prose stylist himself, owing to the classical education enjoyed during his upbringing and a shrewd understanding of the tastes of that novel and growing “reading public” – exercised a program of strict substitution. Where the texts were anachronistic (elaborate periwigs, the American Question, the latest triumph of Mr. Garrick), he replaced the offending passages with references to something modern (locomotive rail travel, the passage of the Slavery Abolition Act, His Grace the Duke of Wellington). Where the speech of certain characters was too old-fashioned and affected to pass as contemporary intercourse, he rewrote each line in a dialect of some sort – the ever-inscrutable Cockney being a favourite.

      Not wishing to hazard all on a single toss, Macrone started by releasing only a handful of minor pieces from among the reams of paper he had stolen – the Sketches already alluded to. The first such sketch appeared in the December issue of The Monthly Magazine, and proved an immediate hit.

      The reader will no doubt feel, with the benefit of hindsight, that Macrone’s chosen pseudonym of “Boz” was scarcely adequate concealment, and this eventually proved to be the case. No one ever seemed to suspect that James Boswell was actually the author of the works being devoured by all the reading world – an honour not accorded to his writings in decades – but wide and loud was the cry for the mysterious author to step forward and reveal himself. Macrone was thus faced with yet another problem. The successes of such poetical gentlemen as Messrs Byron, Coleridge, Keats and Shelley had shown the public ready to make heroes of its favoured authors, but Macrone had nobody to present to them upon whom could be laid the laurels. He could scarcely step forward and claim himself the tales’ originator; his friends and family knew him and his habits too well to believe that he would have the time to write at such length and with such insight.

      Fate cast a line into his hands. His weekly round of the local inns and pubs had brought him into contact with a young man of little prospects but great personal charisma. This ill-starred fellow had been born into modest means but soon reduced to the most abject poverty, with his father sent to the debtor’s prison at Marshalsea and all the family forced to work for their support and the patriarch’s release. He spent his days working in a warehouse for pennies, and fell into the habit of taking a pint or two on his way home. It was while thus occupied that Macrone first found him, and a fast friendship developed. It turned out that the young man had literary aspirations – had even looked into becoming a reporter of political speeches. It was too perfect.

      That man’s name was Charles John Huffam Dickens. This ill-schooled issue of poorhouse and prison agreed to lend his name to the Boswell manuscripts that Macrone intended to slowly publish over the course of the coming years, the proceeds of the ruse being split 80/20 – in Macrone’s favour. Macrone showed him the dozens of Boswell’s novels and stories that were already complete, needing only the substitution of modern elements for the old. Dickens understood well what was expected of him.

      In 1836, “Boz” was revealed as Charles Dickens, and all of England rejoiced.

      In 1837, John Macrone – aged 28 and in excellent health – died suddenly, mysteriously, and without warning. Dickens contacted the greatest authors in England to contribute to a small volume, The Pic-Nic Papers, the sales of which would raise money for Macrone’s widow. She received 450 pounds, and brought all relations with Dickens to an end.

      It is surely a matter of complete coincidence that, that very year, an inexperienced young girl named Alexandrina Victoria ascended the throne…

      Reply
      • JM says:
        04/11/2011 at 2:51 pm

        Stunning! Quick–Pitch the screenplay to Emmerich and Orloff! It’s better than anything they’ve come up with so far.

        Reply
  7. Robert says:
    03/11/2011 at 12:14 am

    I could have sworn I read Shakespeare was the Duke of Earl.

    Reply
  8. Steven Paulson says:
    02/11/2011 at 3:50 pm

    Nice try Holger, but one thing I think we can all agree on is that only a nobleman would possess the intellectual curiosity to go out and ask someone a question….

    Reply

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