Thursday 17 May 2012

Twitter® is old hat*

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)


18 May

We keep reinventing the telegram, first with text-messages, and then with what is fondly thought of as a revolution in communications, this whole Twatter Splatter, where all these messages are generated to divert from the reality that, in just tens of years, it'll all be going on, if at all, with none of the same personnel.

But the truth is simply this: back in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, Shakespeare had to pitch every new idea for a play in the tweet form - give you it in just 140 characters.

The Bard could put over Hamlet like that, but Could you?**


End-notes

* But most of us haven't known, since the days of Laurence Sterne, that the term refers to the female genitals.

** Cousin Marmaduke and I have since taken up my own clannege (? = challenge?) with - I think - creditable attempts by each at a major Shakespeare tragedy on Twitter: by all means do what you like with us then, but find us there!


2 comments:

Anonymous said...

We're not all Shakespeare, congratulations on that masterful observation

The Agent Apsley said...

Yes, I do make masterful observations, but that wasn't one of them!

Clearly, it was not seriously suggested that Will S. had to do what I claimed. Even if he did, I have had a go myself, as has my cousin, and it is quite straightforward, just like Tweeting.