Hamlet's BlackBerry (14 page)

Shakespeare on the Beauty of Old Tools

“Don't worry,” Hamlet's nifty device whispered, “you don't have to know everything. Just the few things that matter.”

 

S
everal years ago, I bought myself some Moleskines, the simple, unassuming notebooks that have become popular in the last decade. By chance, my eye fell on the display at the front counter of my local bookstore. In particular, the “plain journal” model, which is roughly the size of a passport with tan cardboard covers reminiscent of paper grocery bags, was calling out to me. On impulse, I grabbed a three-pack and added it to my haul.

I'd been aware of the Moleskine phenomenon for years, ever since a globe-trotting journalist friend had shown me his. It was one of the classic larger models with pebbly black covers and an integral elastic band to keep it closed when not in use. The pages were filled with his lively handwriting and, scattered here and there, superb sketches of cats, people, and other subjects. The drawings were a surprise. I'd known this guy since we were teenagers and had never realized he had artistic leanings, let alone talent.

He brushed off my compliments and focused on the notebook
itself, which he said he couldn't live without. After the original French manufacturer had gone out of business in the late 1980s, wherever his travels took him he would comb the local shopping districts and bazaars for stray leftovers. That could go on for only so long, he knew, and he was preparing himself for the worst when, seemingly out of the blue, in 1998 an Italian firm brought back the Moleskine brand. To hear him tell the story, it was as if humanity had finally discovered the key to happiness and it would be smooth sailing from here on.

I opened the packet immediately, took one out, and held it. Though slender, it felt sturdy and substantial. The cardboard was a little fuzzy and faintly warm. I slipped it into my back right pocket, and I've had one there ever since. I pull it out at least a few times a day, to jot down ideas that come to me when I'm away from the computer I write on. Every other day or so, I look the notes over, cull the ones worth saving, and transcribe them into digital files. I also use the notebook for the occasional grocery list, driving directions, and other utilitarian tasks, but those scribbles go on the back pages, moving from the last page forward—a method Moleskine apparently had in mind, as the rear pages are perforated for easy tearing out. When the meaningful notes from the front meet the trivial ones from the back, it's time for a new notebook.

On the face of it, none of this makes much sense. In this seamlessly wired world, one can feel a bit loony toting around a stitched-together bundle of that dowdy, reportedly soon-to-be-obsolete tool, paper. There are so many more modern and efficient ways to record ideas and inspirations. For notes like mine that are headed for a hard drive anyway, it would be far more logical to go straight to digital, using a portable screen for the first step. Why bother writing them down by hand first? Another friend dictates thoughts he wants to remember into his smart phone, which automatically sends them as audio
files to a transcription service. They're speedily e-mailed back to him as text, with, he reports, remarkably few typos. He loves this system and proselytizes for it. When I take my notebook out in his presence, he smiles the way one smiles at a passing Model T.
Look at that, isn't it sweet?

Yet sometimes I think
I'm
on the cutting edge and he's stuck in the past. Just ten years ago, Moleskines were a rarity. Today I see them everywhere. When I'm using mine in public, someone nearby will often say, “You, too?” or “Aren't you just crazy about those things?” For bonding with strangers, it's almost as reliable as a baby or a dog.

I'm a true believer, but for a long time I didn't know why. What was it about this seemingly anachronistic tool that made me feel it was essential to my well-being? Why Moleskines, and why now? Their resurgence coincided exactly with the rise of digital connectedness, and my gut told me that the two must be related. But how? Was it just nostalgia, an effort to escape from the messiness of the present into the simplicity of an idealized past? Maybe paperphilia really isn't so different from the recessive pinings that motivate some people to own antique cars. I wanted to think there was more to it than that.

I found the answer in Renaissance England, of all places, with some help from that society's greatest creative mind, William Shakespeare. In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, London, where Shakespeare spent all his productive years and staged his plays, was a bustling, chaotic place. He and his contemporaries woke up each morning to a world as hectic and confounding in its own way as ours, and they found surprisingly inventive ways to cope. It was from one of their coping techniques that I came to see why, four hundred years later, it makes perfect sense that I find myself scribbling in vintage notebooks and feeling all the better for it.

One of the first plays Shakespeare ever wrote,
Henry VI, Part 2,
is about a mob of illiterate peasants that lays siege to London in an uprising against the wealthy and powerful. Having taken an important nobleman prisoner, the rebel leader accuses him of various crimes, among them that he's allowed printing presses to operate and spread knowledge of written language: “[T]hou hast caused printing to be used and…thou hast built a paper-mill. It will be proved to thy face that thou hast men about thee that usually talk of a noun and a verb and such abominable words as no Christian ear can endure to hear.”

Far from seeing Gutenberg's invention as a liberating force, these rebels view it as a tool of oppression. There are good reasons for this. When Shakespeare wrote this play around 1590, he was a young man recently arrived in London from the provincial town of Stratford-upon-Avon. For its time, London was a sprawling metropolis, the third largest city in Europe with a population approaching 200,000. As Stephen Greenblatt writes in his Shakespeare biography,
Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare
, he must have been stunned by “the London crowd—the unprecedented concentration of bodies jostling through the narrow streets, crossing and recrossing the great bridge, pressing into taverns and churches and theaters…their noise, the smell of their breath, their rowdiness and potential for violence.”

There was a palpable undercurrent of danger, too, and not just from street crime, the ever-present threat of plague, and other perils endemic to urban life in this period. This was also a politically unstable time and place. Ever since King Henry VIII's break with the Catholic Church earlier in the century, England had been a pressure cooker of political tension, with power swinging back and forth between Protestants and Catholics, depending on who was on the throne. By the time Shakespeare turned up in London, the Protestant Queen
Elizabeth I had been ruling for many years, her regime always on the watch for Catholic dissidents and spies. Heads were being chopped off all the time, in some cases only to reappear later in a ghastly lineup on the gates of London Bridge. In
The Prince and the Pauper
, his novel of sixteenth-century London, Mark Twain describes this practice, noting that “the livid and decaying heads of renowned men impaled upon iron spikes” were put on display at the bridge as “object lessons” for passersby. Be careful, they said, or this could be you.

In this treacherous atmosphere, the idea of a play about a violent rabble trying to overthrow the powers that be makes more sense. But it still doesn't explain the rebels' specific hostility to Gutenberg's invention, a plot element that could not have come from the historical revolt on which the play is based, which took place in the fourteenth century, before the press even existed. It was Shakespeare who worked this detail into the story. Like Gutenberg, he left behind few clues about his life and the thinking that drove his work. However, we do know that he lived in a rapidly changing world, and one of the key forces driving the change was technology. The printing press was transforming society in countless ways, and, as with digital technology, some of the changes were a source of anxiety and tension.

The printing press had dramatically increased book production. There were an estimated 8 million printed copies of books in Europe by 1500 and far more by Shakespeare's time. In most respects this was a tremendously positive development. As more people learned to read and gained access to books, the opportunities for individual growth and advancement multiplied, which in the long run could only be good for the world. There's no better example of this than Shakespeare himself, who was born into a community where few could read and one day would be called “the poet of the human race.”

But it can take a long time for a society to adjust to a powerful new technology and figure out its best uses. And for all the salutary effects of print, it presented challenges. Though today we know the printing press played a crucial role in the rise of individualism and democracy, like any powerful medium it was sometimes used as a tool of social and political control. While books were more plentiful and accessible than ever, they remained expensive, and literacy was far from universal. As the ability to read took on greater importance, the divide between those who could read and those who couldn't was felt often in everyday life, sometimes in disturbing ways. For instance, English law at the time made a distinction between literate people accused of committing felonies and illiterate ones. In certain cases, accused criminals who could read were tried in ecclesiastical courts, which did not impose the death penalty. The illiterate, meanwhile, went before government courts, where death was a frequent punishment. In effect, people were hanged as a direct result of the fact that they couldn't read.

In this context, as Greenblatt observes, one can see how a playwright intimately familiar with both worlds, literate and not, could imagine a gang of unlettered ruffians wanting to destroy the presses. Print represented power, and the nonlettered had cause for resentment.

More broadly, this technology simply increased how much there was to know and process. Some 1,500 years after Seneca complained about the burden of all those books, the hunted-mind syndrome was back in a more intense way. Once again, there had been a colossal expansion in the sheer amount of available information, without a matching increase in the capacity of the human mind to absorb it. Beyond books, Europe was awash in pamphlets, advertising placards, commercial and public documents—bureaucracy mushroomed wildly in this period—and many other types of printed matter. The first
newspapers were about to be launched. There was a lot to handle, and everyone, even the illiterate, felt its effects. Then as now, it was unsettling just knowing it was all out there. As modern-day scholar Ann Blair has shown, those who lived through the Renaissance experienced something very much akin to the overload we feel today.

What did they do about it? The answer lies a decade further along in Shakespeare's career, in the most familiar and resonant of his plays,
The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark
. There's a moment in
Hamlet
that speaks to our technological dilemma and helps explains the curious persistence of paper notebooks in a digital world. In Act I, Hamlet meets the ghost of his dead father, whom everyone at this point believes was killed by a serpent's bite. The ghost has a news flash: he wasn't done in by a snake but poisoned by his brother, Hamlet's uncle Claudius, who is now king. The ghost beseeches Hamlet to avenge this “murder most foul,” and bids him a spooky farewell, “Adieu, adieu, Hamlet. Remember me.”

Hamlet's reaction to all this is a bit surprising. Rather than focus on the ghost's staggering message, he reflects on his own state of mind and in particular his memory:

The distracted “globe” he's talking about is his head—the actor playing Hamlet would have grasped his own while reciting the lines. Yes, he's saying, of course I'll remember you, because somewhere in this chaotic, unruly brain, I do still have a memory. Shakespeare also seems to be punning off two other meanings of “globe.” On one level, he's suggesting that the whole world is distracted, and on another, that the audience
watching the play in the Globe Theatre might be having some mindfulness issues. Attention deficit disorder was apparently raging long before we gave it that inelegant name.

Hamlet goes on:

What he's basically saying is “I'm going to clean out all the mental clutter that makes me so distracted, so the only thing taking up space in my head will be you, Mr. Ghost, and this hideous crime.” Notice that twice in the above lines Shakespeare has Hamlet mention books, but with a different meaning in each case. In the third line, books (and the “saws,” or clichés, that that they contain) are part of the detritus and “pressures” he needs to remove from his mind so he can think clearly. Then, just a few lines later, he likens the brain itself to a book, a very appealing one devoted to a single important subject and absolutely free of worthless trivia (“baser matter”). In effect, he's saying he's determined to cure his own mental overload by throwing out the equivalent of a lot of books in order to make room for the one book that really matters, his mind.

Shakespeare had an intense interest in books, as one would expect of a man whose life was shaped by them, and they figure often in his works. There's another moment in
Hamlet
where the stage directions call for the prince to enter reading a book. From the above passage, it's clear that the playwright had a
nuanced understanding of the wide range of effects books can have on a person. A book could be a huge obstacle to clear thinking or it could be a tremendous help, depending on how one used it.