Hamlet's BlackBerry (15 page)

But why, amid all this talk of books, does Shakespeare also throw in a table? In the first line of the same passage above, Hamlet compares his memory to a table he's going to wipe off. When modern audiences hear the word “table,” we think of the four-legged kind that figures prominently in our kitchens and dining rooms. And since we do wipe off those tables, the image initially makes sense. In fact, when Shakespeare used the word “table” in these lines he wasn't thinking of a piece of furniture. He was thinking of a piece of technology. Several lines down, the word returns:

Here Hamlet is marveling that King Claudius can walk around with a smile on his face even though he's a cold-blooded assassin. This strikes him as a thought worth remembering, one that it would be wise (or “meet”) to record (“set down”). If you've seen the play performed, you may have watched the actor playing Hamlet scribble a note at this point. However, you likely didn't realize that the object he pulled out for this purpose was the one he was referring to when he said “My tables,” as well as in the earlier passage about wiping away the mental clutter.

What
are
these tables, anyway?

They were an innovative gadget that first appeared in Europe in the late fifteenth century. Also known as writing
tables or table books, they were pocket-sized almanacs or calendars that came with blank pages made of specially coated paper or parchment. Those pages could be written on with a metal stylus and later erased with a sponge, so they were reusable. Tables were a new, improved version of a technology—wax tablets—that had been around for centuries. Instead of wax, their surfaces were made of a plasterlike material that made them much more durable and useful. They became enormously popular in Shakespeare's lifetime as a solution to the relentless busyness of life. A harried Londoner or Parisian would carry one everywhere, jotting down useful information and quick thoughts, perhaps checking off items on a to-do list.

We don't know that Shakespeare owned a table himself, but since he took the trouble to insert one into
Hamlet
and they were very popular among people in his world, it's not unreasonable to imagine he did. It would have been useful to a man who was not only constantly writing plays (and collecting words and phrases to use in them) but also acting (he played the ghost in
Hamlet
), running a business of which he was part owner (the Globe), and investing in real estate on the side, all while trying to stay in touch with distant friends and family—his wife and children remained in Stratford, never coming to live with him in London. Never mind the sonnets, the alleged love affairs, and who knows what else. He had a lot on his plate, and for anyone who did, this technology was a godsend. It was a portable, convenient way to manage the endless details of an active life, the period equivalent of our BlackBerrys and iPhones.

According to a scholarly article published in the
Shakespeare Quarterly
in 2004, the many uses of tables included:

Users spoke effusively about their tables and swore they couldn't get by without them. Michel de Montaigne, the great French essayist who was roughly contemporary with Shakespeare, said it was impossible for him to make his way through a complicated discourse with another person “except I have my writing tables about me” for jotting notes. “Yes, sure I never go without Tables,” says a character in an early-seventeenth-century play by Edward Sharpham. Tables migrated to the New World and caught on there, too. Thomas Jefferson owned one, and they remained popular into the nineteenth century.

Given that it played a central role in people's lives for hundreds of years and helped some of history's most brilliant minds organize their time and thoughts, it's remarkable that this device has been almost completely forgotten. In fact, Hamlet's trusty handheld has a few messages for us.

 

O
NE OF THE
most widely held assumptions of modern culture is that when a new technology comes along, it automatically renders obsolete the older ones that performed roughly the same function. The classic case is the buggy whip. When society switched from carriages to automobiles in the early twentieth century, there was no longer any need for buggy whips, and they effectively disappeared. However, it doesn't always work this way. Older technologies often survive the introduction of newer ones, when they perform useful tasks in ways that the new devices can't match.

The best example is the hinged door. Watch a science fiction movie some time and pay close attention. You'll notice
that the houses, office buildings, and spaceships of “the future” almost always have sliding doors. Since the 1920s, filmmakers have assumed that in the future there would be no hinged doors whatsoever. Why? Because hinges are old-fashioned and cumbersome. The doors that swing on them take up a lot of space. There's no good reason we should continue to use this antiquated, literally creaking technology when sliding doors make so much more sense. They're so sleek and logical and, well, futuristic. Thus, in the popular imagination hinges are always on the verge of extinction.

Yet, as you've undoubtedly noticed, hinged doors are still very much with us. Why? Because though sliding doors are aesthetically appealing, when you come down to it, they do only one thing, slide in and out, which is kind of boring. Hinged doors are more interesting precisely because of the way they occupy and move through space. You can burst through one and surprise somebody. You can slam a hinged door loudly to vent your anger or close it very quietly out of concern for a sleeping child. A hinged door is an expressive tool. It works with our bodies in ways that sliding doors don't.

“Time has given the hinge a rich social complexity that those who foresee its imminent demise fail to appreciate,” writes Paul Duguid, a scholar and author who has used the hinge to demonstrate that new technologies don't always vanquish or supersede old ones.
^*

In some instances, an older technology will survive not just by doing what it's always done well but also by taking on a brand-new role. When television arrived in the 1950s, many expected radio to disappear. Why would you want an old box that produces only sound, when you could have a new one with sound
and
video? In fact, television did replace radio as the
dominant medium for news and entertainment and as a gathering place in the home. But radio found new roles to play. In the automobile, for example, where drivers were not in a position to watch video, radio was a natural choice. Today, in our information-jammed world, many of us enjoy radio precisely because it produces only sound—no text, images, or video—and can relieve media overload.

What does this have to do with Shakespeare? I likened Hamlet's erasable table to the smart phones we carry around today because, like the latter, it was a new gadget that helped people better manage their busy lives. However, it was a new gadget built on two very old technologies. I've already mentioned one, the older wax-based device. The other, much older technology was handwriting. Remember, this was a time when handwritten communication was, in certain crucial ways, on the decline. After centuries of handwritten texts, Gutenberg had come up with a much more efficient technology. People had immediately recognized the value of his invention, and printing had taken off. According to the sliding-door school of thought, then, by Shakespeare's time handwriting should have been relegated to a much smaller role in society and everyday life.

In fact, the opposite happened. Though hand-produced manuscripts did go into a long, slow decline, beyond the small world of professional scribes the arrival of print set off a tremendous popular expansion in handwriting. Even as the revolutionary new Gutenberg technology was taking hold—and in some ways
because
it was taking hold—the older one gained new life. There were a couple of reasons for this. First, as printed matter become widely available, the very idea of engaging in written expression suddenly became thinkable to more people. Previously, putting one's own ideas into words on a page had been the province of the rich and powerful. With printed texts
flying around everywhere, this rarefied activity looked less exclusive and intimidating and more appealing. Regular people wanted and often needed to participate in this new conversation. Since most didn't have access to a press, handwriting was the best way to join in. Many who couldn't read or write were suddenly motivated to learn.

“The advent of printing was a radical incitement to write, rather than a signal of the demise of handwritten texts,” write Peter Stallybrass, Michael Mendle, and Heather Wolfe, authors of groundbreaking scholarship on this phenomenon. As a result, all sorts of important new technologies for writing by hand appeared after the printing press, including graphite pencils and fountain pens. Print simply made more people want to write.

The second reason handwriting became so popular was that it turned out to be a very useful way to navigate the whirlwind of information loosed by print—to live in a crazy world without going crazy oneself. New shorthand methods were invented for taking down words more efficiently. The script style called “round hand,” the forerunner of the cursive writing we use today, was created during this period, for the same reason.

But the most compelling example of handwriting's ability to lighten the burdens of the post-Gutenberg mind was the gadget that Shakespeare gave Hamlet. Here was a fantastic antidote to the new busyness, a portable, easy-to-operate device that allowed the user to impose order on the clamorous world around him. Hamlet wasn't the only one with a tumultuous, tricky-to-navigate life. Imagine Shakespeare back at home after a busy day at the Globe and perhaps some helter-skelter errands around town. At some point in the evening, maybe just before bedtime, he takes out his tables and reviews everything he's written there since morning. He pulls
the stylus out of its handy hidden groove in the binding and circles the jots he wants to keep, while
X
-ing out those that can be tossed. He transcribes each of the keepers to the appropriate hard-copy volume, which might be a diary, a commonplace book for saved quotes and scraps of language, or a financial accounts book. When he's done, he takes a small sponge (or a wet fingertip) and erases the surface of the pages so they're ready for the next day. And no charger to plug in!

The easy erasability of tables was central to their success. In an epoch when so many words were being committed permanently to the printed page—more than any one mind could handle—this gadget moved in exactly the opposite direction. At the owner's command, it made words go away, vanish, cease weighing on the soul. “Don't worry,” Hamlet's nifty device whispered, “you don't have to know
everything
. Just the few things that matter.”

In effect, it was a pushback against all the people and information that were closing in, or often seemed to be. With one of these in your pocket, you were in the driver's seat. You could be selective about what you brought home with you—both literally home to your dwelling and figuratively home to your mind. It was a surrogate for the mind, a visible, tangible representation of what was going on inside your own “globe,” and a way of improving its performance. This is essentially what Hamlet vows to do when he likens his own mind to a table that he's erasing, so he can focus on Topic A. He is cleaning up the internal mess, starting fresh.

I had a chance to see some genuine tables from the period at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C. One of them, made in London within a few years of the debut of
Hamlet
, had the user instructions still intact (“To make cleane your Tables, when they are written on, Take a lyttle peece of Spunge…”). I could almost visualize it for sale at the front
counter of a modern bookstore. Like these four-hundred-year-old tables, my Moleskines rely on old tools, handwriting and paper, that in a world of clicking keys and glowing screens are widely assumed to be nearly obsolete. Yet both are central to why this humble tool gives me a sense of mental order and control.

Unlike my screens, which thrust words, images, and sounds at me all day and night, my paper notebooks project no information at all. The pages are blank. They invite me to fill them with information, and when I do, it's information of my own choosing that I write with my own hand. Crossing my front yard one morning, for instance, I remembered an obscure historical fact about Madagascar that I'd heard the day before and realized might be useful in a writing project I've got on the back burner. Out came the notebook, in went Madagascar. Having survived the winnowing processes of my consciousness, it had earned a spot on the page, and just the act of writing it down raised its profile in my thoughts. When you're used to clicking keys all day, shaping letters one by one feels exotically earthy, memorable just by contrast.

Digital screens are tools of selectivity, too, but using them is more reactive, a matter of fending off and filtering. Because a paper notebook isn't connected to the grid, there's no such defensiveness. The selectivity is autonomous and entirely self-directed. I'm the search engine, the algorithm, and the filter. (Which is not to say it feels like hard work. Sometimes I just doodle.) Like tables, my notebooks are a pushback against the psychic burden of a newly dominant technology.