‘Shakespeare Never Said That’: The Internet’s Thousand Hamlets

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article synthesises the history of rhetorical commonplacing with the modern digital humanities classroom by examining how university students use references to William Shakespeare to access their identities as individual writers. As students take to the web, combing through online compilations of notable literary quotations, discussion forums, and social media pages – appropriating the language they deem useful to their writing – search engine algorithms do the work of narrowing down and amplifying authority. The result is a hybrid authorship between the individual, subjective identity of each student and the aggregation of all those human and nonhuman intelligences circulating the web. This article orients its discussion around a frequently misattributed quotation about William Shakespeare’s Hamlet that circulates via the Chinese search engine Baidu. This discussion ultimately leads to an argument about the dangers of misinformation, and how the logic of search engine algorithms reveals what is most empowering but also obscuring about a New Media Shakespeare – that is, a Shakespeare whose limits are tested and redefined by sheer masses of users on the web.