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And Gulliver never gets back to England because Jonathan Swift upgraded to Apple Maps.Ībove: The Tyger, from Songs of Innocence and Experience (1794), plate 42. And if William Blake, who illustrated his poems with etchings, had access to emoticons, his most famous poem, “Tyger, tyger burning bright,” might have wound up short enough to tweet. If the blind John Milton used text-to-speech for the epic Paradise Lost, we might be reading about “seitan chain’d on the burning lake” after the Fall, not Satan, and we'd be studying the seventeenth-century vegan poets, not the metaphysicals. Below: Bozo the Clown solves the Riddle of the Sphinx as he wanders, lonely as clown, on his trip around the world (one of the less-offensive images from Bozo and His Rocket Ship, a copy of which I owned, and memorized, as a child). Would Wordsworth have come across that host of golden daffodils as he wandered “lonely as a clown” o'er vales and hills?Ībove: Patrick Stewart performs Hamlet’s soliloquy, “Letter B,” on Sesame Street.

Writers spoiled by auto-correct and spell-check are too impatient to proofread anything, so all sorts of funny, embarrassing, or disastrous messages are getting sent.īut if these flawed but irresistible technologies had come along a few centuries ago, would Hamlet be soliloquizing, “Doobie or not doobie”? After all, the guy really needed to chill. So I’ve been thinking, what if Shakespeare had autocorrect on his quill pen? What if Wordsworth used speech-to-text instead of dictating his poems to his sister? These new technologies aren’t perfect. Then there’s Matt Richtel’s take on Romeo and Juliet and texting

Here, for example, is an excerpt from DeeDee Baldwin’s version of Pride and Prejudiceas told through Facebook updates Watching a character in a dark alley in an old movie, I want to shout at the screen, “Use your cell phone, call for help!” Why don’t they ever listen?įortunately, what we can do is time-travel back to the past to rewrite these old stories in light of new technologies. Our lives have become so suffused with digital devices that it’s hard to imagine what things were like before.