I’m really looking forward to our two panels representing what you might call the diasporic CMT at the Renaissance Society of America Annual Meeting in Boston this Thursday:

The Early Modern Material Text I: Reading, Collecting, Compiling

Thu, March 31, 8:30 to 10:00am, Park Plaza, Mezzanine, Georgian Room

There was a Guardian obituary yesterday for Ray Tomlinson, the man who put the @ in your email address. Back in 1971, he needed to find a way for computers on the Arpanet (precursor of the internet) to send messages to each other, and he created the now-ubiquitous identifier username@computername format. The invention apparently caused some problems in operating systems that used the @ symbol to mean ‘delete this line’. (The obituary sadly doesn’t tell us who invented the dot, as in .com).

Coincidentally, yesterday my wife was phoning various Italian archives to try to get permission to reproduce pictures in their collections. Intimidating archivists were rattling off email addresses far too quickly. What’s a ‘chiocciola’? A bit of googling established that the chiocciola (snail) or sweeter still the chiocciolina (little snail) is indeed the @ sign. But the @ is also a mouse’s tail or a sleeping cat in Finland, a rolled pickled herring in Czechoslovakia, a monkey in Poland, and a puppy in Russia. Or perhaps all of the many contributors to this online discussion were having their readers on?

Last week I was involved in a seminar in which Professor Marjorie Garber, visiting from Harvard, reported that she bans her students from writing ‘Shakespeare says…’ Shakespeare doesn’t say anything; you can’t find anything in any of his works which isn’t contradicted by something else in them. So it was amusing to read, this week, that the British Library is planning to digitise the section of the manuscript play Sir Thomas More that is thought to be Shakespeare’s sole surviving draft.

Shakespeare writes some stirring speeches for More who, in his role as a sheriff, is called in to quell a riotous mob of Londoners who are protesting against immigrant labourers. Supposing the King should banish them for their insurrection, he says, ‘whither would you go?/ What country, by the nature of your error,/ Should give you harbour? Go you to France or Flanders,/ To any German province, Spain or Portugal,/ Nay, anywhere that not adheres to England:/ Why, you must needs be strangers’.

As the BL curators have pointed out, this is all strikingly relevant to current politics. But, much as we might like to associate Shakespeare with these anti-xenophobic sentiments, we can’t know where he stood; he was just doing his best to fill a gap in a play that was struggling (and which would eventually fail) to get past the censor. Still, the scene at least reminds us how very hackneyed our problems are.