If William Shakespeare had a blog, what would it be like? It would be well written, it would be popular, and it would win a lot of acclaim from blogging heavyweights that say who is and who isn't good. What would it be about? Well, probably a lot of relationship stuff, a good deal of subtle humor, some politics, and some profound eloquence that few would be able to match.

However, it also would be riddled with code errors, and a good deal of it would have not be able to be published until the appropriate technology was available to mine his hard drive and get the stuff out, cleaned up, edited, and put out in the Internet after he died. (Just like the real thing. A lot of bad quartos, and suspect folios.)

It would also be riddled with plagiarism. Shakespeare was a notorious plagiarist, and many of his most famous plays had entire sections lifted from other sources, and since it was fiction instead of research, citation of sources wasn't exactly a requirement yet. (Romeo and Juliet for instance. Nearly half was lifted out of other plays, all of which were riffs on a story called Romeus and Juliet, and Shakespeare took a lot of original material, added some of his own, and spun the title and the plot so that it fit his idea about how it should go.) There is still an ongoing debate about whether or not he actually wrote anything at all, but I'll weigh in on that once the evidence is compiled. Most of his material was a take on something somebody else had written, although some of it was cribbed from historical annals. (Hamlet, MacBeth, Marc Antony and Cleopatra, Julius Caesar, King Lear, etc.)

That's the side of Shakespeare that doesn't get talked about much, is it? (The evidence is out there, and anyone who's taken a college level Shakespeare course will probably agree with me. ) It would be interesting, though, wouldn't it?