Response to “Willy Shakes”

As a Twitter Bot, Willy Shakes is one of the most well known. As it tweets a line from a Shakespearean play every 10 minute, it melds with each follower’s dashboard creating a unique experience for each person. To get the true affect of Willy Shakes, you have to follow it to see how it affects your timeline.

I really enjoy this bot, because unlike others it doesn’t seem like it exists just to annoy people. Willy Shakes really is all about the story that is created on each individual timeline, not about Shakespearean plays in general. I think it makes Shakespeare more accessible in a way because almost everyone has twitter now. This bot is another way that Shakespeare can be taught in schools, especially the way he played with words. Breaking the plays down sentence by sentence forces you to focus on what’s happening that that particular part linguistically and not canonically. Everyone who has ever studied Shakespeare knows that he invented hundreds of words, but they sometimes get loss or muddled because of how tedious his work can be to read. This bot makes it less tedious only giving the follower 140 characters to digest every 10 minutes.