(And yes, I did laugh at your cartoon, CapriUni!)

Thank you, Desdemona!

About Shakespeare being more easily understood as he was meant to be experienced (heard and seen, rather than read), I wholehearedly agree.

I first encountered Shakespeare through serendipity; flipping through the tv channels (back when there were only 5 to choose from), I came upon a BBC production of As You Like It, filmed out in the real world, as a movie would be, rather than a filmed stage production. The first line I caught was: "I pray thee, Rosalind, sweet my coz, be merry."

Since I knew "Cuz" as modern, school-yard, spoof-yokel slang, I was certain that I was watching a comedic spoof of Shakespeare, and decided it would be more entertainig than the golf, bowling, or boxing that were the other channels. By the time I realized it wasn't a spoof at all but the real thing, I was thrilled (and felt slightly subversive) that I understood something that had such a reputation for being diffecult. By the time Rosilind was reading Orlando's tortured attempts at love poetry, I was laughing so hard my stomach hurt.

So I was rather pleased to hear on NPR a couple of weeks ago that Kenneth Branagh is doing a version of As You Like It for HBO. But then, one of the lead actors, Kevein Kline, said, in very sage tones, that the best way to introduce Shakespeare to people for the first time is to warn them ahead of time that it will be very diffecult, and that they will have to work at it. ...I wanted to reach through the radio and give him a good hard shaking by the collar. It's exactly that approach that turns people (especially teenagers) off from Shakespeare, unless, of course, they pride themselves in being such snobs that you wouldn't want to be in the same room with them...

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Slug: I'm not sure if the computer you're talking about is the one in the picture, in which case, I don't know if it's a Mac or PC. If you're talking about the computer on which I created the picture, I can tell you it's a PC with Windows XP...

I was also wondering, from a cartoonist's perspective, if the joke would have worked better if the two had been standing around a water cooler...