William Shakespeare text message story: Shakespeare gets left on read
A short, funny iMessage-style chat starring William Shakespeare (1564 to 1616), English playwright and poet, with his wife Anne. A man who could put anything into a rhyme is cruelly punished by the one modern habit he could never answer: being seen and not replied to.
Read the chat
- Will: I wrote you a message three hours ago
- Will: a long one
- Will: it had a metaphor about the sea
- Anne: I saw it
- Will: you read it and said nothing
- Anne: I was at the shops
- Will: then hear my sonnet: Shall I compare thee to a seen-but-unanswered text
- Anne: that is not even a rhyme
- Will: it is a draft
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Who was William Shakespeare?
- He wrote about 37 plays and 154 sonnets, and was born in Stratford-upon-Avon.
- He married Anne Hathaway in 1582, when he was 18.
- No letter in his own hand survives; the few signatures that do are among the only samples of his handwriting.
The chat is invented. William Shakespeare never sent these messages, and the story is labelled as fiction wherever it appears.
How this chat is built
It runs 9 messages between Will and Anne. Will writes 6 of them. The longest line is “then hear my sonnet: Shall I compare thee to a seen-but-unanswered text” (Will) and the shortest is “a long one” (Will). It closes on “it is a draft” from Will.
It is shown in the iMessage look , one of the iMessage-style chat tools. In the editor you can switch it to any other look and the whole conversation follows.