In any case, Shakespeare would have loved the internet. (This is something Mark Rylance cleverly suggested in last year's play "The Big Secret Live ‘I Am Shakespeare' Webcam Daytime Chat-Room Show", an ambitious comedy that resurrects the bard using the electric human power of the web.) Our beloved neologising court jester of coinage, Shakespeare invented some 2,000 new and compound words and a host of now-familiar phrases. He was particularly partial to turning nouns into verbs--to cudgel, to champion, to gossip--just as we like to twitter, to spam or to blog (he would surely have gorged himself on Google like a kid in a sweetshop). He created numerous compounds from existing words (farmhouse, bloodsucking); we do the same (homepage, podcasting). The man who first used the falconry term ‘hoodwinked' to describe human trickery might even have enjoyed being rick-rolled.