The Medium Is the Message
Some might quibble about whether or not he was referring to
TV in these familiar lines from Romeo and Juliet:
But soft! what light through yonder window breaks? It speaks, and yet says nothing.
In Othello, which, as much as King Lear, is concerned with the torment of people transformed
by illusions, there are these lines that bespeak Shakespeare's intuition of the transforming
powers of new media:
Is there not charms By which the property of youth and maidhood May be abus'd?
Have you not read Roderigo, Of some such thing?
In Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida, which is almost completely devoted to both a psychic
and social study of communication, Shakespeare states his awareness that true social and
political navigation depend upon anticipating the consequences of innovation:
The providence that's in a watchful state
Knows almost every grain of Plutus' gold,
Finds bottom in the uncomprehensive deeps,
annaabi.ee 
