High on my list of favorite philosophical mysteries is this ancient one: If you gave an infinite number of monkeys an infinite number of typewriters, would they eventually produce the complete works of Shakespeare? Surprisingly, no arts organization had ever thought to seek grant funding to explore the issue. Until recently, that is…

…when scientists in Devon provided six Sulawesi crested macaque monkeys with one computer and gave them four weeks to pound away [Irritated editoral aside: if there had been a military application to this research, you can be sure that they would have had sufficient funding for the full infinite number of monkeys and the infinite computers (although possibly not Macs…)]

As reported in The Guardian, the results were less than promising (although arguably no worse than what comes out of the average creative writing program…). “Perhaps the monkeys had insufficient time?” the reporter speculated:

The macaques should not feel too bad about their lack of productivity, however. Assuming each monkey typed a steady 120 characters a minute, mathematicians have calculated it would take 10⁸¹³ (10 followed by 813 zeros) monkeys about five years to knock out a decent version of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 3, which begins: “Look in thy glass and tell the face thou viewest, Now is the time that face should form another.”

Upon reading this initial report, the editorial collective here at texts & pretexts immediately felt that an injustice had been done, an erroneous conclusion leapt to. It seemed clear that the Devon scientists had become a bit intoxicated, perhaps, from their excursion into a refined literary atmosphere to which they were not accustomed. What we suspected was that what they had in hand in Devon was simply an ordinary, unedited manuscript, and not mere gibberish (although admittedly the two are often difficult to tell apart).

Never known as a group who could just stand by while others struggled with the muse, the editorial collective here at texts & pretexts decided to put their quills to parchment in an effort to help out their fellow-primates. At great cost they obtained an Advance Reader’s Copy of the macaques’ just-published Notes Towards The Complete Works of Shakespeare. It was, as feared, a little heavy on the letter “s”, and while the collective is (collectively) quite found of alliteration, they felt this stepped a little over the line.

Accordingly, members of the collective have made good use of their extensive copy-editing skills, and have undertaken a massive cleanup of the monkeys’ manuscript. Astonishingly, once the obvious typos and marginalia were removed (including, incidently, a fabulous family recipe for mashed bananas à la Sulawesi) an actual sonnet was revealed! Given the rhyme scheme and a few other contextual clues, we here at texts & pretexts feel quite certain that the macaques were interrupted just as they were nearing their literary goal: a true Shakespearean sonnet. Imagine our amazement to find, obscured within the published text, what appears almost certainly to be an early draft of Shakespeare’s actual Sonnet 3. Evidence, perhaps (if not overt proof) that the “infinite monkey” theory cannot yet be entirely discounted.

Here, then, for the first time before a general audience, texts & pretexts proudly offers our findings…

A Simian Sonnet 3
(apologies to Wm. Shakespeare)

Look in thy glass, and tell the face thou viewest
That he is like unto a man in form,
Yet less than man. Good breeding, once the newest
Off’ring from that long genetic storm
That throws a new bipedal shape upon the shore
Each age, you’re now unfashioned, out of style,
Reducèd to unseemly acts before
The gaping crowd, who snicker all the while
Through bars. Thou art thy mother’s glass, and she
Is thine, her quadrupedal gait the best
Until you strode upon the stage. “To be
Or not to be?” is your eternal quest.
Yet ask it not of God, but of the mirrored face
Whose gaze makes yours extinct: the human race.