To be or not to be?

I read somewhere that if you stuck twelve monkeys in a room with an equal number of typewriters then eventually they would type the complete works of Shakespeare.

I think that’s amazing - don’t you?

But then I began to wonder how you’d find these particular twelve apes - are they chimps or orang-utans or maybe spider monkeys (eight legs? that should up the words per minute).

Anyway, suppose you only managed to get hold of seven of them, would that result in some of the plays being unfinished or would you just get the tragedies and none of the comedies?

What if the sonnets ended up having only 11 lines - would they still make sense?

And, even locating seven or eight of these monkeys could be extremely difficult - I mean are they even all in the same troop or even in jungles near each other? Do they get on ok? Writers can be ever so temperamental you know.

What if some have been captured and are even now languishing in a private zoo, deprived of access to a biro and an exercise book? What a terrible waste of talent.

On balance I think we should just try to seek out a couple of them and get them to knock out Henry IV (both parts of course) and maybe one or two rib-ticklers like Midsummer Night’s Dream and Much Ado.

I imagine we’d need to find a female chimp if we wanted slushy stuff like Romeo and Juliet and perhaps a moody gorilla for Coriolanus.

And another thing, why typewriters - what’s that all about?

Do you suppose it might be because their long digits can’t cope with a laptop?

It would be so much easier if they could become PC literate (and I don’t mean teaching them not to play with themselves in public or throw their poo around.)

Have to admit I’m not too sure that they should be shown the spell check though, a lot of Will’s stuff had pretty strange spellings - and as for the punctuation, just don’t go there.

But hang on a minute - what am I thinking, this is all a bit stupid don’t you think?

Let’s get real here. Put these clever baboons to work on something original for a few bananas, some cheap mirrors and a couple of bags of peanuts we are probably looking at a mini-series. And if they are as good as we are led to believe, well, I smell the sweet victory of a little gold statue and I don’t mean of King Kong!

Some are born great, some achieve greatness and some have greatness thrust upon them in return for a big bag of Planters.

Now where did I put that big net?