Whether it is “all the world's a stage” or “one touch of nature makes the whole world kin,” Shakespearean taglines and Shakespearean “philosophy” or wisdom, dislocated from their dramatic context, often assume a certain weightiness (indeed, a rhetorical ponderousness) that is belied by looking at the dramatic situation. This habit of disembodied quotation tends to make Shakespeare into an all-purpose sage, a single author representing the totality of the world's wisdom. The World Wide Web has made this practice even more common
