![]() In addition, they reflect poorly on the author, since they suggest that he or she was just too lazy to do the necessary research. If readers encounter something that they know to be impossible, they’ll suddenly be taken out of the story, which is usually not what you as an author want to do. They disrupt the suspension of disbelief that writers have to create in order to draw readers into their fictional stories. This would be a deliberate anachronism, since everyone knows Shakespeare never owned a computer.)Īnachronisms make a work seem “fake” and unrealistic. (Imagine, for example, a “Shakespeare” biopic in which the bard is sitting in a café in Brooklyn, typing out Macbeth on his laptop. Shakespeare did this because he wanted his plays to be staged as though the events were happening in his own day, much the way we might do with a “modernized” version of old stories. He has Cleopatra play billiards, for example, a game that didn’t exist until over 1,000 years after her death. William Shakespeare sometimes used anachronisms deliberately in his plays about the ancient world. The real King Arthur probably wore chain mail or hardened leather armor, and lived in an earth-and-wood fort instead of a stone castle. However, this is an anachronism: full plate armor was not used until at least the 13 th century AD, hundreds of years after King Arthur died (around 550 AD). When you think of King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table, you probably imagine a group of knights in plate armor, wielding broadswords and large shields. The point is that the story shows something happening at a time when it would be impossible, or at least extremely unlikely, for that thing to happen. This could include simple things like a historical film putting the wrong type of weapon in the hands of the soldiers, or it could be extreme inaccuracies such as having cavemen fight dinosaurs. ![]() Anachronism (pronounced ah-NACK-ruh-nism) is a Greek word meaning “backward time.” It’s what happens when an author, deliberately or accidentally, puts historical events, fashions, technology, etc., in the wrong place.
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