The Renaissance in England brought with it the exploration of new lands as well as the invention of new technology. For William Shakespeare, the concept of using something as ordinary as a wrist watch was a brand new thought that most people had never seen before. In fact, one of the ways we even know there were wrist watches in Shakespeare’s lifetime comes from a single reference to an “arm watch” given to Queen Elizabeth I by Robert Dudley. For the regular guy on the street or in the theater, in our case, they had a different idea of what it meant to tell time, as the 16th century marked the first time anyone was trying to do it using mechanical clocks. Our guest this week is Wendy Beth Hyman, (professor of/author of} Wendy is an expert on not just how Elizabethans like William Shakespeare kept track of the hours during the day, but on specific mechanisms of those clocks, like jaquemarts, which were part of these newly invented timekeeping devices being created in Shakespeare’s lifetime. Today Wendy is here to share with us a piece of the history of time-keeping as well as to let us in on what a jacquemart is, by using references that we find in Shakespeare’s plays. It turns out that some of the words and phrases Shakespeare uses reveal some of what it was like to live in a time when the creation something ordinary, like a wrist watch or wall clock, was a completely revolutionary idea.