Cultural works exhibit systems properties that reflect the systems properties of nature and cosmos. They truly, in Hamlet’s words, “hold a mirror up to nature” in at least sixteen ways, each of which can be demonstrated by examples from Shakespeare’s plays. Thus, the study of systems can enrich the study of Shakespeare, and vice versa.

1. Artworks are cultural systems that emerge from—and reflect—biological, social, and (other) cultural systems.
    
2. Like other systems, successful artworks are integrated, indivisible.
    
3. Like other systems, artworks may be composed of smaller systems, with their own system properties.
    
4. Like other systems, artworks exist in, and create, larger systems: in their case, discourse communities.
    
5. Like other systems, artworks and their discourse communities exist in the relationships among their parts, and thus display emergent properties. For example, literary works, such as plays, exist in the relationship between text and reader, or between production and audience.
    
6. Like connections among parts of other systems, connections within and among artworks are not always obvious.
    
7. Open systems exchange matter and energy with their environment. Artworks exchange “matter” and “energy” with their discourse communities.
    
8. Like other complex nonlinear systems, successful artworks exist in a state far from equilibrium between rigidity and randomness.
    
9. Complex nonlinear systems may change in cycles, from organization, through disorganization, to reorganization at a higher level of complexity; in so doing, they run counter to the general tendency of the universe to increase in entropy. Many musical compositions and narratives display this same cycle.
    
10. Some systems display self-similarity, with details similar in pattern to the whole. In narratives, whole and parts often share the cycle of organization, disorganization, and reorganization.
     
11. This cycle can result in evolution (for a species) or learning (for an individual). Initiation rites, in their pattern of separation, initiation, and return, exhibit this cycle. Narratives often portray characters’ initiation or learning, and as readers or audience members, we also move through this cycle.
     
12. Those systems that survive the cycle do so by developing new characteristics better adapted to new environments. Comedies can be thought of as depicting characters whose initiation or learning let them survive in the same way.
     
13. Not all systems survive the cycle; tragedies depict characters who do not survive it.
     
14. Complex systems may be sensitive to initial conditions, with small causes leading to large effects. In narratives, too, small causes may lead to large effects.
     
15. Because systems may be sensitive to initial conditions, their behavior cannot be predicted, only recorded. Because narratives serve as particularly rich recordings of the behavior of complex systems, they have helped enable human evolution.
     
16. Some systems are fractal, with infinite detail; successful literary works can have near-infinite detail, especially in their interaction with their discourse communities.