Life, 1928-08-02 · page 3 of 36
Life — August 2, 1928 — page 3: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
This is primarily a **Coca-Cola advertisement** disguised as editorial content, using Shakespeare to sell the product. The page claims Shakespeare's quote "Ever precise in promise keeping" endorses Coca-Cola's reliability. The cartoon depicts **characters from Shakespeare's "Measure for Measure"** (Act 1, Scene 2), humorously reimagined discussing Coca-Cola centuries before its invention. The joke relies on anachronism—treating the impossibility as amusing rather than logical. The advertisement emphasizes Coca-Cola's purity through "twenty-two scientific tests" and notes the staggering consumption figure of "8 million a day," attempting to validate the product through both scientific authority and mass popularity. This represents early 20th-century advertising strategy: leveraging cultural prestige (Shakespeare) and pseudo-scientific claims to build brand credibility.
📄 Transcribed text from this page (OCR, searchable)
Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.
What Shakespeare says about Coca-Cola “Ever precise in promise keeping”’ Why smile because Lucio talked about a drink a few centuries before he could get it? There's no more point to that than to laugh at Mark Twain's Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur's Court. What Lucio said about Coca-Cola was no joke—proved by these facts: Pure as Sunlight And the proof of its purity is in the testing. Twenty-two scien- tific tests, covering every step in Measure for, Meee: its preparation, safeguard this 8 m 4, lon pure drink of natural flavors. The Coca-Cola Compay, Altaata, Ga. comicbooks.com