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The appearance of a comprehensive and up-to-date glossary of Shakespeare will be greeted with rejoicing by Shakespeare students and scholars all over the world. Throughout the twentieth century anyone concerned with Shakespeare's language has had to rely essentially on out-of-date works deriving from the nineteenth century. A standard work of reference has been Alexander Schmidt's two-volume Shakespeare-Lexicon and Quotations Dictionary dating from as far back as 1874, reprinted as recently as 1987 and still in print. A product of German philological scholarship, it contains over 50,000 quotations illustrating verbal usages, and is still of value, especially to editors. But Schmidt's work, rooted in the scholarship of its day, was completed without the benefit of the great Oxford English Dictionary, conceived in 1857 but which began to appear only in 1884, by which time the editors had got as far as 'ant'. The dictionary crawled to completion only in 1928, since when there have been a number of supplementary volumes. One of the compilers of the OED was Charles Talbot Onions (1873-1965), but his handy Shakespeare Glossary appeared in 1911, well before the parent work was completed. His glossary, too, to which the Crystals pay tribute, is still in print, in the not very comprehensive revision by Robert D. Eagleson of 1986. |
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In the long period since the origination of Schmidt's and Onions's works, attitudes to Shakespeare's text and to his language have changed, his readership has broadened, and the needs of readers have evolved alongside changes in the English language itself. At the same time great strides have been made in the study of Shakespeare's language. Freudian-influenced criticism has revealed layers of wordplay unsuspected by the Victorians. Specialized areas of Shakespeare's vocabulary, such as his use of sea terms, of legal, military and theatrical terminology, of proverbs, oaths, and the Bible, have been subjected to close scrutiny. Eric Partridge's pioneering Shakespeare's Bawdy, first printed in a limited edition in 1947 and also still in print, has been followed by other studies of what one critic called 'the less decent language of Shakespeare's time' which had been largely neglected by the compilers of OED, most recently and most valuably by Gordon Williams's three-volume Dictionary of Sexual Language and Imagery in Shakespearean and Stuart Literature (1997) and its offshoot A Glossary of Shakespeare's Sexual Language (1998). |
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