Introduction

         
Shakespeare continues to attract a staggering number of new editions, critical commentaries, and discursive essays, but the supportive linguistic literature has been surprisingly sparse. When we were researching the need for this book, we found very little that might be classed as 'high-quality Shakespearian lexicography'. On the other hand, we found a great deal that could be described as 'low-quality lexical commercialism', especially on the Web, in the form of selective word-lists providing crude approximations to the meanings of Elizabethan words, and generalizing about meanings in ways that were often misleading. The tools of enquiry that all students of literature have a right to demand from linguists - in the form of dictionaries, glossaries, thesauri, and concordances - are still remarkably few, by comparison with the literary energy that has been expended on the canon. And there seems to be no let-up in the demand for additional resources, as expressed by teachers, academics, students, actors, journalists, and others, anxious to develop their awareness of Shakespeare's language. 'Onions', of course, is the splendid exception. Having spent three years on the present book with the benefit of modern technology, we cannot but doff our caps in admiration at Charles Talbot Onions' remarkable feat of compilation, first published in 1911, revised in 1919, and enlarged in a further revision by Robert D Eagleson in 1986. Both the present authors have lived with this book in the literary and theatrical parts of their professional lives, and they have benefitted repeatedly from its content - in the first author's case, for some 40 years. But when you live with someone for so long, you find out their weaknesses as well as their strengths; and our personal marginalia identifying omissions of coverage and inadequacies of treatment reinforces our feeling that there is a need for a fresh work.

All dictionaries should be regularly revised, to take account of new findings and methods, and Shakespeare is no exception. 		 
     



         
The texts are available to study in ways that were not possible before, and new texts have begun to attract attention: in the present case, our corpus includes the vocabulary of The Two Noble Kinsmen and King Edward III, which Onions, for example, does not include. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED), which Onions himself helped to create, is now available on CD-ROM and on the Internet, making it much more practicable to carry out large-scale focused projects of a lexical kind. We have thesaurus and concordance material from the fine project by Marvin Spevack to aid us. And between Hilda Hulme's Explorations in Shakespeare's Language (1962) - being written when the first author was one of her students - and Frank Kermode's Shakespeare's Language (2000), we have