A Shakespeare Glossary

A vital resource for scholars, students and actors, this book contains glosses and quotes for over 14,000 words that could be misunderstood by or are unknown to a modern audience. Displayed panels look at such areas of Shakespeare's language as greetings, swear-words and terms of address. Plot summaries are included for all Shakespeare's plays and on the facing page is a unique diagramatic representation of the relationships within each play.

Do you ever find yourself reading Shakespeare and are completely lost because of words like Obeisance and Quiddity? This dictionary contains over 4500 Shakespearean words and their definition.

The last edition of this famous glossary was published in 1919. This thorough revision takes account of the considerable advances in Shakespeare scholarship since then.

Excerpt from A Shakespeare Glossary The steady advance towards completion of the great Oxford English Dictionary has made it possible for the Delegates of the Clarendon Press to authorize the preparation and issue of this book, which is primarily the outcome of an analysis of Shakespeare's vocabulary conducted in the light of the results published in the Dictionary. The application of these results to the making of a glossary to a single author, if it is to have an independent value and to be true to the facts, must not be a mere mechanical transference of definitions and classifications of meanings such as an industrious compiler might make with small expenditure of time and labour. Such a work as is here attempted is one of difficulty and delicacy, and there are pitfalls even for the expert; but, relying upon a fifteen years experience on the editorial staff of the Dictionary, I have allowed myself a wide freedom of adaptation, and trust at the same time to have escaped such errors as would be almost inevitable if a task of this kind were undertaken by one who knew the great book only from the outside and had no adequate training in lexicographical method. The aim of the Shakespeare glossary now presented to the reader is to supply definitions and illustrations of words or senses of words now obsolete or surviving only in provincial or archaic use, together with explanations of others involving allusions not generally familiar, and of proper names carrying with them some connotative signification or offering special interest or difficulty in the passages in which they occur. Senses still current in general literature have also been occasionally illustrated, chiefly where there is contextual obscurity, or where it seemed desirable, for one reason or another, to give a complete conspectus of a word that has many ramifications of meaning. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.