Most scholarly attention on Shakespeare's vocabulary has been directed towards his enrichment of the language through borrowing words from other languages and has thus concentrated on the more learned aspects of his vocabulary. However, the bulk of Shakespeare's output consists of plays and to make these appear lifelike he needed to employ a colloquial and informal style. This aspect of his work has been largely disregarded apart from his bawdy language. This dictionary includes all types of non-standard and informal language and lists all examples found in Shakespeare's works. These include dialect forms, colloquial forms, non-standard and variant forms, fashionable words and puns. >

Shakespeare lived when knowledge of plants and their uses was a given, but also at a time of unique interest in plants and gardens.His lifetime saw the beginning of scientific interest in plants, the first large-scale plant introductions from outside the country since Roman times, and the beginning of gardening as a leisure activity. Shakespeare's works show that he engaged with this new world to illuminate so many facets of his plays and poems. This dictionary offers a complete companion to Shakespeare's references to landscape, plants and gardens, including both formal and rural settings.It covers plants and flowers, gardening terms, and the activities that Shakespeare included within both cultivated and uncultivated landscapes as well as encompassing garden imagery in relation to politics, the state and personal lives. Each alphabetical entry offers an definition and overview of the term discussed in its historical context, followed by a guided tour of its use in Shakespeare's works and finally an extensive bibliography, including primary and secondary sources, books and articles.

Illuminates the pleasures and challenges of Shakespeare's complex language for today's students, teachers, actors and theatre-goers.

This book is devoted to the description of typical trends in development, formation and the present state of English Author Lexicography, the roots of which go back to concordances to the Bible and glossaries of the complete works of Chaucer (xvi c.). Part I, “Linguistic Dictionaries to English Writers,” presents lexicographic analysis of old and new concordances, indices, glossaries and lexicons of famous English writers with special reference to Chaucer, Milton, Shakespeare, and Dickens. It presents a modern scene of author glossaries for unfamiliar words, terms and other groups of writers’ vocabulary (e.g. Shakespeare’s insults and his erotic language). The reader is offered a detailed review of author concordances, glossaries and lexicons on the Internet, along with criticism of printed dictionaries. Part II, “Encyclopedic Reference Works to English Writers,” deals with English author encyclopedic reference books, i.e. encyclopedias, guides and companions; dictionaries of characters and place names; quotations and proverbs, and Internet encyclopedic resources. The book also provides a comprehensive list of references on author lexicography and an Index of Dictionaries to the English Writers (xvi–xxi cc.), including 300 titles of linguistic and encyclopedic dictionaries, which is a reliable user guide in the world of English author lexicography.

This innovative volume testifies to the current revived interest in Shakespeare's language and style and opens up new and captivating vistas of investigation. Transcending old boundaries between literary and linguistic studies, this engaging collaborative book comes up with an original array of theoretical approaches and new findings. The chapters in the collection capture a rich diversity of points of view and cover such fields as lexicography, versification, dramaturgy, rhetorical analyses, cognitive and computational corpus-based stylistic studies, offering a holistic vision of Shakespeare's uses of language. The perspective is deliberately broad, confronting ideas and visions at the intersection of various techniques of textual investigation. Such novel explorations of Shakespeare's multifarious artistry and amazing inventiveness in his use of language will cater for a broad range of readers, from undergraduates, postgraduates, scholars and researchers, to poetry and theatre lovers alike.

This collection explores the consequences of accentism—an under-researched issue that intersects with racism and classism—in the Shakespeare industry across languages and cultures, past and present. It adopts a transmedia and transhistorical approach to a subject that has been dominated by the study of "Original Pronunciation." Yet the OP project avoids linguistically "foreign" characters such as Othello because of the additional complications their "aberrant" speech poses to the reconstruction process. It also evades discussion of contemporary, global practices and, underpinning the enterprise, is the search for an aural "purity" that arguably never existed. By contrast, this collection attends to foreign speech patterns in both the early modern and post-modern periods, including Indian, East Asian, and South African, and explores how accents operate as "metasigns" reinforcing ethno-racial stereotypes and social hierarchies. It embraces new methodologies, which includes reorienting attention away from the visual and onto the aural dimensions of performance.