tionary! Well, maybe.
Surprised not to see anything about this on the dope already … anyone read this book? Have an opinion?
ETA: the whole thing has been digitised and is available online here.
Apparently you have to be a registered member to view the dictionary, though.
I’m intrigued, but they don’t seem to say anything that definitely points to it being Shakespeare’s, aside from “the sheer accumulation of examples” that, they say, could only be found there. That sounds kinda like the sort of evidence people use to “prove” that Edward de Verre wrote Shakespeare’s works.
Shakespeare, I’d read, was the first to use a number of words we now regard as common. It’d be interesting if this dictionary has either those words, or indications leading to those words.
To tell the truth, I’m simply surprised this dictionary exists at all, regardless of any links to Shakespeare. It’s the first I’ve heard of an English dictionary this old.
It would be cool if true, but I’m skeptical: there are a lot of words in the complete works of Shakespeare, such that you probably could find parallels between Shakespeare and almost any random marked-up book if you were looking for them, and a lot of people who weren’t Shakespeare in early modern England. (For that matter, even if we accept the contention that there are significant parallels between Shakespeare’s works and the markings in this dictionary, it could just as easily be a dictionary someone used for reading his works rather than writing them.)
From a scholarly perspective, of course, this doesn’t have to be Shakespeare’s dictionary to be an awesome find – almost anything that tells us about contemporary reading practices and how people interacted with the language is gold.
Oxfordians used a similar argument in showing the deVere’s bible “proved” he wrote the Shakespeare plays - the sheer number of annotations that correspond to something in a play.
But nobody has said what the threshold number is that one would expect to find in a well-annotated large work that kind of matches something in a Shakespeare play.
I’d like to hear more about their methodology - cliched phrases like “hair stand on end” don’t really do much for me, for instance.
That phrase wasn’t a cliche when Shakespeare wrote it. It only became a cliche because people quote Shakespeare so much. It’s very possible that he originated the phrase. At the very least, if he stole it from another source, that source is unknown to us. Hamlet is the oldest text we know of in which it appears.
There are hundreds and hundreds of other examples of common words or phrases that do not appear in any surviving literature before Shakespeare. Finding so many of them, in a single volume that appears to be contemporary with Shakespeare, is pretty strong evidence (although far from proof) that there’s a connection between it, and the Bard.
I don’t believe that is how Shakespeare worked. He was writing fast, and writing for theatrical effect and plot rather than to impress intellectuals with his large vocabulary or his verbal originality. His verbal originality is the sort that stems from not thinking too much about it (and from being very verbally adept, of course), rather than from looking things up in dictionaries or thesauri.
I would not be at all surprised if this (the annotations) were a deliberate fraud, although the alleged correspondences may be, as others are suggesting, mere coincidence.
Aren’t many word supposedly unknown in print before Shakespeare used them? Presumably this book (as opposed to its annotations) is not previously unknown to lexicographers, so I guess Shakespeare was not looking to it for any of his “new” words.
An article in this week’s New Scientist claims that contrary to what is always said Shakespeare did not have an unusual large vocabulary:*
That’s book’s a fascinating find no matter what. Here’s a good page on the Alvearie. It could be a forgery, of course, but I can certainly see someone annotating it for greater usefulness. The scholars will being going crazy on this for years.
An unsaid part of the remarkableness is that scholars will be able to work simultaneously on it because it’s being posted on the Internet. Remember the controversy over the Dead Sea Scrolls because a small group kept them secret for decades to stake their priority claims? It’s a totally new and awesome era that such a find can be made available to every major person in the field at the same time.
*I’m a subscriber so I have access. I don’t know what you’ll see if you don’t. I never did figure out what the article was even doing there. Outside of a few highly dubious readings of mentions of science in his plays, the articles - multiple! - didn’t have any real science in them.