William Shakespeare: The Complete Works 2nd Edition (13 page)

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Authors: William Shakespeare

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BOOK: William Shakespeare: The Complete Works 2nd Edition
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People were evidently very sensitive to these modality changes, and sometimes the text explicitly recognizes the contrasts involved. In
Antony and Cleopatra
, the summit meeting between Caesar, Antony, and their advisors is carried on in formal verse. But when Enobarbus intervenes with a down-to-earth comment in prose, he receives a sharp rebuke from Antony: ‘Thou art a soldier only. Speak no more’ (2.2.112). And in
As You Like It
, Orlando arrives in the middle of a prose conversation in which Jaques is happily expounding his melancholy to Ganymede (aka Rosalind). Orlando addresses Ganymede with a line of verse, which immediately upsets Jaques: ‘Nay then, God b‘wi’you an you talk in blank verse’ (4.1.29-30). And Jaques promptly leaves.
Vocabulary
 
Vocabulary is the area of language least subject to generalization. Unlike the grammar, prosody, and discourse patterns of a language, which are subject to general rules that can be learned thoroughly in a relatively short period of time, the learning of vocabulary is largely ad hoc and of indefinite duration. By contrast with the few hundred points of pronunciation, grammar, and discourse structure which we need to consider when dealing with Shakespeare’s language, the number of points of vocabulary run into several thousands. As a result, most books do little more than provide an alphabetical glossary of the items which pose a difficulty of comprehension.
The question of the size of Shakespeare’s vocabulary, and its impact on the development of the English language, has always captured popular imagination, but at the cost of distracting readers from more important aspects of his lexical creativity. It is never the number of words that makes an author, but how those words are used. Because of Shakespeare’s literary and dramatic brilliance, it is usually assumed that his vocabulary must have been vast, and that his lexical innovations had a major and permanent effect on the language. In fact, it transpires that the number of words in his lexicon (ignoring variations of the kind described below) was somewhere between 17,000 and 20,000-quite small by present-day standards, though probably much larger than his contemporaries. And the number of his lexical innovations, insofar as these can be identified reliably, are probably no more than 1,700, less than half of which have remained in the language. No other author matches these impressive figures, but they nonetheless provide only a small element of the overall size of the English lexicon, which even in Early Modern English times was around 150,000.
The uncertainty in the personal total arises because it is not easy to say what should be counted. Much depends on the selection of texts and the amount of text recognized (as the present edition illustrates with
King Lear
and
Hamlet
), as well as on editorial policy towards such matters as hyphenation. In Kent’s harangue of Oswald (
The Tragedy of King Lear
), for example, the number of words varies depending on which compounds the editors recognize. In this extract (2.2.13-17),
The Complete Works
identifies 20; by comparison, the First Folio shows 22:
 
Complete Works
: a base, proud, shallow, beggarly, three-suited, hundred-pound, filthy worsted-stocking knave; a lily-livered, action-taking, whoreson, glass-gazing, super-serviceable, finical rogue; one-trunk-inheriting slave . . .
First Folio
: a base, proud, shallow, beggerly, three-suited-hundred pound, filthy woosted stocking knaue, a Lilly-liuered, action-taking, whoreson, glasse-gazing super-seruiceable finicall Rogue, one Trunke-inheriting slaue ...
 
Other editions reach different totals: one allows a three-element compound word (
filthy-worsted-stocking,
Penguin); another a four-element (
three-suited-hundred-pound,
Arden).
The number of words in a person’s lexicon refers to the items which would appear as headwords in a dictionary, once grammatical, metrical, and orthographic variations are discounted. For example, in the First Folio we find the following forms:
take, takes, taketh, taking, tak‘n, taken, tak’st, tak’t, took, took’st, tooke, tookst
. It would be absurd to think of these as ‘twelve words’ showing us twelve aspects of Shakespeare’s lexical creativity. They are simply twelve forms of the
same
word, ‘take’. And there are several other types of word which we would want to exclude when deciding on the size of Shakespeare’s vocabulary. It is usual to exclude proper names from a count (
Benvolio, Eastcheap
), unless they have a more general significance (
Ethiop
). People usually exclude the foreign words (from Latin, French, etc.), though there are problems in deciding what to do with the franglais used in
Henry V.
Word counters wonder what to do, also, with onomatopoeic words (e.g.
sa, sese
) and humorous forms: should we count malapropisms separately or as variants of their supposed targets (e.g.
allicholly
as a variant of
melancholy
)? If we include everything, we shall approach 20,000; if we do not, we shall look for the lower figure, around 17,000.
How many of these words have gone out of use or changed their meaning between Early Modern English and today? A recent glossary which aims at comprehensiveness,
Shakespeare’s Words
(Crystal and Crystal, 2002), contains 13,626 headwords which fall into this category - roughly three-quarters of Shakespeare’s total word-stock. But this does not mean that three-quarters of the words in
The Complete Works
represent Early Modern English, for many of these older words are used only once or twice in the canon. If we perform an alternative calculation - not the number of different words (the word
types
), but the number of instances of each word (the word tokens), we end up with a rather different figure. According to Marvin Spevack’s concordance, there are nearly 885,000 word tokens in the canon - and this total would increase to over 900,000 with the addition of
The Two Noble Kinsmen.
The 13,626 word types in the glossary are actually represented by some 50,000 word tokens - and 50,000 is only 5 per cent of 900,000. This is why the likelihood of encountering an Early Modern English word in reading a play or a poem is actually quite small. Most of the words in use then are still in use today, with no change in meaning.
The attention of glossary-writers and text editors has always focused on the ‘different words’, but it is important to note that they do not all pose the same kind of difficulty. At one extreme, there are many words which hardly need any gloss at all:
• words such as
oft, perchance, sup, morrow, visage, pate, knave, wench,
and
morn
, which are still used today in special contexts, such as poetry or comic archaism, or which still have some regional use (e.g.
aye
‘always’);
• words where a difference has arisen solely because of the demands of the metre, such as vasty instead of vast (‘The vasty fields of France’, Henry V, Prologue 12), and other such uses of the
-y
suffix, such as
steepy
and
plumpy
;
• words where the formal difference is too small to obscure the meaning, such as
affright
(‘frighten’),
afeard
(‘afraid’),
scape
(‘escape’),
ope
(‘open’),
down-trod
(‘down-trodden’), and
dog-weary
(‘dog-tired’);
• words whose elements are familiar but the combination is not, such as
bedazzle, dismasked, unpeople, rareness,
and smilingly, and such phrasal verbs as
press down
(‘overburden’),
speak with
(‘speak to’), and
shove by
(‘push aside’);
• idioms and compounds whose meaning is transparent, such as
what cheer?, go your ways, high-minded
, and
folly-fallen.
 
We might also include in this category most of the cases of
conversion
- where a word belonging to one part of speech is used as a different part of speech. Most often, a common noun is used as a verb, as in
‘grace
me no grace, nor
uncle
me no uncle’ (
Richard II,
2.3.86), but there are several other possibilities, which Shakespeare exploits so much that lexical conversion has become one of the trademarks of his style:
She Phoebes me
(
As
You Like It, 4.3.40)
 
 
Thou losest
here
, a better
where
to find
 
(
The Tragedy of King Lear
, 1.1.261)
 
 
they . . . from their own misdeeds
askance
their eyes
(Lucrece, 1. 636-7)
 
 
what man
Thirds
his own worth
(
The Two Noble Kinsmen,
1.2.95-6)
 
In such cases, although the grammar is strikingly different, the lexical meaning is not.
At the other extreme, there are words where it is not possible to deduce from their form what they might mean - such as
finical, fardel, grece,
and
incony.
There are around a thousand such items in Shakespeare, and in these cases we have no alternative but to learn them as we would new words in a foreign language. An alphabetical glossary of synonyms is not the best way of carrying out this task, however, as that arrangement does not display the words in context, and its A-to-Z structure does not allow the reader to develop a sense of the semantic interrelationships involved. It is essential to see the words in their semantic context, for this can help comprehension in a number of ways. Shakespeare sometimes provides the help himself. In
Othello
, when the Duke says to Brabanzio (1.3.198-200):
Let me speak like yourself, and lay a sentence
Which, as a grece or step, may help these lovers
Into your favour
 
we can guess what
grece
means (‘step, degree’) by relying on the following noun. And in
Twelfth Night
, when Sir Toby says to Maria: ‘Shall I play my freedom at tray-trip, and become thy bondslave?’ (2.5.183-4), we may have no idea what
tray-trip
is, but the linguistic association (or
collocation
) with
play
shows that it must be some kind of game. Collocations always provide major clues to meaning.
An A-to-Z approach provides no clues about the meaning relationships between words:
aunt
is at one end of the alphabet and
uncle
at the other. A more beneficial approach to Shakespearian vocabulary is to learn the new words in the way that young children do when they acquire a language. Words are never learned randomly, or alphabetically, but always in context and in pairs or small groups. In this way, meanings reinforce and illuminate each other, in such ways as the following:
• words of opposite meaning (
antonyms
):
best/meanest, mine/countermine, ayward/ nayward, curbed/uncurbed;
• words of included meaning (hyponyms), expressing the notion that ‘an X is a kind of Y’:
bass viol
—
viol, boot-hose-hose; mortar-piece/murdering-pjece—piece; grave-/well-/ ill-beseeming
—
beseeming; half-blown/unblown—blown;
• words of the same or very similar meaning (
synonyms
):
advantage/vantage, argal/argo, compter/counter, coz/cousin
(these words sometimes convey a stylistic contrast, such as informal vs. formal);
• words of intensifying meaning:
lusty/over-lusty, pleachedlthick-pleached, force/force
perforce,
rash/heady-rash, amazed/all-amazed.
 
In many cases, it is sensible to group words into
semantic fields
, such as ‘clothing’, ‘weapons’, or ‘money’, so that we can more clearly see the relationships between them. Under the last heading, for example, we can distinguish between domestic coins (such as
pennies
) and foreign coins (such as
ducats
), and within the former to relate items in terms of their increasing value:
obolus, halfpence, three farthings, penny, twopence, threepence, groat, sixpence, tester/testril, shilling, noble, angel, royal, pound
. That is how we learn a monetary system today, and it is how we can approach the one we find in Shakespeare.
In between the extremes of lexical familiarity and unfamiliarity, we find the majority of Shakespeare’s difficult words - difficult not because they are different in form from the vocabulary we know today but because they have changed their meaning. In many cases, the meaning change is very slight (
intent
‘intention’; glass ‘looking-glass’) or has little consequence. When Jack Cade says ‘I have eat no meat these five days, yet come thou and thy five men, an if I do not leave you all as dead as a doornail I pray God I may never eat grass more’ (
Contention
, 4.9.37-40), meat is here being used in the general sense of ‘food’ - but if we were to interpret it in the modern, restricted sense of ‘flesh meat’, the effect would not be greatly different. By contrast, there are several hundred cases where the meaning has changed so much that it would be highly misleading to read in the modern sense. These are the ‘false friends’ (
faux amis
) of comparative semantics - words in a language which seem familiar but are not (as between French and English, where
demander
means ‘ask’, and
demand
is translated by
requérir
)
.
False friends in Shakespeare include
naughty
(‘wicked’),
heavy
(‘sorrowful’), humorous (‘moody’), sad (‘serious’),
ecstasy
(‘madness’),
owe
(‘own’),
merely
(‘totally’), and envious (‘malicious’). In such cases, we need to pay careful attention to the context, which we must always allow to overrule the intrusion of the irrelevant modern meaning. We can see this operating, for example, in
The Tragedy of King Lear
(5.1.5-7):
REGAN
Our sister’s man is certainly miscarried.
EDMOND
‘Tis to be doubted, madam.
REGAN
Now, sweet lord, You know the goodness I intend upon you.
 

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