William Shakespeare_s Romeo and Juliet (Bloom_s Modern Critical Interpretations)

When asked to compile a dictionary of Shakespeare’s informal English within a series published by Athlone Press (now taken over by Continuum Books), I naturally reviewed what the attraction of compiling such a diction ary might be. Informal language is a neglected topic—at least from a historical standpoint—and it is not well covered in historical dictionaries like the Oxford English Dictionary [OED] if only because, to illustrate why a word or phrase may be understood as informal, a much longer context is necessary than most dictionaries provide. There are dictionaries and glossaries devoted to other aspects of Shakespeare’s language like legal and military language, sexual innuendo, and neologisms, but his informal language has not been covered though it forms so large a part of conversation. As Shakespeare is primarily a dramatist and he is one of the first dramatists to use informal language for conversation, his informal English should be a major topic of investigation. Indeed, his informal language is often ignored by editors and commentators, who often interpret what could be informal as formal and/or grammatical. I have had an interest in informal language for some time (Blake 1981), and through compiling this dictionary I hope to learn more about Shakespeare, conversational language in the Elizabethan and Jaco bean periods, and to what extent we may need to change our views about Shakespeare through studying this aspect of his linguistic usage. However,