For years now, scores of books and websites have all claimed to be the authoritative guides to the world (and words) of William Shakespeare. And thus was many a student tricked into buying one more “workbook” to supplement their “textbook”, or spend hours on a website full of easy distractions. The real struggle for students of Shakespeare, it can be argued, isn’t in remembering the context of excerpts from his plays. It is in confronting a seemingly simple, yet puzzlingly (sometimes to comic effect) out-of-context word while reading dialogue.
This is where the father and the son duo of David and Ben Crystal step in. For instance:
minion. NOUN.
Don’t read the meaning of ‘humble servant’ into these senses.
The authors tell us that “minion” could mean “darling” (as used in Twelfth Night) or “hussy” (as used in Romeo And Juliet) following the “warning note” above in red. Such notes abound in the Oxford Illustrated Shakespeare Dictionary. David is a lecturer, and the writer and editor of several books on language and linguistics. His son Ben is an actor, writer and producer. This book is a result of the former’s penchant for words combining with the latter’s experience and experiments with Shakespeare.
What really makes the dictionary a treat is the art by Kate Bellamy. Her illustrations not only welcome the entry of each new letter in the dictionary— as “J” ends and “K” begins, a crown atop a watery yellow-and-pink background is accompanied by the Crystals’ note on the “King’s Men”— but are also stand-alone folios, redirecting the reader to pages that carry the words they depict. Sample the illustration titled “Closet With Arras”, which tells you that Shakespeare’s “closet” is actually a “small private chamber”, and “Arras” is a “wall tapestry”.
Also, if you just cannot fathom what “French-crown-colour” is, then the section titled “Colours”, a part of the 26 thematically illustrated folios (including “Cosmos”, “Swords And Daggers”, “Hats”, and “Animals”) in the centre of the book will help. This two-page spread brings alive unusual phrases that the Bard had used to describe the colours of various things. The Crystals tell you that this is the light yellow of, yes, a French crown coin, but Bellamy helpfully accompanies this by dabbling on, rather whimsically, this particular shade of yellow on a sketch of the said coin.
Other than this, there are also special panels that pop up through the book. Titbits of phrases or words are grouped together under different heads (“Stage Directions”, “Exclamations”, “Humours”, and more) in a frayed-parchment-like box. Much detail (a full two-page spread!) is dedicated to “Swearing”—as different from “Insults”, which also has a separate panel. Do you want to swear on your body or a disease? The authors refer us to a line from Othello—“A pox of drowning thyself!”—where Iago tells Roderigo not to entertain suicidal thoughts. Further in the play, you will encounter Iago telling Emilia, “Zounds, hold your peace!” This was Shakespeare’s way of swearing strongly by God’s name (“God’s wounds”) without actually invoking it—“thus avoiding a charge of blasphemy”, the Crystals tell us.
Though the panel on insults starts off with great promise— “Some of Shakespeare’s most vivid vocabulary appears in the way characters insult each other,” it tells us—it is perhaps one of the only places where the dictionary falls short. The delights of the World Wide Web have ensured that many a bored Shakespeare-nerd could generate insults at random from the Bard’s various works, with a click of their mouse (www.pangloss.com/seidel/Shaker ). And so it is a slight downer to realize that there are only eight from Shakespeare’s most outrageously colourful phrases. The dictionary’s funniest insult is a quote from the comedy Twelfth Night. “Sir Toby calls Sir Andrew ‘an ass-head, and a coxcomb, and a knave, a thin-faced knave, a gull!’—a simpleton.”
In case you get into a sword fight when you’re out drinking, this dictionary will teach you to pull off a punto reverso with ease, for there’s an illustrated fencing tutorial.
This is “not just a dictionary”, say the authors. This is an “encyclopaedic way to the mindset of the Elizabethans…and ways you’d navigate that world.”
Oui vraiment. Indeed.
