Schmidt - Shakespeare Lexicon and Quotation Dictionary, Vol. 1

Shakespeare Lexicon and Quotation Dictionary

A COMPLETE DICTIONARY

OF ALL THE ENGLISH WORDS, PHRASES AND CONSTRUCTIONS

IN THE WORKS OF THE POET

BY

ALEXANDER SCHMIDT

THIRD EDITION

REVISED AND ENLARGED

BY

GREGOR SARRAZIN

IN TWO VOLUMES

VOLUME I

A M

DOVER PUBLICATIONS, INC

NEW YORK

Abbreviations.

The different Quarto editions are designated in the same manner as in the great Cambridge edition of Messrs. Clark and Wright.

By the initials the unchanged forms and words are meant, as they stand in the respective headings; inflected forms are denoted by their terminations preceded by a dash; f. i. under the article Grow g. means grow, s grows, ing growing, etc.

The quotations are from the Globe edition.

Asterisks inserted behind some articles or quotations refer to the Supplement.

Names of Authors quoted in the Supplement indicate, as a rule, editions of Shakespeares Plays and Poems, or other well-known books connected with Shakespeare, f. i. Wyndham Shakespeares Poems by George Wyndham; D. H. Madden The Diary of Master William Silence by D. H. Madden ; S. Lee A Life of Shakespeare by Sidney Lee.

This Dover edition, first published in 1971 is an unabridged republication of the third revised and enlarged edition as published by Georg Reimer in Berlin in 1902 under the former title Shakespeare-Lexicon.

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 70-150407

International Standard Book Number

ISBN-13: 978-0-486-22726-9

ISBN-10: 0-486-22726-X

Manufactured in the United States by Courier Corporation

22726X20

www.doverpublications.com

Preface to the First Volume of the First Edition.

The present work, as differing from the existing Shakespearian glossaries, the object of which has been only to explain what has become obsolete and unintelligible in the writings of the poet, is to contain his whole vocabulary and subject the sense and use of every word of it to a careful examination.

As it was not intended to establish a critical standard, but only to furnish some of the necessary materials for criticism, it seemed convenient to lay aside, for the present, the question of the authenticity of the works generally ascribed to Shakespeare, and to consider as genuine all that has been commonly printed together as Shakespeares, namely the thirty-six plays of he first and second Folios, together with Pericles, and the so called Poems; but to disregard the apocryphal pieces of the latest Folios as well as those which the criticism of still later times has brought into connection with the name of the poet. The stage-directions, too, even those of the earliest editions, have been left unnoticed, as it appeared more than doubtful whether they were written by Shakespeare himself.

In the present unsettled state of textual criticism it could not be decided, whether the Folios or the extant Quartos deserved greater credit. But fortunately the business of a lexicographer was, in this point at least, easier than that of an editor, who must make his choice between different lections, whereas the former may fairly content himself with registering the occurring variations. These have indeed been collated with great care wherever some authority could be attributed to the ancient texts; excluding, of course, those Quartos which the editors of the first Folio meant when speaking of stolen and surreptitious copies, maimed and deformed by the frauds and stealths of injurious impostors, namely the Quartos of the Merry Wives and Henry V, the First Part of the Contention', the True Tragedy, and the earliest impressions of Romeo and Juliet (1597) and of Hamlet (1603). Their variations are, at the best, of the same weight as the conjectures of modern emendators.

The example and reasons of the Cambridge editors have been decisive for adopting the modern orthography, those cases excepted when the different spelling of the old editions was evidently caused by a difference of pronunciation.