Koppelman George - Shakespeares beehive: an annotated Elizabethan dictionary comes to light

Shakespear e 's Beehive

Contents

Setting the Stage:

The Possibility of Shakespeares Dictionary

Further Evidence:

The Annotations as They Relate to the WorksAn Abridgment

isbn 978-0-9915730-7-3 (print)

isbn 978-0-9915730-8-0 (iBooks)

isbn 978-0-9915730-9-7 (Amazon)

isbn 978-0-692-50032-3 ( All Others )

copyright 2014, 2015 axletree press llc

W e are , each of us that make up Axletree Press llc , professional rare booksellers, and this book is the second edition of a single-item catalogue dedicated to the study and understanding of an annotated dictionary published in 1580. The companion piece to our study is our website for the dictionary in question: shakespearesbeehive.com . The dictionary can be viewed there in its entirety. The object itself has for some time been housed in a private unit at a secure facility. Our hope as stated in the first edition remains unchanged: to provide, in due course, the actual dictionary with a more appropriate home.

A second edition became a necessity as a result of research that we conducted over the course of the past year, evidence that we believe is important to share and helps to solidify and advance the credibility of our arguments and our claim. There are two entirely new chapters, including perhaps what is now the most significant of all: Missing Leaves, and the Curious Case of John Frith. A wide array of fresh textual examples comparing the annotated Baret dictionary with the works of Shakespeare has been added throughout.

Baret was in effect the standard English dictionary of Shakespeares schooldays, and must have had powerful inuence in shaping the English denitions of Shakespeares generation. But it is not likely that Shakespeare would have preserved the patterns so accurately if he had not himself turned many a time and oft to Baret for his varied synonyms.

T. W. Baldwin on John Barets Alvearie

P olonius : What do you read, my lord?

H amlet : Words, words, words.

Hamlet , act 2, scene 2

You have to read something other than the dictionary. I mean, if youre not Shakespeare, why bother reading the dictionary ?

An Upper East Side mother overheard admonishing her daughter at Bel Ami Caf, off Madison Avenue, in New York City, December 2013

T hroughout the following study we embody citations from our copy of Barets Alvearie, or Quadruple Dictionarie in a regularized format designed to convey both the characters used in the printed dictionary text and the annotations that we nd in the margins and within the text columns. Both the printed Baret texts and the annotations are represented in their original spellings, which include features peculiar to the early modern period in which they were made. Although certain elements may at rst be difcult to relate to the modern alphabet and familiar spellings and punctuation, such as the lack of the letter J, the combined usages of U and V, the common spelling shift of words ending in y to ie, and doubled consonants such as dogge for dog, we feel it is essential for the strength of our linguistic arguments that they be conducted within the parameters of the Elizabethan and early Stuart English language.

There are no page numbers in Barets Alvearie. To allow readers to quickly locate an entry, we use the same numbering system for individual denitions that Baret uses. For example, at the Baret number 98 under letter B, we nd the following denition: to Bang, or beate with a cudgell. If we were to refer to this denition, we would cite B98. To help distinguish and highlight the annotators work in the context of our own analysis, anything that the annotator adds to the page either by supplying words, or by marking the text without using words we have represented in red. If you see red, you know that the annotator has added these words or marks to the page. Additionally, if something is underlined, that is the annotator's mark.

We have also chosen to cite printed excerpts from Shakespeares works using the original printed texts. For the poems and sonnets, we cite from the original quarto printings. For the plays that were rst printed in the First Folio of 1623, we cite that original text. In addition, to allow our readers to more easily access the plays, for each citation we provide a reference to the modernized passage, by act, scene, and line numbering, as it appears in The Oxford Shakespeare: The Complete Works (2nd ed.), under the general editorship of Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005) .

O n the evening of April 29, 2008, through joint venture, a bid of $4,300 was placed on eBay for a book printed in London in the year 1580. dictionary, and, more notably, the particular copy offered to the public on that date, is what the following pages are all about.

The precise bid was arrived at following a series of brief daytime exchanges, across email and telephone. In not untypical antiquarian bookseller fashion, the debated gure continued to rise the more we each contemplated the lingering disappointment on the chance that we might lose out, in this instance, on a sixteenth-century Elizabethan dictionary with handwritten annotations. Not everyone will relate to such nervousness, but in our profession there are items that excite and those that dont, and this was one that, for us, carried from the beginning a sense of romance and intrigue. This, in spite of the fact that we had not yet come across Mr. T. W. Baldwin and his pronouncement, a conclusion that we imagine will represent a certain portion of the debate going forward.

The auction closed at $4,050. Only $250 separated us from never having had this experience, and a long experience it has already been.

One week after the auction ended, our copy of Barets Alvearie arrived in New York City from Canada. As rare booksellers, we then began to do what we have done repeatedly. We started to describe an item new to our inventory with the goal of reaching the utmost limits in terms of appeal. This is not meant to sound magnanimous. Add too much luster and gloss to your descriptions, and it will seem as though you are trying too hard. Some books warrant very little description. But there are those occasions when you feel there is work to be done, and through the process of investigation an angle is found that previously went undetected. The homework, the investigation, is what makes the job fun.

Many of the books and manuscripts that are acquired in our business have at least some description available at the time of acquisition. One has the choice to either build upon the preexisting write-up, or start from scratch. Our copy of Baret was offered on eBay with a few rudimentary, though not amateurish, paragraphs. Annotations were mentioned and several of them pictured, although nothing more was said, this not being unusual. The physical book and its general contents were accurately described, with one not insignicant exception: the book lacked two leaves of preliminary matter; as such, it was incomplete. We have from time to time amused ourselves by wondering how many members of the antiquarian book trade would have returned the book on account of its incompleteness (a common and accepted practice), and either saved themselves a mountain of time and trouble, or, potentially, for a refund of $4,050, returned to the previous owner William Shakespeares own personal dictionary.