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):