Dot is very exercised by Shakespeare..
Every time I see a Shakespeare play, I wonder how many of the words the audience is picking up. It is all very well their getting the drift from the behaviour of the actors, but that makes it like a mime accompanied by unknown utterances.
Matters are not helped for the poor children who must study Shakespeare by internet glossaries that mislead. So, in Hamlet, the word gall in the line ‘Let the galled jade wince, our withers are unwrung’, is explained on a commonly used website as ‘Bitterness, anything bitter’. The meaning here, though, is not ‘embittered’ but ‘afflicted with a swelling’. The consequence is tenderness to pain. In a sermon from the 1580s Archbishop Sandys remarks that ‘Herod heard John gladly while he carped others, but he could not abide to be rubbed on the gall himselfe.’ The general point about the obscurity of Shakespeare’s vocabulary is made in a do-it-yourself test in a new book by Vivian Cook called It’s All in a Word. Professor Cook wrote the bestseller on spelling called Accomodating Brocolli in the Cemetary (if I have got the deliberate misspellings right). In his latest ramble round English he claims that modern productions of Shakespeare ‘superimpose our contemporary meanings on an old text, for good or for ill’.
As proof he sets a test for readers to write down the meanings of some words in context, and check their answers with those at the back of his book. What, for example, is meant by fathomless in the line from Troilus and Cressida: ‘Buckle in a waist most fathomless’? The answer he gives is ‘cannot be encircled’, which is correct, for rather an odd reason.
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