William Shakespeare: The Complete Works 2nd Edition by William Shakespeare Page A

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