William Shakespeare

William Shakespeare’s work illustrates a striking historical paradox: a writer of extraordinary verbal invention composed without an English dictionary to consult. His plays show language being stretched and used in unfamiliar ways, while the absence of a reference book left even a celebrated playwright without a ready means to check whether a word was properly spelled, correctly chosen, or apt to its context.

Identity and Historical Context

The book presents Shakespeare not through a full biography, but as a working writer in an age before the English dictionary had become an ordinary tool. When he was writing, there was no alphabetically arranged English wordbook offering explanations of meanings, and even the now-familiar act of looking something up had not yet acquired its later sense. The phrase used for consulting a reference book appeared only in 1692, long after Shakespeare’s plays were written.

This absence did not mean that his contemporaries lacked books. They had atlases, prayer-books, histories, biographies, romances, and works on science and art. Shakespeare is thought to have drawn classical allusions from Thomas Cooper’s specialized thesaurus and to have used Thomas Wilson’s Arte of Rhetorique. But these were limited aids, not general guides to English words and their uses.

Twelfth Night and the Problem of Reference

The book makes the difficulty vivid through Twelfth Night, completed at the beginning of the seventeenth century. In a scene probably written in the summer of 1601, the shipwrecked Sebastian and his rescuer, Antonio, arrive in port and consider where to lodge. Sebastian says, “In the south suburbs, at the Elephant / Is best to lodge…” The line names an inn, but its reference opens a question that a dictionary could not answer: why were lodging-houses called the Elephant, and what did the name imply?

The Elephant was not an isolated name: lodging-houses of that name existed in several European cities, including at least two in London. Yet the passage stresses that Shakespeare could not simply turn to a book to confirm the animal behind the name, check whether the inn was genuinely so called, or settle whether his reference was accurate. The scene’s ordinary practical question—where to stay—thus exposes a larger gap between a writer’s verbal choices and the reference tools available to him.

Vocabulary Without a Dictionary

Other phrases in the same play sharpen the contrast between Shakespeare’s range and the lack of a means to verify it. He writes, “Am not I consanguineous?”; refers to “thy doublet of changeable taffeta”; and asks, “Now is the woodcock near the gin.” The examples span kinship, fabric, and a bird in relation to a trap. Their presence makes the problem more than a question of spelling: an unfamiliar word might carry grammatical, factual, or contextual uncertainty as well.

The book imagines the risk of such uncertainty by asking whether a writer could, without lexical reference, become an occasional Mrs Malaprop. The point is not that Shakespeare’s language is shown to be unreliable; rather, even a vocabulary as prodigious as his had to be exercised without the routine checking later readers take for granted.

Significance

Shakespeare’s circumstances reveal how much creative work preceded the fixing and cataloguing of English. The language was spoken and written, but it was not yet defined by a comprehensive English dictionary; it surrounded its speakers like air, taken for granted even as its components remained uncertain. Shakespeare’s genius therefore appears not as the product of a fully mapped linguistic system, but as flourishing in its absence. His example gives the book’s history of dictionaries a human measure: lexicographical reference did not create literary language, but its absence made every unfamiliar choice an act without the reassurance of looking it up.