Thursday 2 April 2015

Shakspeare (sic)

I'm happy.

Happy, happy, happy!

My exciting find today - 'Shakspeare'

See this book? I came across it in an antique shop in Battle, Sussex, amongst a mix of books old and new...an absolute bargain. It's about three inches thick, and seems to contain all of Shakespeare's plays (called The Works of Shakspeare (sic)), as well as some of his poetry, it has a foreword by Samuel Johnson, and was printed 1836. Apart from all of that, it has some excellent plates in it, one for each play...
I'm a history geek, ok? Love this stuff!

But, if that didn't make me happy, I noticed in the contents there was a section called, 'A Glossary of Obsolete Words'...Turned straight to it, and was absolutely fascinated and engrossed by the wonderful terms explained - really, terms that were obsolete in 1836, but are even further from our everyday language!

Works of Shakspeare

Now, I have found this book on Google books, but it isn't exactly the same. Not only doesn't the one on Google have the first plate this book has, but it doesn't seem to have any of the others (perhaps they were stuck in later?). So, for a bit of fun, I'm going to go through the phrases in each of Shakespeare's plays that are explained at the back of my new olde book, and add the respective plate from that play (oooo, I'm so excited. Having read some of the terms, I can't wait to explore more of them!)


Plate 1: Shakespeare
See next post for Obsolete expressions and phrases from Tempest.


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