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Notes
A paper read on September 5th, 1955, at the 7th International Shakespeare Conference at Stratford-upon-Avon. The paper is here unaltered except for the addition of footnotes. My thanks are due to Professor Bowers and Professor R. C. Bald for reading the paper in an earlier draft and for constructive criticism. From Professor Bald's comments on unpublished work and projects at a standstill it is clear that lexicographical work needs more encouragement than it has recently had. An editor's work is of especial value since no one is more likely to understand what is at issue than those who have made a special study of a particular author or text.
The more so, since the parallels cited often introduce fresh difficulties for the uninstructed—old spelling and unfamiliar words which require at times more explanation than the text itself.
It is living yet. Both Professor Bowers and Professor Bald pointed out to me that the word is still used for revoking at cards (the latter citing Webster). I am also told it is used in the game of dominoes.
Since this paper was written, Professor Black has set an admirable example in his Variorum Richard II. It is much to be hoped that his lucid and economical method of recording the Dictionary's information will be followed.
I suspect this underlies the popular notion that, given a choice of readings, the rarer word will be Shakespeare's, since, so the argument runs, no scribe or compositor would have introduced it. So far as I know, no one has estimated the range of vocabulary a scribe acquainted with the King's Men's plays might have acquired nor how the vocabulary of Jaggard's compositors differed from that of Roberts's. In view of Shakespeare's ridicule of eccentricity in Holofernes, Armado, Osric, and the tribe of Clowns who fed on the almsbasket of words, we ought to be chary of supposing that the value of a word was enhanced by its rarity.
In making these two general reservations I do not wish to imply that the O.E.D.'s verdict can otherwise be taken as final. Many of its glosses need reconsideration as most editors by now will know.
Jaggard's Treasury volumes, translated by Thomas Milles and published in 1613 and 1619, were compilations of the kind popularised by the Silva de Varia Lecion of the Spanish chronicler, Mexia. Mexia's work was imitated by an Italian, Gieronimo Giglio, whose Nuova Seconda Selva (1565) was pillaged by Du Verdier for his Diverses Leçons (1576), an immensely popular work which served as model and a main source for Milles. The original Silva and its successors were omnibus volumes covering a wide range of topics -social, political and natural history etc., much of it drawn from Aelian, Paulus Diaconus, Polydore Vergil, Guevara, and so on.
Two other words postdating the O.E.D. last entry are mandragon (mandrake), 663.a.37—last entry 1611; and wagleg (gadfly) 168.b.37—last entry 1611. Other words antedating the first entry are: antigrapher (check-clerk), 111.b.17—1st and only ex. Blount, 1656; Cypriots, 569.a. 33—1st ex. 1750; horology (clock-making), 861.b.3—1st ex. 1819; ichthyomancy, 583.a. 22—1st ex. 1656; immeasurably, 115.b.28-9—1st ex. 1631; Ostrogoths, 795.b.5—1st ex. 1647-8; plumassery (ornament of feathers), 946.b.34—1st ex. 1656; spiracle (vent hole), 814.a.18—1st ex. Jaggard's Decameron, 1620; tache-hook (clasp), 371.b. 14—1st ex. Favyn, 1623; urinator (pearldiver), 76.a.39—1st ex. 1648—nor is this list exhaustive; but, such as it is, it illustrates the point made in note 6: namely, that we need to know much more about the kind of vocabulary compositors might have acquired before leaping to the conclusion that it was necessarily more limited in range than a writer's. The risk in Folio texts is, indeed, that Jaggard's compositors might have developed a bias against the modesty of nature towards the recondite in vocabulary.
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