See where this is going: a ground-breaking edition of Hamlet Thursday 14th July saw our third annotation sprint, which pushed our annotation count up to 649 from 440. This means an average of over 200 comments per sprint, but, as previous sprints lasted for two days, this also suggests that this sprint had …
The word “quondam”, as any latinist will tell you, means “formerly”. It, like “i.e.” (‘id est’, or ‘that is’), “vice versa” and other Latin terms, was current in the English of Shakespeare’s time. It occurs twice, for example, in Henry VI part III: first, the keeper spots the “quondam King” (deposed Henry VI) and an …
“Neapolitan” describes someone or something from Naples. The difference between the adjective and the noun is the result of the latter having evolved much more rapidly than the former. from its original Greek ‘neapolis’ (‘new city’) to modern Napoli or Naples. The city, despite a name that proclaims its newness, is one of the oldest …
This word, which only occurs once in Shakespeare’s works, is a neologism, a new word invented by Shakespeare. Of course, it is far from being the only neologism in the bard’s works: we have Shakespeare to thank for the words “brittle”, “bump”, “countless”, “dwindle”, “eventful” and many more. “Kated”, though, is a rather special neologism …
Date: Thursday 14th July Time: 9am to 5pm BST (thus UTC 8am-4pm, EDT 4am-12 noon, PDT 1am-9am) You can also follow us online using the hashtag #annotation or make suggestions on the Open Literature etherpad. How to Participate Step 0: Check your browser To participate in the annotation sprint, you will need a recent version …
There are two hundred and twenty five defintions of the word jump, as adjective, noun, and verb, in the OED, many of them now obsolete (compare Merriam-Webster’s three). Shakespeare only uses the word fourteen times, but the way in which he does shows a marked divergence between modern usage and his own. Personally, jump for …
Cheapside ran with wine, Cornhill was festooned with pageantry, and the Lord Mayor dressed in the most elaborate of costumes; 17th November was an important occasion in Elizabethan London, a time when, in Agnes Strickland’s words, “The city of London might…have been termed a stage.” [Ackroyd (2000), 157] 17th November, or Saint Hugh’s Day, was …
Only three mentions of this rare wood occur in Shakespeare, twice in Love’s Labour’s Lost and once in Twelfth Night. The word itself could and still can refer to any of several different varieties of timber, found in India, Africa, and Indonesia. These valuable woods were extensively exported by the Dutch in the seventeenth century, …
The word “alabaster” is now part of an established style of poetic language, and has been since Shakespeare’s time. However, this does not mean that there is nothing to say here: for example, there are in fact two kinds of alabaster, gypsum and calcite. The former constitutes modern alabaster and the latter that of the …
In 1592, Robert Greene provided what many now take to be crucial evidence of Shakespeare’s rise to fame in the London theatre scene when he mentioned, in his Groats-worth of Witte that …there is an upstart Crow, beautiful with our feathers, that his Tygers hart wrapt in a Players hyde, supposes he is as well …
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