Product Description

The purpose of this dictionary is to identify the hundreds of still unnoted puns, to indicate their enrichment of Shakespeare's plays, to reawaken the reader to the value of reading and hearing Shakespeare word by word, giving full weight to each one and asking why the line was thus written. The new words in the supplement deal more exclusively with the Sonnets and include more references to similar puns that were made by Shakespeare's contemporaries, as well as by the classical writers with whose works he was familiar. The puns are discussed in their contexts to stress the point that they are intrinsic, not accessory to Shakespeare's thought processes and (un)consciously influence the choice of subsequent words.