Music Theatre

Alexander Dyce, an important Nineteenth Century scholar, collector, bibliophile, and editor of classical and Renaissance literature, compiled this comprehensive dictionary of words used in Shakespeare's drama and poetry. Entries include definitions of words, as well as examples of usage from Shakespeare and other Renaissance writers.

Website for Alexander Schmidt's Lexicon and Quotation Dictionary is a painstakingly compiled glossary of every word in the Shakespeare corpus and an exhaustive collection of quotations. It has long been a standard reference work

Names. Everyone has one, most people have a vague idea what their own means, but few give them much more thought. The study of names is called onomastics, a field which touches on linguistics, history, anthropology, pyschology, sociology, philology and much more.

C. T. Onions's famous 1911 lexicon of terms used in Shakespeare's plays and poems is still an indispensable resource for readers and scholars who wish to clarify their understanding of unfamiliar words or phrases. An outgrowth of his work on the Oxford English Dictionary, this glossary includes brief definitions and examples of usage from Shakespeare, with particular attention to words that are provincial, archaic, unusually connotative, or otherwise obscure for the modern reader.

Enables you to search for any word or phrase in Shakespeare's works and find all instances of words that can pose difficulty to modern readers.

Edwin Abbott Abbott (1838 - 1926) was for twenty-five years the tireless headmaster of The City of London School, where he wrote A Shakespearian Grammar to help students understand the differences between Elizabethan and modern syntax. It is still the most complete work on the subject.

This site offers the text of Shakespeare's Sonnets, together with a descriptive commentary explaining difficult or unfamiliar words and phrases. Works by contemporaries such as Spenser, Sidney, Drayton, and Sir Thomas Wyatt are also included