Ideas & Suggestions
Shakespeare Vocabulary.
Even in England when reading Shakespeare for the first time, we have to reach for the dictionary to get the full meaning on 16th Century words & meanings. Hope a few of them might help.
Best Regards
Manichaean.
Replies (10)
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TRENCHER: A plate, platter, a flat piece of wood for cutting & serving meat.
(Antony & Cleopatra): "I found you as a morsel, cold upon dead Caesar's trencher."
SAWS: Old sayings, proverbs, maxims, aphorisms, adages.
(As You Like It): "With eyes severe, and beard of formal cut. Full of wise saws and moral instances."
PANTALOON: A feeble, tottering old man. A dotard.
(As You Like It): "The sixth age shifts, into the lean and slippered pantaloon."
by MANICHAEAN -
JAY: A flashy or absurdly dressed person.
(Cymbeline): "Some jay of Italy".
UNANELED: Not anointed, not having recieved extreme unction.
(Hamlet): " Cut off even in the blossoms of my sin / Unhouseled, disappointed, unaneled".
CONTUMELY: Contemptuously insulting language or treatment.
(Hamlet): For who would bear the whips and scorns of time / The oppressors wrong, the proud man's contumely"
by MANICHAEAN -
QUIETUS: A discharge or release from ofice or duty. A final settlement, an ending.
BODKIN: A dagger, a stileto.
FARDELS: A burden, a load.
(Hamlet): "When he himself might his quietus make. With a bare bodkin? Who would fardels bear. To grunt and sweat under a weary life"
by MANICHAEAN -
PITH: Importence, weight.
(Hamlet): "Thus conscience does make cowards of us all / And thus the native hue of resolution / Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought / And enterprises of great pith and moment. / With this regard their currents turn awry / And lose the name of action.
by MANICHAEAN -
Pint of Lager and a packet of crisps - 99 pence Deal of the day board in the Shakespear pub
May 23, 2009 7:55 am
by HSEManager342 -
JADE: Exhaust, wear out, fatigue, tire, sate, dull.
GALLED: Bitterness, anything bitter.
WITHERS: The emotions, the sensibilities.
(Hamlet):" Let the galled jade wince, our withers are unwrung."
by MANICHAEAN -
EXTANT: Conspicious, manifest.
(Hamlet):" The story is extant and the writ in very choice Italian."
CONTAGION: Harmful, contagious influence or quality.
(Hamlet):" When churchyards yawn and hell itself breathes out contagion to this world".
by MANICHAEAN -
UNCTION: The action or act of anointing a person or thing with oil as a religious rite.
(Hamlet):"Lay not that flattering unction to your soul".
by MANICHAEAN -
LIBERTINE: A person who follows his or her own inclinations, not restricted or confined by convention.
(Henry V):"When he speaks, the air, a chartered libertine, is still".
by MANICHAEAN -
TRAMMEL: An impediment to free action, a constraint, a hinderence.
(Macbeth):"If it were done when tis done, then twere well it were done quickly / If the assassination could trammel up the consequence / And catch with his surcease, success / But that this blow / Might that this blow / Might be the be-all and the end-all here / But here, upon this bank and shoal of time / We'd jump the life to come.
by MANICHAEAN