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Excerpt from A Glossary of Obscure Words and Phrases in the Writings of Shakspeare and His Contemporaries: Traced Etymologically to the Ancient Language of the British People as Spoken Before the Irruption of the Danes and Saxons There are many words and phrases in the works of Shakspeare, and in those of the poets and dramatists of the Elizabethan era, that are obsolete or unintelligible, or have changed their primitive meaning. Some of the obscurities that have long puzzled commentators are evi dent errors of the press, for shakspeare seems never to have corrected his proof-sheets, like the authors of our time, and was so singularly careless of his literary fame, except in the instance of his early poems, Venus and Adonis and the Rape of Lucrece, as to allow printers and publishers to attribute to him many works, unworthy of his reputation, which he never wrote, and to publish his undoubted works without his sanction. This circumstance accounts for many errors that have crept into the text, but leaves unexplained a great number of words that must have been current in his time, or he would not have used them, but which dropped out of literary fashion in the courtly and corrupt time of Charles II., and in that of Dryden and Pope, when classicism all but killed roman. Ticism in the current literature of the upper classes. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.
