A glossary of Tudor and Stuart words, especially from the dramatists

A warm story of scholarly camaraderie lies behind this reference work. While staying in the Welsh spa town of Llandrindod, a young editor met his long‑time friend, the eminent Professor Skeat, whose habit of turning to old plays for amusement sparked the idea of gathering the obscure words that pepper the dramas of the Tudor and Stuart eras. Their shared love of language and literature set the stage for a meticulous glossary that began as a series of handwritten slips and grew into a full‑scale project.

The resulting volume presents the vocabulary as Skeat originally compiled it, enriched with carefully chosen quotations from the period’s playwrights and clarified with modern definitions. Drawing heavily on the New English Dictionary, the editor supplies historical notes, dialectal parallels, and even older English and foreign cognates, making each entry a compact lesson in linguistic history. For anyone exploring Shakespeare, Jonson, Beaumont, Fletcher, or their contemporaries, the book offers a handy guide to the often‑puzzling words that once animated the stage.