Norman F. Blake: Shakespeare’s Non-Standard English. A Dictionary of His Informal Language (Athlone Shakespeare Dictionary Series).

Norman Blake’s contribution to English linguistics and, in particular, to the study of Shakespeare’s English has been truly impressive: his Grammar of Shakespeare’s Language (2002) is followed, after only two years, by the book to be reviewed here, his Shakespeare’s Non-Standard English. A Dictionary of His Informal Language.1 Purists may object to the equation of “non-standard” (title) with “informal” (subtitle). In his “Introduction” Blake readily admits that “the subject matter of this dictionary is more difficult to define [than that of some other volumes in the same series]” (p. 2) and he further states that the words he has included “may be categorized as falling into two broad categories: those which are or started life as non-standard [e.g. words belonging to canting language and similar varieties] and those which belong to a type that is generally non-standard or at least commonly exploited at the spoken level [e.g. phrasal verbs]” (p. 3).

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