The Arden Dictionary of Shakespeare Quotations

by Jane Armstrong

Book Overview

Containing approximately 3000 quotations, both familiar and little-known, this text draws from Shakespeare's entire body of work, featuring quotations selected for their intrinsic interest and... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0174436467
• ISBN13: 9780174436461
• Release Date: January 1999
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Length: 408 Pages
• Weight: 0.85 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 5.0" x 7.8"

Customer Reviews

An Interesting & Useful Dictionary of Shakespeare's Themes.

THE ARDEN DICTIONARY OF SHAKESPEARE QUOTATIONS. Compiled by Jane Armstrong. 396 pp. London : Thomson Learning, 2000 (1999).The present compilation contains 3000 quotations, both well-known and lesser-known, from Shakespeare's plays and poems. The quotations vary in length from short sentences such as "For he was great of heart," through to longer passages such as Hamlet's soliloquy, "To be or not to be," which can run to almost a page or more. Most quotations, however, are quite short, and many consist only of "a strikingly expressed thought or resonant phrase" such as "Do you smell a fault?"Speaker, addressee, and act/scene/line references are keyed to the Arden Shakespeare series, and some are followed by brief annotations which help clarify the context. The book is rounded out with a 4-page Life of Shakespeare; a 12-page Glossary; an extensive 45-page Keyword Index; and an Index of References to Plays.In her Preface, Editor Jane Armstrong writes that, as in "the 'commonplace books' in which Shakespeare's contemporaries recorded memorable extracts from their reading," her book has been organized by topic - e.g., ABSENCE, DESIRES, GUILT, HASTE, LOVE - since she feels that this "often clearly reveals the concentration round a subject in a particular play; and ... sometimes shows ideas recurring through Shakespeare's work, either in similar form or in a progression from the more straightforwardly expressed to the increasingly complex and embedded" (pp. xi-xii).The book, in other words, has been designed to serve a twofold purpose - primarily as a commonplace book or compilation of themes, and only secondarily as a dictionary - and because it contains only 3000 quotations readers are occasionally not going to find what they may be looking for. I was surprised, for example, to discover that a key line from 'Titus Andronicus' - "When will this fearful slumber have an end?" - has not been included. In fact, SLUMBER doesn't even appear as a topic, since the single line containing it has been subsumed under SLEEP. I was also, until I carefully read Armstrong's Preface, surpised to find that, although there are twenty "heart" quotations, HEART itself does not appear as a topic. To locate the line "For he was great of heart," which has been included under the topic NOBILITY, you will have to search the Keyword Index. In other words, if you are searching for a particular line you should FIRST CHECK THE KEYWORD INDEX, since the book has not been arranged as a dictionary of words but as a commonplace book of topics or themes, and a more accurate (and less misleading) title for it would have been 'The Arden Commonplace Book of Shakespeare Quotations' or 'The Arden Dictionary of Shakespeare's Themes.' A truly complete 'dictionary' that would perfectly satisfy all readers and in which we would all find all of our favorite passages and lines could of course only take the form of a rearrangement of Shakespeare's complete work

The best Shakespearean quotation book out there!

This book is well-organized, nicely printed with the headings in large bold letters. This makes finding a quote under a specific topic easy. I am using it for my college Shakespeare class. BUY THIS BOOK over any of the others.