A Glossary

Writing about Shakespeare leans on two technical vocabularies — one from the playhouse, one from the printing house — and most general accounts assume you have both. Here they are, plainly.

The printing house

Format. Not a size but a folding. A sheet of paper folded once gives two leaves and is a folio; folded twice, four leaves, a quarto; three times, eight leaves, an octavo. Larger formats meant more paper per page and a more expensive, more prestigious book — which is why publishing plays in folio was a statement about their standing.

First Folio. The collected edition of Shakespeare's plays published in 1623, seven years after his death, assembled by colleagues from his company. It contains thirty-six plays, eighteen of which had not been printed before and would otherwise almost certainly be lost. A page-by-page digital facsimile is published free by the Bodleian Library.

Quarto. In this context, the individual play editions printed in the author's lifetime and after. They vary enormously in quality and authority, and several plays exist in both quarto and folio versions with substantial differences.

Foul papers. An author's working draft, with corrections, before fair copying. The term is a compositor's, not a critic's.

Compositor. The workman who set the type by hand, letter by letter, from a manuscript or an earlier printed copy. Individual compositors had identifiable habits of spelling and spacing, and modern textual scholarship can often tell which pages each of them set — which in turn indicates where errors are likely.

Emendation. An editor's correction of a reading believed to be corrupt. Some are universally accepted; others have been argued over for three centuries. Editions that show their workings, such as those at the Internet Shakespeare Editions, make the scale of the intervention visible.

Crux. A passage where the surviving text does not make sense and no emendation has won general agreement.

The playhouse

Tiring-house. The building behind the stage where actors attired themselves. Its wall was the stage's back wall, with two or more doors and a gallery above.

The heavens. The painted canopy over part of the stage, supported on pillars, sometimes housing machinery for lowering a performer.

Trap. An opening in the stage floor, used for graves, apparitions and devils — a fixture with strong conventional associations, which is why what comes up through it carries meaning before it speaks.

Groundlings. Those who paid the lowest admission and stood in the yard around three sides of the stage, closer to the actors than anyone seated. Their proximity is the single most important fact about how the plays were originally received.

Prompt book. The playhouse's working copy, marked with entrances, effects and cuts. Surviving examples are among the best evidence for what was actually performed rather than written.

Doubling. One actor playing several parts. Companies were small and the texts were written with the practice assumed — which is why characters who must be doubled are seldom on stage together.

Boy player. Women's parts were played by boys and young men in the professional companies of the period. The plays are conspicuously interested in this, and several build disguise plots on top of it.

Jig. A short comic song-and-dance piece performed after the play, including after tragedies. It is a useful corrective to any solemn picture of an afternoon at the theatre.

Terms of the text

Blank verse. Unrhymed iambic pentameter — five stressed syllables to the line — the standard vehicle for serious speech.

Prose. Used for comedy, for low-status characters, for madness, and for moments where verse would be too composed. The switch between the two is a deliberate signal and is worth watching for.

Feminine ending. An extra unstressed syllable at the line's end, which softens the close. Their frequency changes across the career and is one of the measures used to date the plays.

Aside. Speech heard by the audience and not by the other characters on stage. In daylight, with a visible audience, this is far less artificial than it reads on the page — see the note on outdoor performance.