I can almost read your thoughts. “Nope. It was his job as an author to be able to be accessible to a reader some 450 years later. And he failed. I can't make heads nor tails of it. And don't even talk to me about his portrayal of women or role in colonialism.
Yadda, yadda, yadda, his plays have a lot of sex jokes in them. Yadda, yadda, yadda, he invented a lot of words and sayings we use today. Whatever. Besides, aren't you one of those nut-cases who believes that the Earl of Oxford actually wrote the works? Why in the world would I want to read anything you write about 30-something plays and 100-and-some poems 400 years past their best by date?”
If anyone is still reading, after these introductory paragraphs, you're my potential audience. Even if you agree with their sentiment.
I've spent years doing research of all kinds. I am indeed a nut-case for knowing the details of any subject that interests me. I do a lot of deep dive. One of those subjects is Shakespeare. Ever since my years as a computer-based production systems engineer, I have applied strict rational analysis to all of my studies.
Deep dive, as it regards Shakespeare, does not mean chasing conspiracy theories or detecting hidden ciphers. In fact, it frequently doesn't mean researching the Authorship Question at all. From my perspective, to know something real about the works of Shakespeare is to know something important toward Authorship. Let the chips fall where they may.
All of this said, deep dive is time consuming and crushingly hard work. In the matter of language alone — and it must be admitted that language is everything — I have painstakingly gathered together scores of physical and above 100 digital facsimile dictionaries. Add half that many again, encyclopedias. Almost as many of other detail-oriented close cultural anthropology studies, of engineering studies, of period cookbooks, of government and guild records, etc.
For years I could only add a few books a year on any of my subjects. Shakespeare related studies, of the necessary depth, were so hard to come by, at an affordable price, or to find on area library shelves, that I pretty much despaired of pursuing the many leads I'd uncovered.
But then matters got considerably better. Libraries began selling large quantities of books from their stacks and donations in order to replace them with CDs, DVDs and computer terminals. They did not sell the popular novels (for which I have no use), but, rather, all of the boring books that no one ever took out — the classics in every field. They were chunked on long tables and sold for pennies on the pound. Fabulous tomes of knowledge were donated to thrift shops and sold for 5-25¢ a volume.
Suddenly, my various studies looked like they could move forward in a meaningful way — Shakespeare among them. Still, I could only be disappointed with the limitations of my resources. I was making headway but constantly jotting memoranda to my future (somehow still better resourced) self.
Then Google started its book digitization project. The Project Gutenberg, it seems, had first come up with the concept some 30 years before. The Internet Archive followed. Millions of digitized books were rapidly becoming available, going back to the end of the 15th century.1 The Internet was suddenly a wonder. My years of sheltering-in, with more books than I could read in a lifetime, on every topic of interest, had begun. With a little bit of help from the inter-library loan system the t's were being crossed and the i's dotted. With a little more from Blogger and Amazon Kindle, and the occasional paper-and-ink and digital literary journal, it was finding a modest readership.
I will spare us a recitation of the detriments that come along with the Internet, as well as the benefits. The very fact that none of us can afford to do without it is one such detriment. But that is the subject of another essay.
The most immediately threatening, is the advent of Automated Intelligence. It promises to create disruption like nothing else the human race has experienced before.
At first, I refused to use its services. But then the most basic of its services that are available now, its use as a super-powerful search engine, that responds to and answers queries in everyday language, was too tempting to resist. I now use it regularly to verify and/or expand my understanding of a wide range of topics, to remind myself of exact dates, etc.
Shakespeare studies have long now sent me down the rabbit hole of foreign languages as they were written in the Middle Ages through the 17th century. It is a fascinating subject and truly a Shakespeare study. Whoever one might think he was, he clearly loved reading the Italian and French poetry and novellas of his day. As well as classical languages, he was well-read in Chaucer and Gower who wrote in middle English, Pierre de Ronsard who wrote in middle French. His strange, and much commented, depiction of the Greek heroes and the defeat of Troy, in the play Troilus and Cressida, prove to us that he had access and the ability to read Benoit Sainte-Maure's medieval french Roman de Troie (1160)2 — obscure even in his day. The even more obscure Latin Chronicle of John Whethamstede, Abbot of St. Albans, is the only known source for some key details in Henry VI, part 3. Shakespeare ransacked the libraries of the Royalty, the nobility, the monasteries and the universities of his day in search of plots for his plays.
Many of the cherished dictionaries I have mentioned above specialize in the languages of his sources for any one of those period languages. But, when I come upon a particularly knotty passage, for all I value their knowledge, the time it takes to extract it is often a matter of simmering frustration. I now merely type an entry such as “middle french domter” to remind myself that this word I constantly forget means “to tame or domesticate”.
In my recent essay on the carnival at Fontainebleau, in 15643, the word “gaillarde,” repeated in works by Ronsard, clearly did not refer directly to the dance called the “galliard,” in English, but likely would tell me from what the name was derived. The AI query “middle french gaillarde” gave the result shown in the screen shot at the head to this essay: “lively, vigorous or brave”. My cherished Ancient French Dictionary was, for some reason, unaware of this definition but did offer:
GALER, galler, gualler, v., s'amuser, se réjouir, danser, faire la noce4
[to amuse onself, to enjoy oneself, to dance, to pass the night away]
On this occasion, AI's definition exactly fitted Ronsard's various uses in the works he wrote for the carnival. But the Ancient French Dictionary only covers through the 15th century. Ronsard wrote in the 16th. The contrast between the two may suggest the history and derivation of the name galliard.
At some point, I will return to research on the relation of Ronsard to Shakespeare or between the 1564 carnival and the play A Midsummer Night's Dream. Or perhaps between Whethamstede's Chronicle and the Henry VI plays. I am almost certain to save precious time by consulting AI about knotty matters in ancient texts — and to consult my dictionaries when time allows or circumstance requires.
Has AI gotten me on its side while it insidiously takes over the world? Perhaps I will ask it. I mean, it would tell me. Right?
1Manuscript collections were eventually digitized but access largely retracted.
2See my variorum edition of Ulysses and Agamemnon (1584). https://www.amazon.com/Ulysses-Agamemnon-Edward-William-Shakespeare-ebook/dp/B07JD7KM1T/ This is the play that was later expanded into Troilus and Cressida (1609) which first shows up in the famous Diary of Philip Henslowe, as Ulysses and Agamemnon, under the date of 1599.
3See my “Shakespeare and Catherine de Medici's Famous 1564 Carnival at Fontainebleau.” Virtual Grub Street, September, 23, 2026. https://gilbertwesleypurdy.blogspot.com/2026/09/shakespeare-and-catherine-de-medicis.html
4Dictionnaire L'Ancienne Langue Français et de Tous ses Dialectes du IX au XV Siècle (1885). IV.209.
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