Shakespeare’s Rare Words and Chronology
Douglas S. Bruster, Anna Christoffersen · Shakespeare Quarterly · 2021
This essay presents a “rare words” analysis of Shakespeare’s plays and poems with the goal of better establishing their chronology. The technique of examining Shakespeare’s rare words for what they suggest about the order of his works was proposed by Gregor Sarrazin over a century ago, and subsequently elaborated by such figures as, among others, Karolina Steinhäuser, Alfred Hart, Eliot Slater, M. W. A. Smith, Thomas Merriam, and MacDonald P. Jackson.1 As modeled by Sarrazin and refined by these and other scholars, the procedure examines the strength and weakness of associations in the overlap, across Shakespeare’s texts, of words he seldom used. Indeed, while called “rare” by tradition, “seldom-used” is more to the point: such words are less like “honorificabilitudinitatibus” in Love’s Labor’s Lost (5.1.41)—understandably used only once in the canon, and in that respect too rare to connect this comedy with other texts—and more like the same play’s “jangling” (2.1.225), which it shares only with A Midsummer Night’s Dream (3.2.353); “moderately” (1.1.197), used elsewhere just in Romeo and Juliet (2.6.14); and “specialties” (2.1.164), which it has in common only with The Taming of the Shrew (2.1.126).2 Because they link a target text with other texts, such words are referred to as “link words.” Texts written closer in time to each other tend to be linked by their word choices.