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SCHOLARS OF EARLY MODERN LITERATURE KNOW WELL what most readers may never dare to think: that as much as we love and need this essential reference, the Oxford English Dictionary is not perfect. When it comes to cruxes or even to the many unique, rare, or unusual words in Shakespeare's plays, experienced readers must be ready to scrutinize the OED as rigorously as any other source. Indeed, in the pages of this journal, I myself recently argued that since the solution of a particular crux in the OED had been drawn from Robert Nares's Glossary, and that since Nares had based his entry on a spurious note by George Steevens, someone trying to use the OED as a check against the established critical tradition (derived from the early commentators) would be doing little more than comparing Steevens with himself.1 Unsurprisingly, editors who routinely challenge OED readings in their notes are well aware of this phenomenon, which Barbara Mowat once described to me in conversation as theOED loop." When the OED loops back on the critical tradition, finding a way to break out of that orbit can be extremely time-consuming; and because taking the time is no guarantee of success, such a pursuit becomes difficult to justify, especially when there is general agreement that the crux has already been settled by the scholarly labors of three centuries. We may find at least some reassurance in knowing that the readings of many Shakespearean terms in so esteemed a reference as the OED ultimately derive from the reflections of so esteemed an editor and critic as George Steevens, but there are many good reasons why editors of modern editions do not simply reuse the notes of the eighteenth-century commentators.
All of this must be said in defense of this essay, which could otherwise seem like an absurd amount of fuss for the doubtful gain of proving that an entry in the OED is, well, correct. But what makes this essay necessary is that, although the compilers of the New English Dictionary (which became the OED) contradicted Steevens on this crux-thus preventing a loop from forming-almost every subsequent editor of the plays has been unable to resist Steevenss gravitational pull, despite the counterinfluence of the OED. Editors have been...