Newswise — Although William Shakespeare has been one of the most studied authors in history, a U of T English professor is working to change the way we understand his plays.
Professor Ian Lancashire is creating a lexicon, or dictionary database, that collects entries for English words from dozens of dictionaries of the Renaissance (1480-1700) when Shakespeare (1564-1616) lived. In doing so, he has already solved a Shakespearean mystery that has confounded scholars for centuries.
In Shakespeare's play Titus Andronicus, the villain is named Aron. Scholars believed this name was picked because it is the name of Moses' brother in the Bible but what puzzled Lancashire is that the Aron in the play is a dark-skinned Moor. Why would Shakespeare give a Moor the name of an Israelite? What Lancashire discovered from his database of Early Modern English lexicons is that there existed during Shakespeare's time a dark-spotted weed called aron, a member of the dragon family.
This discovery explains why this villain is killed off in a particularly odd way: he is buried up to his neck in earth, which is how the weed aron would have grown in the soil.
"I am using the testimony of the people of this period to find out the meanings of their words and so give scholars access to original, neglected evidence of the language," says Lancashire. "Shakespeare " and many authors of the period " will have to be reexamined now that this information is coming out."
Lancashire's project, the first lexicon of its kind, is partially funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and a grant from the Killam Foundation.
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