Squashing the "shard-borne Beetle" Crux: A Hard Case with a Few Pat Readings

Abstract

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