Richard Stacey is Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Glasgow. He has published work on Shakespeare and early modern drama in numerous collections and journals such as Studies in Philology and Shakespeare Survey (Cambridge University Press), and has written an introduction to Shakespeare's Henry VI Part 3 for Oxford World Classics. Adrian Streete is Professor of Early Modern English Literature and Religion at the University of Glasgow. He is author of Protestantism and Drama in Early Modern England (Cambridge University Press, 2009) and Apocalypse and Anti-Catholicism in Seventeenth-Century English Drama (Cambridge University Press, 2017), as well as being the editor of several volumes, and the author of numerous articles and essays.

'Shakespeare and the Shape of Words is a wonderfully rich assessment of Shakespeare as wordsmith. Offering a creative variety of approaches, essays move thoughtfully between small-scale attention to single words and large-scale critical interpretation, whether illuminating specific plays or wider cultural concepts.' Lynne Magnusson, Professor of English, University of Toronto

• Introduction Richard Stacey and Adrian Streete; Part I. Shaping Words: 1. Vicious Shakespeare: rhetoric, invention, and error Sophie Read; 2. Lead us not into tentation: Shakespeare's extenuating circumstances Eric Langley; 3. 'What's in a name?': Noun-verb conversion in Shakespeare Laurie Maguire; Part II. Shaping Words at Work: 4. Sequent Jonathan Hope and Michael Witmore; 5. Shakespeare and the syntax of scripture Jonathan P. Lamb; 6. Shakespeare's affixes Jonathan Culpeper, Sean Murphy and Ellen Roberts; Part III. Shaping Words on Stage: 7. The sound and sense of Shakespeare's reduplicatives Jakub Boguszak; 8. The jest's the thing Indira Ghose; 9. Shakespeare's pretty players Richard Stacey; Part IV. Shaping Words in the World: 10. 'All is stained' by white supremacy: 'follow[ing] the act of othering home' in Othello's exposition David Sterling Brown; 11. 'Words are very rascals': ambivalent language in twelfth night Miriam Jacobson; 12. 'Where America, the Indies?': a lexical geography of Shakespeare's Atlantic Lauren Working.