Excerpt from A Study in the Warwickshire Dialect

Opportunity of the call for a Fourth Edition of this work has been taken to add an extra chapter to suggest that, while Shakespeare practically ignored the English Bible, - the four greatest versions of which were extant during the period covering his lifetime, - yet the Liturgy and Psalter of Edward the Sixth, - attendance upon which was compelled by Elizabeth's Acts of Uniformity, during Shakespeare's nonage, and until long afterward - may have insensibly influenced his vocabulary.

I trust that the Index to the Warwickshire Dialect, added to this Fourth Edition, may facilitate the use of the work as a sort of representative dictionary of that Dialect, no less than as a study of its characteristics.

Many of the words presented in this work as dialect forms are now common to English speech wherever it is spoken, while still others certainly cannot be limited to Warwickshire to-day. But, wherever provincially used in 1564-93, it was in Warwickshire and not elsewhere that the child and boy Shakespeare first heard them, before he could have grafted them (if he did graft, or help to graft, them) upon English speech!

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