2.1 Introduction

Etymologically, the Latin word concordia refers to that quality of being “together (con) of one heart (cordis)”. Whereas a concordance, according to the O.E.D., is an “alphabetical arrangement of the principal words contained in a book”. In the present case, we have arranged together the principal words of Shakespeare’s First Folio that are “of one heart” in that they all refer to the practice of theatre. These words or terms of theatre are resolutely not arranged alphabetically but, rather, in the exact order in which they appear in each of the Folio’s thirty-six plays. Contrary to most Concordances, we also chose to include speech prefixes so as to specify which character speaks the word or line in question. The spelling and punctuation are those of the Folio. All citations provide the Norton Facsimile’s TLN, as well as the act, scene, & verse numbers of the Riverside Shakespeare (2nd ed. 1997).

The general layout of plays, as well as their arrangement into Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies, exactly reproduces that of the Folio (whereas the corresponding Roll # 2, In Terms of Theatre, presents the plays in their presumed chronological order of composition.)

We undertook this play-by-play concordance of the First Folio simply because there appeared to be no thorough comprehensive catalogue of theatrical terms in Shakespeare’s dramatic writings. Ann Barton and James Calderwood have certainly contemplated and (in the case of Barton especially) most likely compiled something like such a catalogue for their own work. That they did not include it (to our knowledge) in their writings is perhaps due to their belief that an extended perusal of Complete Concordances, such as John Bartlett’s (1894) or Marvin Spevack’s (1968–80), would suffice in establishing the extent to which Shakespeare, in his dramatic writings, made use of the play metaphor or made textual references to the theatre itself.

But, indeed, Concordances are usually alphabetical, so that navigating between individual terms in order to get a sense of how many such references there are in any given play can be quite tedious. Furthermore, if Concordances are exhaustive they aren’t necessarily comprehensive in that they do not (even if some allowance should be made for a particular word’s resonance) distinguish between a theatrical act and an act of parliament, or between playing a part, game, or musical instrument.

As for drawing up a list of theatrical search-terms of this survey, such a list was in part suggested by Barton and James Calderwood themselves. Shakespeare, Barton writes, “delights in the use of words like act, scene, tragedy, perform, part and play” (p.90), to which terms James Calderwood later added “counterfeit, shadow, stage, cast, plot, quality, and pageant” (p.5). In the end, Barton’s brief selection of terms were more suitable, simply because they were more technical and therefore less ambiguous than Calderwood’s (some of whose terms did, in fact, end-up in the following chapter’s concordance of Art, Imitation and Painting).

Taking Barton’s cue, we therefore selected terms that were both technical as well as contemporaneous to Shakespeare’s theatrical practice. Thus words like character, costume, prop, and set were excluded either because they were anachronistic or drew no hits. The words that did make it into our final list of search-terms, either referred to playing (actor, cue, part, etc.), dramatic form (comedy, tragedy, pageant), or dramaturgy (catastrophe). All of them would have been recognizably theatrical to an Elizabethan audience. Hence the final list of search terms is as follows:

•ACT / ACTING /ACTOR

•CUE

•DISSEMBLE

•ENACT

•PAGEANT

•PART

•PLAY / PLAYER

•PROLOGUE / EPILOGUE / CATASTROPHE

•PROMPT

•SCENE

•STAGE

•THEATRE

•TRAGEDY / COMEDY

We began our survey by locating all references to these terms using a searchable, numeric, modern text version of Shakespeare’s writings (The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, CD-ROM Creative Multimedia, 1992). In some few cases (namely those of Act and Scene), we also used John Bartlett’s Complete Concordance of Shakespeare’s Works. This initial data was then compared with the Norton Facsimile and modified in lineation, spelling, and punctuation so as to match it. The Folio version of our data was once again compared, this time to the on-line Folio available through the University of Virginia’s Electronic Text Center .

What the following play-by-play concordance essentially seeks to determine, then, is just how much Shakespeare resorted to these theatrical terms and consequently to the play-metaphor in the plays of the First Folio. Unlike its corresponding Roll #2, where just the search word itself or its line is retained, here we try as much as possible to provide somewhat more of a theatrical term’s immediate textual context and thus meaning.