This book is designed to be easy to use, but the following notes may be helpful to the reader.
Alphabetical arrangement: Entries are arranged in letter-by-letter alphabetical order of their headwords, which are shown in bold type.
Names of plays and characters: The Oxford Companion to Shakespeare follows the Oxford Shakespeare (1986), edited by Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor, in returning to the titles of the plays Shakespeare used when he composed them, rather than the titles that appeared in the First Folio, and which have since become standard. For example, the play known as Henry VIII appears under its original name of All Is True. Signpost entries direct the reader from the standard title to the entry under the original title. The Companion also follows the Oxford Shakespeare in its modernization of Shakespeare’s spellings of names, for example, a reader looking up Iachimo will be redirected to Giacomo.
Cross references: An asterisk (*) in front of a word in the text signals a cross reference to a related entry that may be of interest. Also, ‘see’ or ‘see also’ followed by a headword in small capitals is used to indicate a cross reference when the precise form of a headword does not appear in the text. Entries are marked as cross references the first time they appear in an individual entry only. To avoid cluttering the text, the names of plays and poems by Shakespeare, and of the characters that appear in the plays, are not marked as cross references, although there are entries on all of these.
Thematic listing of entries: This is a list of entries under major topics, which appears at the front of the book (see pp. xiv–xxix), and offers another means of accessing the material in the Companion. It allows the reader to see all the entries relating to a particular subject—such as songs in the plays or extant portraits of Shakespeare—at a glance.
Contributors’ initials: These are given at the end of each entry, and a key to these initials appears on pp. xii–xiii.