Shakespeare’s Beehive: An Annotated Elizabethan Dictionary Comes to Light by George Koppelman and Daniel Wechsler (review)

After W. H. Auden died, his copy of the Oxford English Dictionary—all t welve tattered volumes of it—was passed between poets like a relic: Chester Kallman gave it to James Merrill, who gave it to J. D. McClatchy, who composed a poem on the subject. “What he made of himself,” McClatchy wrote of Auden’s OED, “he had found / in this book.” If we revere the physical volumes owned by great writers as sacrosanct objects, in 2014 the booksellers George Koppelman and Daniel Wechsler announced that they had found the Holy Grail: a book owned by Shakespeare. The book in question is a densely annotated copy of John Baret’s An Alvearie or Quadruple Dictionarie(1580), a comprehensive “beehive” of synonyms in English, Latin, French, and Greek—a work that some scholars, including the magisterial T. W. Baldwin, had already suspected that Shakespeare knew. Koppelman and Wechsler’s elaborate arguments about the provenance of their copy of the Alvearieare based not on any direct evidence (Shakespeare’s signature, inscribed fragments of his poetry, or titles of his plays) but on nebulous parallels between annotations in the book (underlining, marginal bubbles, notes for cross-referencing) and Shakespeare’s works. Ultimately their arguments will interest many and convince few. The authors’ industrious labors, however, do bear some fruit for scholars of Shakespeare’s sources, who will (with much patience) discover among Koppelman and Wechsler’s findings a handful of resonances between Baret and Shakespeare no less suggestive than Baldwin’s. If, according to Seneca’s famous apian metaphor, reading provides a writer with the nectar that he will convert into honey, the vast scholarly enterprise of Shakespearean Quellenforschunghas been driven by a gourmand’s passion to discover where—and how—the bee sucked. Shakespeare’s Beehiveis thus most pleasurably read as a singularly obsessive, often hallucinatory (and at times touching) attempt to prove our almost-instinct almost true: what he made of himself he had found in his books.