ABSTRACT
It is hard for inexperienced readers of Shakespeare when a number of unfamiliar words cluster together – harder still when the words are played with through punning and complex syntax. These are the kind of problems that are most likely to foreground themselves both in preparation and in the classroom. But maybe we need to develop a more alert sense of which words matter most for an initial understanding. I suggest that these are not necessarily the words that will most readily occur to us, and I do so because of a classroom experience. There are words that, although they might strike the teacher as straightforward enough, stand for complex or (to pupils, anyway) unfamiliar ideas, and initial consideration of these words before reading them in context might help open up a scene, making it, for comparative newcomers to Shakespeare, more readable. Take, for instance, ‘virtue’ and ‘virtuous’ in Much Ado about Nothing.
