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I have also become nervously mindful of how unreadable some parts of the book are—and will prove to be for readers. I remember how dubious I was many years ago when beginning the eminent William Empson's The Structure of Complex Words and coming upon this sentence: “I am sorry that so many of the following pages are so tedious, and feel that I had better give the reader a warning about what to expect” (2). Naturally I wondered, how could the always fascinating Empson's words be tedious? Upon finishing those pages, however, I realized that Empson was not only right about the tediousness but also right in his added note that he could find absolutely no way to avoid the tediousness. As soon as I began rereading parts of this book, even after it had gone through several drafts, I thought immediately of Empson's dilemma as I found myself experiencing simultaneous feelings of empathy and déjà vu. There is just no way to make some of the book's passages more readable; had there been, I would have done so. As Empson knew and said, some things that seem to require being set down in words simply cannot be set down well enough that good readers—even specialist readers—will find those words at all pleasurable. If you are a writer who feels so required, you can only do the best you can—and that I have done. I only hope that a few readers will find these particular “complex words” a tiny bit as useful as many readers (myself included) have found Empson's own.
There is also a bit of unavoidable redundancy in these pages with respect to specific pieces of textual evidence, as some of the evidence gives help not to just one of the book's supporting arguments but to two or three. For this, I apologize and hope that these repetitions do not prove overly irksome.
I presented an early version of this book as a paper at the Lancastrian Shakespeare Conference held at the University of Lancaster and Hoghton Tower several years ago, distributing