Shakespeare Is For The Birds | From the Catbird Seat

The following is a guest post by Abby Yochelson, English and American Literature reference specialist at the Library of Congress’s Main Reading Room, Humanities and Social Sciences Division. This is the third in a small series of blog posts on Shakespeare at the Library of Congress.

Image of Shakespeare with bird from: The birds of Shakespeare; critically examined, explained, and illustrated by James Edmund Harting. London : J. Van Voorst, 1871. — Image of Shakespeare with bird from: *The Birds of Shakespeare; Critically Examined, Explained, and Illustrated* by James Edmund Harting. London : J. Van Voorst, 1871. [From HathiTrust Digital Library]

During my years as a reference librarian at the Library of Congress, I’ve received many questions about Shakespeare. Some researchers are looking for literary criticism on a specific play; other students want Shakespeare translated into “real” English. I’ve gotten inquiries on Shakespeare quotations: “What quote goes something like this: ‘A _ a _ my country for a _’” ?*

Before the Internet age, I once sent someone references from French dictionaries available in Shakespeare’s time–or at least from the dictionaries we had available in our Rare Book and Special Collections Division. She was looking for all words starting with ver to prove that Edward de Vere, 17^th Earl of Oxford, had salted clues all through Hamlet to show that he was Shakespeare. If you saw the 2011 film Anonymous