...and for the values and ideas with which the form is associated. Doctor Johnson's observation that the "quibble was to him the fatal Cleopatra for which he lost the world, and was content to lose it" is more than a dubious As Richard Lanham puts it, speaking of Cervantes' "contempt for romances" and...

...golden apple for which he will always turn aside from his career, or stoop from his elevation. A quibble poor and barren as it is, gave him such delight, that...which he lost the world, and was content to lose it. 14 To this eighteenth-century sensibility, the pun was anathema, and to suggest that Johnson has a...

...describe metaphorically what he saw as Shakespeare's weakness for punning and wordplay: 'A quibble was for him the fatal Cleopatra for which he lost the world, and was content to lose it.') Some of what is unfamiliar about Shakespeare's language, that is to say, is the result of changing...