request for histling: recent work on Early Modern English

[Jonathan Hope]

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
I've recently been asked to do a couple of things which give me the
chance to spread recent work on Early Modern English to a wider,
non-linguistic audience, and I'd be very grateful for any off-prints,
suggestions, and references people think are relevant:
 
1  The first is a chapter (7000 words) on Shakespeare's language for
a student companion to Shakespeare studies.  The editor is keen for
me to put Early Modern English, and Shakespeare, in a proper
linguistic context.  In particular, this seems to me to be a good
opportunity to spread the word about variationist studies of Early
Modern English (eg. much of the work coming out of Helsinki), but
there may be other things that I'm not so well up on that I should
know about.
 
2  The second is that I've been asked to address a meeting of the
editors of Shakespeare's plays for the Arden Shakespeare series (one
of the scholarly, one play per volume editions).  This stems from a
realisation on their part that they don't know much about what is
going on in historical linguistics, and a genuine desire to find out,
and if possible use the kind of things we're working on in their
editing.  This seems to me to be (a) very laudable in itself and (b)
an opportunity for us as a community of historical linguists to reach
a much wider audience (Arden texts are used in schools and
universities all over the world).
 
I'd be very grateful for any suggestions anyone has, which I'll
summarise to the list if it seems worthwhile.
 
Jonathan Hope
Middlesex University
j.hope at mdx.ac.uk