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WHAT I would like to do today is to tell the story that is encapsulated in The Professor and the Madman, and, if we have time, tell you a story behind the actual making of the book. I'll begin by reading a very short passage from Shakespeare. I am well aware that reading passages is complicated for the interpreters, so I will keep this as short as possible. This comes from Twelfth Night, at the meeting between Sebastian and Antonio, the shipwrecked sailor. It begins with a request for information about where to stay for the night. "Do not," says Sebastian, "then walk too open." Antonio replies, It doth not fit me. Hold, sir, here's my purse. In the south suburbs, at the Elephant, Is best to lodge: I will bespeak our diet, Whiles you beguile the time and feed your knowledge With viewing of the town: there shall you have me. Now, it's a deceptively simple passage, this. The point I want to make is that when Antonio says, "I will go to the Elephant to lodge" how did Shakespeare, when writing this, know what an elephant was? England wasn't exactly awash with elephants. Shakespeare had probably never seen an elephant. How did he know that the arrangement of letters, e-l-e-p-h-a-n-t, represented a large gray animal with a trunk and a tail and that what he was trying to say by using those letters wasn't a rhinoceros or a table or a vacation in Spain? How did he know that that was the right word? It is a measure of Shakespeare's genius that he did know. The thing you have to remember, when he wrote that play in 1592, is that there was no dictionary available for him to look the word up in. In fact, no writer of English literature from the author of Beowulf or the translators of the Bible to Chaucer-no one had access to a dictionary because there were no such things around. Technically speaking, that is not quite true. Dictionaries that translated languages from, let's say, Latin into English, or German into English, or French into English did exist. However, the modern idea of a table of English words alphabetically arranged, including their pronunciation and their spelling and their meaning, did not exist. So when Shakespeare came to write the word elephant, if he felt uncertain for a microsecond whether he was using the right word, he had no way of looking it up. It's a measure of his genius, which is important for us to remember, that he did all this work, created all these poems and plays and sonnets, without once having access to a dictionary. However, that was to change shortly after he died. You have to remember what people looked like and how they behaved at the end of the sixteenth and the beginning of the seventeenth century, and the men in particular: full-bodied wigs, ruffles, all sorts of amazing clothing and personal habits. This was very much reflected in the language they spoke. People in the early part of the seventeenth century spoke an incredibly high-flown sort of English to give the impression to their hearers that they were perhaps cleverer and wiser than they actually were. They used weird words. Once again, I hope the interpreters won't mind if I use some of them, such as abequitate, bulbulcitate, archgrammacian, adminiculation. These words were nonsensical, but people used them to give the impression that they were wise and clever. In 1604 a schoolmaster from Coventry, Robert Cawdrey, suddenly had a commercial idea-that he could list all of these words alphabetically in a little book, which one of these fellows would keep in his pocket to pull out when he was stuck for a long and clever word to use. These words were called inkhorn terms-that's generally the phrase used today to describe these ludicrous words. Then he, Robert Cawdrey, might make quite a lot of money. So in 1604, a table, alphabetically listed, of hard words, as it was called, was published in London-the first dictionary ever. It was such a stunning commercial success that by 1610 there were all sorts of dictionaries, not just for helping people who wanted to appear learned but also to help people who wanted to describe birds or pieces of furniture or fossils. …