Peter Milward on academic "gobbledygook" (jargon) in Shakespeare scholarship

Peter Milward (1925-2017) makes an interesting point about the growth of academic jargon ("gobbledygook") in scholarly writing. Milward is the author of Biblical Influences in Shakespeare's Great Tragedies (1987), which is helpful in some ways that similar books by other authors sometimes are not.

The following quote is from Milward's review of a book by Gillian Wood (whose work I've enjoyed), Shakespeare's Unreformed Fictions:

...maybe she is content, or her publisher is content, with a readership of like-minded scholars as being (in Milton’s words) a ‘fit audience, though but few’. All too evidently, she likes to puzzle or muddle the general reader with such phrases as
‘characterological interiority’ (p. 129),
‘disjunctions in the drama’s representational logic’ (p. 170),
‘the ontological confusion inherent in the moment of animation’ (p. 181),
and ‘the axiomatic knowledge of the binary distinction’ (p. 201).
Admittedly, these phrases make more sense in their context, once the reader accustoms himself to looking through the ‘inspissation’ of the argument, but it is necessary to point them out, not just in criticism of this individual author, but rather as they have become all too requisite in today’s academic world – as if the book would hardly be accepted for publication without such gobbledygook.

Excerpt from a review of
Shakespeare's Unreformed Fictions
Review by: Milward, Peter.
Heythrop Journal.
Nov2013, Vol. 54 Issue 6, p1046-1047. 0p.
DOI: 10.1111/heyj.12043_56.

A partial list of Milward's other books on Shakespeare:

Jacobean Shakespeare (2007)
Elizabethan Shakespeare (2007)
The English Reformation: From Tragic Reality to Dramatic Representation (2007)
Shakespeare's World of Learning (2006)
Shakespeare the Papist (2005)
The Catholicism of Shakespeare's Plays (1997)
The Mediaeval Dimension in Shakespeare's Plays (1990)
Shakespeare's Religious Background (1973)

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Disclaimer: If and when I quote or paraphrase bible passages or mention religion in many of my blog posts, I do not intend to promote any religion over another, nor am I attempting to promote religious belief in general; only to explore how the Bible and religion influenced Shakespeare, his plays, and his age.
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