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 thei...
