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Like Abbot, Hope is concerned with the grammar of a fixed (if marginally contested) written corpus, set down when English was in flux and transition. This is unfortunate since the study of grammar is one step towards the linguistic objectivity and detachment from which criticism can proceed. Philology has given way to theory, context and other orders. At least, this author does express the hope that some users will be led by his book into the linguistics of Early Modern English, but acknowledges that not all readers of Shakespeare are familiar enough with "grammar" even to use a book such as his. Norman Blake's claim in Shakespeare's Language: an Introduction (London, Macmillan, 1983) that "students of literature are often taught little or nothing about language and how it works" (9) is probably still true, and Hope's book, like Blake's, with which it shares certain structural principles, addresses that lack. Shakespeare's Grammar was commissioned to replace Abbot and Jonathan Hope has fulfilled his aim, which was To produce an up-to-date, systematic descriptive grammar of Shakespeare which can be used by editors, teachers and students of Shakespeare (with, as I understand it, literary critical interests), without assuming any detailed linguistic knowledge or familiarity with work in historical linguistics".

Now Abbott's Grammar is available on the Arden Shakespeare CD-Rom and on the World Wide Web at. Originally intended for late Victorian schoolchildren, Abbot in the twentieth century is more familiar to editors of Shakespeare, who refer to him on matters of syntax. Abbott's A Shakespearian Grammar was first published in 1869 and stayed in print for over a hundred years: a photographic facsimile reprint was issued in 1966.