This sense of the word is known from the 14th century; but it is not Shakespeare’s normal usage, where it means “fruitlessly, uselessly, unsuccessfully, in vain”. The word is from Old English, where it meant “good” or “use” (better comes from the same root). So when Caesar addresses the company with “Doth not Brutus bootless kneel?”(Julius Caesar 3.1.75) or the Fairy enquires of Puck “Are not you heThat... bootless make the breathless housewife churn” (Midsummer Night’s Dream 2.1.37), the issue is nothing to do with footwear. But the potential for wordplay is always there, as Glendower discovers, when he boasts of sending Henry Bolingbroke “Bootless home, and weather-beaten back” (Henry IV, Part 1 3.1.66). Hotspur retorts: “Home without boots, and in foul weather too!How scapes he agues (fevers), in the devil’s name!”

David Crystal is the author, with Ben Crystal,of Shakespeare’s Words, published by Penguin in June