Spelling of Shakespeare's name

• 1. Introduction

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  The spelling of William Shakespeare's name is one of the most contested orthographic debates in the history of the English language. Six authentic signatures survive in his own hand, and not one of them spells the name the way we spell it today. That simple fact set off centuries of argument, scholarly feuding, and even ideological warfare over whose version of the name was truest to the man himself.

  The signatures are attached to legal documents. The deposition in the Bellott v Mountjoy case, dated the 11th of May 1612, carries one. Two more come from the purchase and mortgage of a house in Blackfriars, London, dated the 10th and the 11th of March 1613. His Last Will and Testament, dated the 25th of March 1616, bears three signatures, one on each page. Across all six, the spellings recorded are: "Willm Shakp", "William Shaksper", "Wm Shakspe", "William Shakspere", "Willm Shakspere", and "By me William Shakspeare". None of those is the spelling most of us learned in school.

  The spelling "Shakespeare" was in wide use during his lifetime. It appeared in the dedications of his poems Venus and Adonis in 1593 and The Rape of Lucrece in 1594, and it was the spelling used in the First Folio of 1623. Yet it never appeared in his own signatures. That gap between the printed name and the handwritten name would fuel a dispute lasting well past his death, pulling in biographers, poets, novelists, and eventually the advocates of authorship conspiracy theories. The question this documentary follows is how a single surname became a battlefield.

• 2. Six Signatures

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  Most of Shakespeare's signatures rely on breviographic conventions, the common shorthand of the era, which is why so many are abbreviated. Edmund Spenser, the poet, sometimes signed his first name in full but also used contracted forms such as "Ed: spser" or "Edm: spser". Abbreviation was simply normal practice, not a sign of carelessness or eccentricity.

  The three signatures on the will were first reproduced by the 18th-century scholar George Steevens, in the form of facsimile engravings. The two signatures connected to the Blackfriars house were identified in 1768, and the documents were acquired by the scholar Edmond Malone. Photographs of those five signatures were later published by Sidney Lee. The sixth and final signature was discovered by 1909 by Charles William Wallace.

  Two additional signatures sit in a murkier category. One appears on the fly-leaf of a copy of John Florio's translation of the works of Montaigne; it reads "Willm. Shakspere" and was accepted as genuine by some scholars until the late 20th century, though it is not now considered authentic. Another possibly genuine signature appears on a copy of William Lambarde's Archaionomia, first published in 1568. Though smudged, the spelling on that copy seems to be "Shakspere". The uncertain status of those two inscriptions left later researchers with a frustratingly small set of confirmed data points from which to argue about what the poet himself intended.

• 3. The Printed Record

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  Fifty-eight quarto editions of Shakespeare's plays and five editions of poetry were published before the First Folio. On twenty of those plays the author receives no credit at all. Of the remainder, the name appears in several distinct forms, and the question of which form was most authoritative became a long-running scholarly argument.

  On fifteen title pages the name is hyphenated as "Shake-speare". Thirteen of those fifteen hyphenated instances cluster on the title pages of just three plays: Richard II, Richard III, and Henry IV, Part 1, in their various quarto printings between 1598 and 1615. A hyphen also appears in the first quarto of Hamlet from 1603 and the second quarto of King Lear from 1619. The hyphenated form further turns up in the poem The Phoenix and the Turtle, published in a collection of verse in 1601, and on the title page and in the poem A Lover's Complaint of Shake-speares Sonnets in 1609.

  The unhyphenated "Shakespeare" appears on twenty-two of the fifty-eight quartos, including the first quartos of The Merchant of Venice, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Much Ado About Nothing, all from 1600. James S. Shapiro has argued that the name caused genuine difficulties for typesetters, and that the form with the "e" in the centre was favoured partly because it was easiest to set in type and could be cleanly divided across a line. Scholar David Kathman notes that names with two recognisable parts were more likely to be hyphenated regardless of whether they were real surnames or invented pseudonyms, a detail that would later matter greatly to the authorship debate.

• 4. Shifting Fashions

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  Philip Chetwinde published the second printing of the Third Folio in 1664, and the title page of the new supplementary section in that edition quietly swapped "Shakespeare" for "Shakespear". That single editorial choice opened the door to a generation of modernised spelling. John Downes and Nahum Tate, both writers of the Restoration era, followed suit.

  Nicholas Rowe, Shakespeare's first biographer, used "Shakespear" in his 1709 book Some Account of the Life of Mr. William Shakespear and in his accompanying edition of the works. Alexander Pope followed with his Works of Shakespear in 1725, and George Sewell used the same spelling in his own edition. Not everyone complied. Pope's rival Lewis Theobald kept the First Folio spelling in his Shakespeare Restored of 1726, which explicitly pushed back against attempts to modernise and sanitise the original texts. Samuel Johnson, the most authoritative literary voice of the century, also preferred the First Folio form.

  The "Shakespear" spelling did not vanish quickly. William Hazlitt used it in his Characters of Shakespear's Plays. George Bernard Shaw, a committed advocate of spelling reform, insisted on it in all his publications throughout his life. In the 18th century, French critics writing in their own language invented still more variants: "Shakpear", "Shakespehar", "Shakespeart", and "Shakees Pear" all appeared in French critical writing about the playwright.

• 5. The Authenticity Wars

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  Edmond Malone, the scholar who acquired the Blackfriars house documents in 1768, emerged as the most influential early voice in the authenticity debate. He declared a preference for "Shakspeare" and used it in his major publications, including his 1790 sixteen-volume edition of the complete works. His reasoning: he believed the final signature on the will was spelled that way, and that this spelling also matched the inscription on Shakespeare's tomb. George Steevens shared the preference. Malone admitted, however, that the will signature was difficult to read and that the other signatures clearly lacked the final "a".

  The "Shakspere" spelling had a different advocate. In 1785 the antiquarian John Pinkerton revived it in his Letters on Literature, published under the pen-name Robert Heron, arguing that it was the form "traced by the poet's own hand" in his signatures. A reference in The Gentleman's Magazine in 1784 to the "new fashion of writing Shakespeare's name SHAKSPERE" suggests the trend had been building since Steevens published his facsimile engravings in 1778. By 1788 the London publisher Bell had given the spelling official status in its editions of the plays. Samuel Taylor Coleridge used both "Shakspere" and "Shakspeare" in his criticism.

  The debate grew heated in The Gentleman's Magazine. A dispute in 1787 was followed by a longer one in 1840, when Frederic Madden promoted "Shakspere" on the basis of new manuscript evidence. Isaac D'Israeli responded with a strongly worded letter calling that spelling a "barbaric curt shock". John Bruce argued that a man's own way of spelling his own name should be authoritative. John William Burgon countered that names should follow the usage of well-educated printed books, which he said authorised "Shakspeare". The satirical magazine The Month eventually printed a piece by Albert Richard Smith claiming the dispute had been settled by a manuscript showing the spelling changed with the weather: "When the sun shone he made his 'A's, / When wet he took his 'E's."

  The antiquarian Joseph Hunter published in 1845, in his Illustrations of the Life, Studies, and Writings of Shakespeare, the first full accounting of all known variant spellings, including the most extreme cases: "Shagsper" and "Saxpere". Hunter wrote that "there has been endless variety in the form in which this name has been written." He also proposed that two distinct pronunciations may have coexisted, a Warwickshire version and a London one, and imagined the poet being addressed as "Mr. Shaxper" by neighbours in Stratford and Shottery while being called "Shakespeare" by London friends. Kathman later argued that while two pronunciations were possible, the spelling evidence alone gives no solid reason to conclude they existed.

• 6. Cambridge Settles It

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  Between 1863 and 1866, William George Clark, John Glover, and William Aldis Wright, all Fellows of Trinity College at the University of Cambridge, edited the nine-volume Works of William Shakespeare for the university press. The edition spelled the name "Shakespeare". A companion volume, issued in 1864 and known as the Globe Edition, reproduced Shakespeare's text from the Cambridge edition without the scholarly apparatus. The Globe Edition became so widely used that it stayed in print and functioned as a standard text for nearly a century.

  The authority of the Cambridge editors and the ubiquity of their text pushed "Shakespeare" into a position of dominance it had never quite held before. Other spellings did not vanish overnight, and "Shakspere" continued to appear well into the 20th century, for example in Brander Matthews' Shakspere as a Playwright in 1913, Alwin Thaler's Shakspere to Sheridan in 1922, and T.W. Baldwin's Shakspere's five-act structure in 1947. The New Shakspere Society, founded in Britain in 1873 by Frederick James Furnivall, used that spelling until it folded in 1894. The Shakspere Society of Philadelphia, founded in America around the same period, still exists under its original name. But the tide had turned, and the standardised form has remained "Shakespeare" ever since in English-speaking countries.

• 7. Spelling as Argument

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  When advocates of the Shakespeare authorship question began arguing that someone other than the man from Stratford-upon-Avon wrote the plays, they found the spelling dispute unusually convenient. Because variant spellings were already on the record, it was possible to use different spellings as shorthand for different claims about identity.

  In some cases the choice was simply practical, a way of distinguishing two entities in the same sentence. In other cases it carried an ideological charge. R.C. Churchill described one common version of the argument: some authorship advocates treated "Shakespeare" or "Shake-speare" as the name of the real author, whether Francis Bacon, the Earl of Derby, the Earl of Rutland, or another candidate, while using "Shaksper" or "Shakspere" for the Stratford man they cast as a front. Some writers imagined three distinct persons: the author, the actor, and the Stratford man, each assigned a different spelling.

  H.N. Gibson noted that outlandish variant spellings were sometimes deployed not for analytical clarity but for ridicule, filling pages with forms such as "Shagspur" and "Shaxpers" to make the Stratford man seem vulgar. Gibson quoted the Baconian Edwin Durning-Lawrence, who closed each chapter of his book with the declaration "Bacon is Shakespeare" in block capitals. The question of the hyphen drew particular attention. Some authorship advocates argued that hyphenated names in early printed texts signalled pseudonyms, pointing to fictional character names like "Master Shoe-tie" and the pseudonym "Tom Tell-truth". Kathman countered that real names were hyphenated just as readily. He cited the printer Robert Waldegrave, who printed the Marprelate tracts: Waldegrave never hyphenated the acknowledged pseudonym "Martin Marprelate" but did repeatedly hyphenate his own genuine surname, which suggests that hyphenation carried no systematic signal about authenticity at all.