The spelling of William Shakespeare's name has varied over time. It was not consistently spelled any single way during his lifetime (1564–1616), including by Shakespeare himself, in manuscript or in printed form; historians note that this was not unusual for documents in the Elizabethan era. After his death, the name was spelled variously by editors of his work, and there was no fixed spelling until well into the 20th century.
The standard spelling of the surname as "Shakespeare" was the most common published form in Shakespeare's lifetime, but it was not one of the inconsistent variations used in his own handwritten signatures. It was, however, the spelling used as a printed signature to the dedications of the first editions of his poems Venus and Adonis in 1593 and The Rape of Lucrece in 1594. It is also the spelling used in the First Folio, the definitive collection of his plays published in 1623, after his death.
The spelling of the name was later modernised, "Shakespear" gaining popular usage in the 18th century, which was largely replaced by "Shakspeare" from the late 18th through the early 19th century. In the Romantic and Victorian eras the spelling "Shakspere", as used in the poet's own signature, became more widely adopted in the belief that this was the most authentic version. From the mid-19th to the early 20th century, a wide variety of spellings were used for various reasons; although, following the publication of the Cambridge and Globe editions of Shakespeare in the 1860s, "Shakespeare" began to gain ascendancy. It later became a habit of writers who believed the fringe theory that proposes up to 80 others who are the "someone else" who wrote the plays to use different spellings when they were referring to the "real" playwright and to the man from Stratford-upon-Avon. With rare exceptions, the spelling is now standardised in English-speaking countries as "Shakespeare".
Shakespeare's signatures
There are six surviving signatures written by Shakespeare himself. These are all attached to legal documents. The six signatures appear on four documents: a deposition in the Bellott v Mountjoy case, dated 11 May 1612 the purchase of a house in Blackfriars, London, dated 10 March 1613 the mortgage of the same house, dated 11 March 1613 his Last Will & Testament, which contains three signatures, one on each page, dated 25 March 1616
The signatures appear as follows: Willm Shakp William Shaksper Wm Shakspe William Shakspere Willm Shakspere By me William Shakspeare
Most of these are abbreviated versions of the name, using breviographic conventions of the time. This was common practice. For example Edmund Spenser sometimes wrote his name out in full (spelling his first name Edmund or Edmond), but often used the abbreviated forms "Ed: spser" or "Edm: spser".Albert Charles Hamilton (ed), The Spenser Encyclopedia, University of Toronto Press, 1990, p. 346.
The three signatures on the will were first reproduced by the 18th-century scholar George Steevens, in the form of facsimile engravings. The two relating to the house purchase were identified in 1768, and the document itself was acquired by Edmond Malone. Photographs of these five signatures were published by Sidney Lee.Sidney Lee, Shakespeare's Handwriting: Facsimiles of the Five Authentic Autograph Signatures, London, Smith Elder, 1899. The final signature was discovered by 1909 by Charles William Wallace.Wallace, Charles William, "Shakespeare and his London Associates," Nebraska University Studies, October 1910.
Though not considered genuine, there is a signature on the fly-leaf of a copy of John Florio's translation of the works of Montaigne, which reads "Willm. Shakspere"; it was accepted by some scholars until the late 20th century.F. E. Halliday, A Shakespeare Companion, 1550–1950, Funk & Wagnalls, New York, 1952 pp. 209, 424. Another possibly authentic signature appears on a copy of William Lambarde's Archaionomia (1568). Though smudged, the spelling appears to be "Shakspere".Schoenbaum, Samuel. William Shakespeare: Records and Images. New York: Oxford University Press, 1981, p. 109.
Other spellings
The writer David Kathman has tabulated the variations in the spelling of Shakespeare's name as reproduced in Samuel Schoenbaum's William Shakespeare: A Documentary Life. He states that of "non-literary references" in Shakespeare's lifetime (1564–1616) the spelling "Shakespeare" appears 71 times, while "Shakespere" appears second with 27 usages. These are followed by "Shakespear" (16); "Shakspeare" (13); "Shackspeare" (12) and "Shakspere" (8). There are also many other variations that appear once or in small numbers. Critics of Kathman's approach have pointed out that it is skewed by repetitions of a spelling in the same document, gives each occurrence the same statistical weight irrespective of context, and does not adequately take historical and chronological factors into account.
R.C. Churchill notes that name variations were far from unusual in the Elizabethan era:
Kathman notes that the spelling is typically more uniform in printed versions than in manuscript versions, and that there is a greater variety of spelling in provincial documents than in metropolitan ones.
Printed spellings
Fifty-eight quarto (or Q) editions of Shakespeare's plays and five editions of poetry were published before the First Folio. On 20 of the plays, the author is not credited. On 15 title pages, his name is hyphenated, "Shakespeare", 13 of these spellings being on the title pages of just three plays, Richard II (Q2 1598, Q3 1598, Q4 1608, and Q5 1615), Richard III (Q2 1598, Q3 1602, Q4 1605, Q5 1612, and Q6 1622), and Henry IV, Part 1 (Q2 1599, Q3 1604, Q4 1608, and Q5 1613). A hyphen is also present in the first quarto of Hamlet (1603) and the second of King Lear (1619). The name printed at the end of the poem The Phoenix and the Turtle, which was published in a collection of verse in 1601, is hyphenated, as is the name on the title page and the poem A Lover's Complaint of Shake-speares Sonnets (1609). It is used in the cast list of Ben Jonson's Sejanus His Fall, and in six literary allusions published between 1594 and 1623.John Louis Haney, The Name of William Shakespeare, Egerton, 1906, pp. 27–30.
The unhyphenated spelling "Shakespeare" (or Shakeſpeare, with a long s) appears on 22 of the 58 quartos. It is spelled this way in the first quartos of The Merchant of Venice (1600), A Midsummer Night's Dream (1600), Much Ado About Nothing (1600), The Merry Wives of Windsor (1602), Pericles, Prince of Tyre (1609), Troilus and Cressida (1609), Othello (1622). The second, or "good", quarto of Hamlet (1604) also uses this spelling. It is also spelled this way on the misattributed quarto of Sir John Oldcastle (1600; 1619) and on the verse collection The Passionate Pilgrim (1599).
Rarer spellings are "Shakspeare" on the first quarto of King Lear (1608), and "Shakeſpere", in the first quarto of Love's Labour's Lost (1598). On the misattributed quarto A Yorkshire Tragedy (1608) his name is spelled "Shakſpeare", a spelling that also appears on the quarto of The Two Noble Kinsmen (1634), which was published after the First Folio.
James S. Shapiro argues that Shakespeare's name caused difficulties for typesetters, and that is one reason why the form with the "e" in the centre is most commonly used, and why it is sometimes hyphenated.. Kathman argues that any name that could be divided into two clear parts was liable to be hyphenated, especially if the parts could be interpreted as distinct words.
Spellings in later publications
Later editions of Shakespeare's works adopted differing spellings, in accordance with fashions of modernised spelling of the day, or, later, of attempts to adopt what was believed to be the most historically accurate version of the name. When he was referred to in foreign languages, he acquired even more variant spellings. 18th-century French critics were known to use "Shakpear, Shakespehar, Shakespeart, or Shakees Pear."R.C. Churchill, Shakespeare and His Betters: A History and a Criticism of the Attempts Which Have Been Made to Prove That Shakespeare's Works Were Written by Others, Max Reinhardt, London, 1958, p. 20.
Shakespear A shift from "Shakespeare" to the modernised spelling "Shakespear" occurs in the second printing of the Third Folio, published in 1664 by Philip Chetwinde. This retained the original title page, but included a section with additional plays. The title page of this new add-on adopted the new spelling. It was also adopted by other authors of the Restoration Era. John Downes and Nahum Tate both use the spelling.Hazelton Spencer, Shakespeare Improved: The Restoration Versions in Quarto and on the Stage, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1927.
This was followed by 18th-century writers. Shakespeare's first biographer, Nicholas Rowe, also spelled the name "Shakespear", in his book Some Account of the Life &c. of Mr. William Shakespear (1709) and in his new edition of the works. This spelling was followed by Alexander Pope in his edition of the Works of Shakespear (1725) and George Sewell (The Works of Mr. William Shakespear).Simon Jarvis, Scholars and Gentlemen: Shakespearian Textual Criticism and Representations of Scholarly Labour, 1725–1765, Oxford University Press, 1995, p. 50. The spelling with an "e" at the end persisted, however. Pope's rival Lewis Theobald retained it in his edition, Shakespeare Restored (1726), which pointedly rejected attempts to modernise and sanitise the original works.Theobald adopts Pope's spelling in An Answer to Mr. Pope's Preface to Shakespear, Jarvis, p. 93.
The "Shakespear" spelling continued to be used by scholars throughout the 18th century, including William Warburton. However, many, like Theobald, preferred the First Folio spelling, most notably Samuel Johnson. "Shakespear" was less widely used into the 19th and 20th centuries, increasingly by advocates of rational spelling. William Hazlitt used it in his book Characters of Shakespear's Plays. George Bernard Shaw, a strong advocate of spelling reform, insisted on the use of this spelling in all his publications.
Archaising spellings
Shakspeare
Archival material relating to Shakespeare was first identified by 18th-century scholars, most notably Edmond Malone, who recorded variations in the spelling of the name. Malone declared a preference for the spelling "Shakspeare", using it in his major publications including his 1790 sixteen-volume edition of the complete works of the playwright. George Steevens also used this spelling. Steevens and Malone had both examined Shakespeare's will, and were convinced that the final signature was spelled this way, which also conformed to the spelling used on Shakespeare's tomb. However, Malone admitted that the signature was difficult to read and that the others were clearly spelled without the final "a". This spelling continued to be popular throughout the later Georgian period. Indeed "virtually every edition" of the playwright's work in the early 19th century before 1840 used this spelling. Even German scholars such as Friedrich Schlegel and Ludwig Tieck adopted it.John Louis Haney, The Name of William Shakespeare: a Study in Orthography, Egerton, 1906, pp. 42–50