The Spelling and Pronunciation of
Shakespeare's Name
by
(一)Introduction
(二)Spelling of the Name "Shakespeare"
(三)Pronunciation
(四)Hyphenation
(五)Conclusion
(六)Notes
One of the most common articles of Oxfordian faith is that there is great significance in the
various spellings of Shakespeare's name. The spelling "Shakespeare," according to most
Oxfordians, was used to refer to the author of the plays and poems, while the spelling
"Shakspere" (or "Shaksper," in the version sometimes promoted by more militant Oxfordians such
as Charlton Ogburn) was used to refer to the Stratford man. A milder version of this claim
acknowledges that Elizabethan spelling was not absolute, but still says that the usual and preferred
spelling of the Stratford man's name was "Shaksper(e)," as opposed to the poet "Shakespeare."
These claims about spelling are usually accompanied by an assertion that the two names were
pronounced differently: "Shakespeare" with a long 'a' in the first syllable, as we are accustomed
to pronouncing it today, but "Shakspere" with a "flat" 'a,' so that the first syllable sounds like
"shack." A separate but related claim involves hyphenation: the name was occasionally
hyphenated in print as "Shake-speare," a fact which Oxfordians say points to it being a
pseudonym. These claims are given more or less prominence in different presentations of the
Oxfordian theory, but they are virtually always present in one form or another. Indeed, they are
vital for the Oxfordian scenario, since they make it easier for Oxfordians to believe that the
"William Shakespeare" praised as a poet was some mysterious figure with no apparent connection
to the glover's son and actor "William Shaksper" from Stratford-upon-Avon.
As it turns out, though, all of the above claims are false. Specifically:
(一)"Shakespeare" was by far the most common spelling of the name in both literary and
non-literary contexts, and there is no significant difference in spelling patterns when we take
into account such factors as handwritten vs. printed and Stratford vs. London spellings;
(二)there is no evidence that the variant spellings reflected a consistent pronunciation difference,
but there is considerable evidence that they were seen as more or less interchangeable;
(三)there is no evidence whatsoever that hyphenation in Elizabethan times was ever thought to
indicate a pseudonym, and other proper names of real people were also sometimes hyphenated.
ToTable of Contents.
Elizabethan spelling was very erratic by twentieth-century standards, though it was not (as is
sometimes stated) totally without rules. Even the simplest proper names were spelled a variety of
ways, but we can at least look at the range of different spellings used for a given name and see
what patterns emerge. In the accompanying lists, I have attempted to gather together all the
references to Shakespeare by name, from his christening in 1564 to the publication of the First
Folio in 1623 and slightly beyond, with the original spellings used at the time. These are primarily
taken from the transcripts in E.K. Chambers's William Shakespeare: A Study of the Facts and
Problems and J.O. Halliwell-Phillipps's Outlines of the Life of Shakespeare; Chambers was the
primary source, but in some instances Halliwell-Phillipps reproduces an entire document where
Chambers only reproduces an excerpt, and transcripts of some references (particularly those
discovered since 1930) are taken from other sources. Page numbers are given for reference, and
for those handwritten documents which are reproduced in facsimile in Samuel Schoenbaum's
William Shakespeare: A Documentary Life, I have also given page references to that work, so
that readers who are so inclined may check the transcriptions for themselves. In one or two
instances, Chambers and Halliwell-Phillipps disagree in their transcriptions, in which cases I have
made my own judgement based on the facsimiles.
There are two separate lists, to make it easier to test the claim that the names of﹃the Stratford
man﹄and the playwright were distinct and spelled differently. The first
list consists of non-literary
references to William Shakespeare of Stratford; these include records from Stratford and its
environs, as well as various London records, including those relating to his career as an actor and
shareholder in the Globe and Blackfriars theatres. The second list
consists of references to
Shakespeare as a poet and/or playwright up to the publication of the First Folio in 1623; this
includes both direct references to Shakespeare by other writers as well as mentions of his name on
title pages of quartos, with each edition of a work counting as a separate reference. Some
references could be taken as belonging on either list; I have generally put in the second ("literary")
list any references which allude to Shakespeare as a playwright/poet, regardless of other content it
may have. For instance, the references in "The Return from Parnassus, Part II" and in John
Davies's epigram of 1611 are in the "literary" list because they praise Shakespeare as a
playwright/poet, even though they also allude to him as an actor and member of the
Chamberlain's/King's Men. The following tables give a breakdown of how many times each
of the various spellings of Shakespeare's name occurs in the documents that have survived, from
1564 through 1616, the year of his death. [note1] Abbreviated versions are listed only if they
include more than half of the name; thus "Shakespe" is included, but "Shak" is not. I should
emphasize that the figures in Table 1 refer only to non-literary references which can be reasonably
taken to refer to William Shakespeare of Stratford, and that literary references to William
Shakespeare as a poet/playwright are summarized in Table 2. Each of the tables is divided into
three columns. In Table 1, the first column lists the total occurrences of each spelling, and the
other two columns break these down into non-London (mostly Stratford) and London
occurrences. In Table 2, the first column also lists total occurrences, while the other two columns
break these down into printed vs. handwritten occurrences. At the bottom of each table I have
tabulated the total occurrences of spellings with the first 'e' (e.g. "Shakespeare") vs. spellings
without the first 'e' (e.g. "Shakspere").
Table 1. Non-literary references (1564-1616):
Outside In
Total London London
----- ------- ------
Shakespeare 71 8 63
Shakespere 27 25 2
Shakespear 16 16 0
Shakspeare 13 9 4
Shackspeare 12 11 1
Shakspere 8 7 1
Shackespeare 7 7 0
Shackspere 6 5 1
Shackespere 5 5 0
Shaxspere 3 3 0
Shexpere 2 2 0
Shakspe~ 2 0 2
Shaxpere 1 1 0
Shagspere 1 1 0
Shaksper 1 1 0
Shaxpeare 1 1 0
Shaxper 1 1 0
Shake-speare 1 0 1
Shakespe 1 0 1
Shakp 1 0 1
with first 'e' 128 (71%) 61 (59%) 67 (87%)
w/o first 'e' 52 (29%) 42 (41%) 10 (13%)
Table 2. Literary references (1593-1616):
Hand-
Total Printed written
----- ------- -------
Shakespeare 119 107 12
Shake-speare 21 21 0
Shakspeare 10 5 5
Shaxberd 4 0 4
Shakespere 4 1 3
Shakespear 3 1 2
Shak-speare 2 2 0
Shakspear 2 0 2
Shakspere 1 0 1
Shaksper 1 0 1
Schaksp. 1 0 1
Shakespheare 1 1 0
Shakespe 1 0 1
Shakspe 1 0 1
with first 'e' 149 (87%) 131 (95%) 18 (55%)
w/o first 'e' 22 (13%) 7 (5%) 15 (45%)
It is clear from Tables 1 and 2 that, at least by modern standards,
there was considerable variation in the spelling of Shakespeare's name in
both literary and non-literary contexts. In both contexts, though,
"Shakespeare" was the most common spelling by a wide margin, and in both
contexts, variants with the first 'e' ("Shakespeare," etc.) greatly
outnumber variants without the first 'e' ("Shakspere," etc.). The latter
type are somewhat more prevalent in non-literary contexts (29% vs. 13%), a
fact which Oxfordians might seize upon as some small support for their
theories. However, there are a variety of factors which need to be taken
into account, factors which upon examination make it clear that the
evidence gives no support to the claim that "Shakespeare" and "Shakspere"
were distinct names, referring to playwright and Stratford citizen
respectively.
First, spelling in London tended to be more uniform and modern than in the rest of the country,
where regional dialects and lower literacy rates made it more idiosyncratic. Note that among the
non-literary references from outside London, "Shakspere" spellings are fairly prominent (41%),
and this group includes the more idiosyncratic spellings often ridiculed by Oxfordians, such as
"Shagspere" and "Shaxper." Among non-literary references from London, though, "Shakespeare"
is the overwhelmingly preferred spelling (63 out of 77). The percentage of
"Shakespeare"-spellings among non-literary references in London (87%) is comparable to the
percentage among literary references (95%), nearly all of which are also from London.
Another very significant factor is handwritten vs. printed spellings. Spelling in Elizabethan printed
texts was much more uniform and closer to modern practice than in handwritten ones, because
compositors tended to normalize idiosyncratic features of the manuscripts they worked from.
This factor can clearly be seen in the breakdown of literary references in Table 2. The spelling
"Shakespeare" and its hyphenated variant "Shake-speare" were overwhelmingly preferred in
printed texts, but among handwritten references they were much less prevalent, with
"Shakspere"-spellings (without the first 'e') almost as common as "Shakespeare"-spellings (15 versus 18). Given
this pattern, it is actually somewhat surprising that there are not more "Shakspere"-type spellings
among the non-literary references, all but two of which are handwritten.
A specific example illustrates more forcefully the difference between printed and handwritten
spellings. We have four surviving contemporary records where someone recorded his purchase of
one of Shakespeare's printed works while noting the author's name; in each case the writer spelled
the name without the first 'e', even though in three of the four cases the corresponding printed
work spells the name "Shakespeare":
(一)On June 12, 1593, Richard Stonley purchased a copy of newly-published Venus and Adonis,
with a dedication signed "William Shakespeare," yet in his notebook he wrote﹃Venus and
Adhonay pr Shakspere.﹄
(二)On June 19, 1609, Edward Alleyn noted his purchase of the recently-published Shake-speares
Sonnets (as it is called on the title page) by writing down "Shaksper sonetts, 5 d.."
(三)Sometime in 1609 or 1610, Sir John Harington made a list of play quartos he owned, including
"K. Leir of Shakspear" (the 1608 Quarto spells the name "Shak-speare").
(四)In 1611, William Drummond of Hawthornden noted among an inventory of his books﹃Venus
and Adon. by Schaksp.﹄(the name was spelled "Shakespeare" in all editions).
Surely these entries indicate that "Shakspere," "Shaksper," "Shakspear," and "Schakspe(a)re,"
when they happened to appear, were just seen as variants of "Shakespeare," and that nobody gave
them a second thought.
Still another factor to be considered is the nature of the documents themselves. Legal documents
such as contracts, which might have to be referred to decades later, tended to be more carefully
written than informal jottings such as those of Stonley, Alleyn, and Drummond. It is thus worth
noting that the documents relating to Shakespeare's property purchases, both in Stratford and in
London, invariably spell the name "Shakespeare" or its close variants. For example, both of the
documents relating to Shakespeare's purchase of New Place in 1597 consistently have
"Shakespeare"; the two documents concerning his 1602 purchase of the Old Stratford freehold
consistently have "Shakespere"; the indenture for his 1605 purchase of tithes has "Shakespear"
throughout; both the conveyance and the mortgage from his 1613 purchase of the Blackfriars
Gatehouse consistently have "Shakespeare." It is clear that from a legal standpoint, the man's
name was considered to be "William Shakespeare," not "Shaksper." [note 2]
I have tried to be as complete as possible in compiling the accompanying lists; others have
sometimes tried to make arguments based on selective or incomplete lists of references, which can
lead to a distorted picture. I have also tried to be fair and reasonable, but inevitably some people
may object to one aspect or another of the procedure; I will not attempt here to rebut every
possible objection. [note3]Arguments about the spelling of the name are ultimately less important
than it might seem, though, because as I will argue in the next section, there is no evidence that
"Shake-" and "Shak-"-type spellings represented different pronunciations, while there considerable
evidence that they were seen as interchangeable.
ToTable of Contents.
The spelling issue bears directly on the Oxfordian claim that "Shakespeare" and "Shakspere" were
pronounced differently, the first with a "long" 'a' and the second with a "short" or "flat" 'a,' as in
"shack." The relationship between spelling and pronunciation was much more fluid in Elizabethan
times than in modern English; the same word could have variant spellings which would be
pronounced differently according to modern rules, but which were freely interchangeable in
Shakespeare's day. For example, there is some evidence that the spellings "-low" and "-ley" were
considered interchangeable at the end of a word in Elizabethan times, even though they must be
pronounced quite differently in modern English. The man we know today as Christopher
Marlowe was baptized as "Marlow," but he spelled his name "Marley" in his one known surviving
signature; variations of these two spellings occur interchangeably throughout his life, with no
indication that they represented different pronunciations. Similarly, the name of the theatrical
entrepreneur we know as Phillip Henslowe was spelled "Henslowe" or "Hinshley" (and variations
thereof) with no apparent rhyme or reason. In a single document (the 1587 deed of partnership
with John Cholmley) the name is spelled "Hinshley," "Henslow," and "Hinshleye"; Henslowe
himself sometimes signed his name "Henslow," sometimes "Hensley," but presumably he did not
change the pronunciation of his name on a regular basis.
Similarly, all indications are that the spellings "Shakespeare" and "Shakspere" (and their variants)
did not represent a consistent pronunciation difference, despite our intuition based on modern
spelling rules. The foremost authority on the subject, Fausto Cercignani, says in Shakespeare's
Works and Elizabethan Pronunciation (p. 1) that﹃we do not even know how Shakespeare
pronounced his own surname, since the first part of his signature (Shakspere and Shakspeare) may
imply either the antecedent of present shake or a variant pronounced like shack, while both -spere
and -speare may conceal either the antecedent of present spear or a form rhyming with pear.﹄ It
is entirely possible that the name was pronounced differently in Stratford and London, and this
may be one more factor among several contributing to the greater occurrence of "Shak-"-type
spellings in Stratford. (Though recall that in London, "Shake-"-type spellings were used more
often in non-literary referernces to "the Stratford man" than in literary references to
Shakespeare.) If we look at Stratford and London references separately, though, the distribution
of "Shake-" and "Shak-" spellings gives no indication that they represented any consistent
difference in pronunciation.
Furthermore, there is independent evidence that "Shake-" and "Shak-" in this context were seen in
Shakespeare's day as interchangeable spelling variants. The anonymous play Arden of Feversham
was first printed in 1592. One of the villians of the play is a ruffian and hired murderer whose
name is given in modern editions as "Shakebag," based on an actual historical figure named
George Shakebag; the similarity to "Shakespeare" makes comparison relevant. In the 1592
Quarto, this character's name appears 43 times (not counting abbreviations), and it is spelled six
different ways, broken down as follows:
Shakbag (25 times)
Shakebag (10 times)
Shakebagge (5 times)
Shakbagge (1 time)
Shackbag (1 time)
Shakabage (1 time)
No rhyme or reason is apparent in the use of these various spellings; their distribution is
essentially random. The name is spelled "Shakbag" on the title page, but in the character's first
appearance in the text, in a stage direction in line 665, he is "Shakebagge"; in line 829 the name is
"Shakebagge," and in the very next line it is "Shakbag"; in line 1234 it is "Shakebag," but two
lines later we get "Shakbag." (Line numbers are taken from the 1947 Malone Society facsimile of
the 1592 Quarto.) There is no indication at all that any of these spellings represent different
pronunciations; it is apparent that the first syllable of the name was pronounced identically
(presumably like the word "shake," however that may have been pronounced in Elizabethan times)
whether it was spelled "Shake," "Shak," or "Shack."
Matus (p. 26) provides some similar evidence, involving the playwright Shakerley Marmion. On
the title page and in the author's dedication of Marmion's Holland's Leaguer, his first name is
spelled "Shackerley." The next year, on the title page of his A Fine Companion, the name is
spelled "Shakerley," but the author's dedication is signed "Shack: Marmyon." On the engraved
title page of Marmion's poem Cupid and Psyche, his first name is spelled "Shakerley," but on the
typeset title page it is "Shackerley." We cannot be certain whether Marmion pronounced the first
syllable of his own name as "shake" or "shack," but whatever the pronunciation, it is evident that
"Shack-" and "Shak-" were seen as equally valid spellings for it.
There is little or no evidence to support the common Oxfordian assertion that "Shakspere" always
required a "short" 'a' pronunciation while "Shakespeare" always required a "long" 'a.' Rather, the
evidence indicates (as near as we can tell 400 years later) that these were alternate spellings for a
single pronunciation, though that pronunciation may have varied regionally. The variant spellings
may have sometimes indicated different pronunciation, but we have no way of reconstructing with
any confidence when this was.
ToTable of Contents.
Another common claim made by Oxfordians is that hyphenation was used in Elizabethan times to
indicate a pseudonym; since Shakespeare's name was sometimes hyphenated, this is taken as
evidence that people recognized it as a nom-de-plume. They fail to mention, however, that such
an idea is completely unknown outside of Oxfordian (and earlier, Baconian) literature. I find no
reference to it in one of the standard scholarly works on literary pseudonyms (The
Bibliographical History of Anonyma and Pseudonyma by Archer Taylor and Fredric J. Mosher),
nor do I find any mention of it in any of various studies of Elizabethan punctuation and
orthography. But, an Oxfordian might object, just because an idea is not generally recognized
does not mean it is not true. True enough, but it turns out there is a very good reason why
scholars do not accept the "hyphenation-as-pseudonym" claim: the evidence simply does not
support it.
Despite Oxfordian claims to the contrary, it was not at all unusual for proper names of real people
to be hyphenated in print in Elizabethan times. The following is a very partial list of names of real
people which were hyphenated on title-pages of printed works between 1570 and 1640; some of
these are taken from Irvin Matus's Shakespeare, In Fact(pp. 28-30), while others are culled from
my own research with the Short-Title Catalogue, the National Union Catalogue, and the OCLC
database.
●Charles Fitzgeoffrey's name was regularly hyphenated on the title pages of his works, published
between 1596 and 1637 as by "Charles Fitz-Geffry," "Charles Fitz-Geffrey," or﹃Charles
Fitz-Geffrie.﹄ Fitzgeoffrey's name was hyphenated much more regularly than Shakespeare's
was, yet no one has suggested that he was using a pseudonym.
●The name of the Protestant martyr Sir John Oldcastle, the original model for Shakespeare's
Falstaff, was often hyphenated as Old-castle. When four of Phillip Henslowe's writers wrote a
play about Oldcastle in response to the success of Falstaff, the printed version of the play had
the title "The first part of the true and honorable historie, of Sir John Old-Castle, the good
Lord Cobham."
●When Anthony Munday wrote a pageant in honor of Sir Thomas Campbell's installation as
Lord Mayor of London in 1609, the title of the printed version was﹃Camp-bell, or, The
ironmonger's faire field.﹄ (This is actually taken from the running title, since the title page of
the only surviving copy is missing.)
●The printer of Munday's pageant, Edward Allde, was quite fond of hyphens, and in fact he
often hyphenated his own name as All-de on the title pages of works he printed (e.g. Henry
Fitgeffrey's Satyres (1617), Thomas Middleton's The Sun in Aries (1621), and John Bradford's
Holy Meditations (1622)). [note4]
●Another printer, Robert Waldegrave, also regularly hyphenated his own name as Walde-grave
on the title pages of works he printed from 1582 on; Matus's book contains an illustration of
one of these (p. 31). It is interesting to note that Waldegrave was the printer of most of the
Martin Marprelate pamphlets, which initiated a major controversy in 1588-89;﹃Martin
Marprelate﹄is the one example sometimes cited by Oxfordians of an undisputed Elizabethan
pseudonym being hyphenated. It is true that there are a few instances of "Marprelate" being
hyphenated (for example, on the title page of Rythmes against Martin Marre-prelate(1589)),
but it was usually not. In all the Marprelate tracts published by Waldegrave (reprinted in
facsimile by Scholar Press in 1967), I have been unable to find a single instance of the
hyphenated version "Mar-prelate" (or its variations), though the name occurs repeatedly.
However, the name of Waldegrave himself also occurs repeatedly in the tracts, and it is always
hyphenated. If hyphenation was supposed to indicate a pseudonym, it is curious that
Waldegrave repeatedly hyphenated his own name while failing to hyphenate an undisputed
pseudonym in the same texts.
In fact, the pattern seems to be that a name could be hyphenated (according to the whim of the
printer) if it could be seen as divided into two parts; most often one or both of these parts were
English words, though in "Fitz-Geffrey" the "Fitz-" is a Norman French prefix meaning "son of."
As the above examples show, whether a name was real or pseudonymous had nothing to do with
the matter; real names were hyphenated just as easily as pseudonyms (perhaps even more easily).
"Shakespeare" obviously fits this pattern; the name was taken to consist of "shake" + "spear,"
even though E. K. Chambers (EKC II: 374-5) doubts that this is its actual historical origin.
Contemporary evidence that this was how people thought of the name can be found in William
Camden's Remaines, first published in 1605. Camden had a long section on the origins of English
names, and at one point he says that some men derived their names﹃from that which they
commonly carried, as Palmer, that is, Pilgrime, for that they carried Palme when they returned
from Hierusalem, Long-sword, Broad-speare, Fortescu, that is, Strong-shield, and in some such
respect, Breake-speare, Shake-Speare, Shotbolt, Wagstaffe.﹄ Camden here not only confirms that
the name was thought of as "shake" + "spear," but he hyphenates it along with several of the other
names. At least one more tidbit of evidence that the family name had the "spear-shaking"
interpretation long before William was born can be found in the records of Richard Shakespeare,
William's paternal grandfather. Richard was called "Richard Shakstaff" in a 1533 record; some
scribe apparently wrote "staff" instead of the semantically similar "spear" as part of the name.
In sum, there is no evidence to support the Oxfordian assertion that the occasional hyphenation of
the name Shakespeare means that people thought of it as a pseudonym. Real names were
occasionally hyphenated when they could be divided into two parts; the same is true of fictitious
names. The best-known pseudonym of the time, Martin Marprelate, was only occasionally
hyphenated, while names of several real people (such as Charles Fitz-geffrey and Robert
Walde-grave) were hyphenated with great regularity.
ToTable of Contents.
To sum up, none of the three major Oxfordian claims about Shakespeare's name holds up under
scrutiny. There were not two separate names, "Shakspere" and "Shakespeare"; rather, they were
the same name, with "Shakespeare" being by far the most common spelling both in non-literary
references to the glover's son from Stratford and in literary references to Shakespeare as a poet
and playwright. The evidence does not support the claim that "Shakspere" and "Shakespeare"
had to be pronounced differently; rather, it seems to indicate that they were spelling variants.
Finally, there is no substance at all to the common Oxfordian assertion that the occasional
hyphenation of the name "Shake-speare" meant that it was taken to be a pseudonym. The above
certainly does not exhaust all that could be said on the subject of Shakespeare's name, but I hope
it is enough to show how little substance there is to Oxfordian claims about its spelling,
pronunciation, and hyphenation.
ToTable of Contents.
Two extant documents are not included in my tally because they are exact duplicates of other
included documents. On May 18, 1604, a warrant for the creation of the King's Men was issued
under the Privy Seal; this was identical in wording to the warrant issued the previous day under
the Signet Seal, a document which does appear in my list (cf. Schoenbaum's Documentary Life, p.
197). When Shakespeare purchased the Blackfriars Gatehouse in 1613, two copies were made of
the March 10 Conveyance, one for the vendor and one for the purchasers; they are identical
except that the latter lacks the signatures of the purchasers (including Shakespeare). Since the
copies in question use the spelling "Shakespeare" (once and fifteen times respectively), including
them would result in an even more lopsided margin for that spelling. On the other side of the
coin, I have not included in the literary list the running titles on the top of each page of the 1609
Quarto of "Shake-speares Sonnets," since they simply repeat (32 times) the spelling found on the
title page ("Shake-speare").
Oxfordians use a form of this argument when they note that the name was spelled "Shakspere" in
the Stratford parish register records of Shakespeare's baptism and burial and those of his children;
surely, they say, this was the "official" spelling. However, as Table 1 and the accompanying list
show, this spelling was not very common at all, being almost exclusively confined to the Parish
Register. Furthermore, all the Register entries from before 1600 -- including all the
above-mentioned Shakespeare entries except that of his burial -- are transcripts made in
September of that year by a single copyist (probably vicar Richard Byfield), who consistently used
his own preferred spellings.
I will, however, mention Charlton Ogburn, who in The Mysterious William Shakespeare (1992
edition) tries to have it both ways. He has apparently glanced at the evidence enough to see how
often the name of "the Stratford man" was spelled "Shakespeare," but this conflicts with his firm
belief that the man's name was unequivocally "Shaksper" or "Shakspere." Thus he rationalizes
away the mass of "Shakespeare" spellings by claiming (p. 93) that the Stratford man and others
around him may have come to "fancy" this spelling in imitation of the great author﹃William
Shakespeare,﹄presumably to the extent of using it almost exclusively in London, and a majority of
the time in Stratford. Rather than try to rebut this semi-coherent scenario, I will merely note that
it conflicts wildly with Ogburn's insistence that "Shaksper" of Stratford was an illiterate bumpkin
who consorted with similarly illiterate lowlifes; how such a densely ignorant crowd became so
familiar with the works of "William Shakespeare," Ogburn does not inform us.
This and the next example indicate that individual printers and publishers tended to use hyphens
according to their own personal idiosyncracies. This is relevant for the case of Shakespeare, as
Matus points out. Of the fifteen quartos of individual plays where the name is hyphenated as
Shake-speare on the title page, thirteen of them are editions of three plays (Richard II, Richard
III, and 1 Henry IV) all published by Andrew Wise and the man who took over Wise's business in
1603, Matthew Law. Wise's fondness for hyphens, and the fact that publishers often kept
title-page information intact from one edition of a work to another, tends to make the hyphenation
of Shakespeare as Shake-speare look more widespread than it actually was.
ToTable of Contents.
To List of Non-literary references to
Shakespeare.
To list of references to Shakespeare as Author/Poet/Playwright.
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