Talk:Spelling of Shakespeare's name

Sources

If you need a source, Chambers devotes a bit of space to the spelling. I'm not sure this subject is notable enough to have its own article, since its main notability is yet another fantasy from fringe theorists. Tom Reedy (talk) 15:23, 29 April 2011 (UTC)

I don't know. I am now fascinated with the question of why editors and writers in thr 18th and 19th century switch spllings. It seems to be about "modernising" in some cases and about "authenticity" in others. It looks like the 'Shakspere' spelling became a vogue in the 1840s after Joseph Hunter's book, on the grounds that it was the "real" spelling of the name. Others seem to derive from theories about the etymology of the name, or pet ideas about rational spelling systems. Of course this not unique to Shakespeare. Walter Raleigh's name has gone through several different spelling-trends, as have many others. I will continue to add stuff over the next few days. Paul B (talk) 18:26, 29 April 2011 (UTC)

Thanks for creating this. Tom is correct about the fringe theorists, and I'm hoping that in due course the balance of material in the article would be under 10% relating to SAQ because this article should not be expanded with weakly sourced commentary to the effect that such-and-such feature of the spelling "proves" Shakespeare didn't do it. I hope some source discusses the wider issues of when correctness and consistency in spelling became important, and why. What sources would have been available to someone at the time (e.g. how often would the name have been read, as opposed to heard, by those who had to write the names that we see today)? Also, would any part of the spelling variation be related to the accompanying fact that most modern readers would find the original spellings in many works incomprehensible? I suppose there are some editors (a wikiproject?) who are familiar with the topic of the history of English spelling—we need to find them. Johnuniq (talk) 01:53, 30 April 2011 (UTC)

I have asked for help at WT:WikiProject Linguistics#Spelling of Shakespeare's name. Johnuniq (talk) 10:26, 30 April 2011 (UTC)

There's a lot of material, but most scholars discuss it by "accident" as it were. They reproduce the spellings used in sources, but rarely discuss the spelling-choice as such. Paul B (talk) 12:35, 30 April 2011 (UTC)

Yes, finding useful information will be tricky. If I may indulge in some wild speculation, I suppose that an important factor in how modern readers expect spelling consistency is that we see a lot of material in print, and we (usually) "know" how a word should be spelled/spelt. If we did not do a lot of reading, many of us would have a very hazy idea about the spelling of less common words, and someone's name would be a total unknown. A suitable historian might understand how much reading was normal in the 1600s, although it is hard to see how even an expert could do more than speculate on whether that influenced spelling variations. Johnuniq (talk) 03:45, 1 May 2011 (UTC)

de Grazia, Margreta (1991). Shakespeare Verbatim: The Reproduction of Authenticity and the 1790 Apparatus. Oxford: Clarendon Press. ISBN 0198117787. discusses this, somewhat superficially, in the context of the normalization of Shakespeare's spelling in the plays (in summary, she's against it, and all modern editions, on the grounds that it fixes the plays and discourages fluid adaptation from case to case). Specifically she links the perfection of the printing process with the standardization of spelling and language, suggesting that the increasing degree of standardization follows the increasing quality and availability of print. I don't recall off the top of my head what authority she cites for this, and she isn't, as far as I know, herself a linguist; but I suppose all Shakespeareans are to a degree also philologists and lexicographers.
For the record, I'm with Tom on this: this is not a subject that needs or merits its own article, and I fear it will only end up attracting the various fringe enthusiasts. That said, I can see the argument for the opposite position: by the mere fact that both Chambers and, IIRC, Schoenbaum discuss the issue (however briefly) this is a subject that has more merit than, say, the spelling of Marlowe or Raleigh's name, or any other random word then current. --Xover (talk) 10:52, 1 May 2011 (UTC)

Personally, I am far more interested in the fact that spellings come in and out of fashion over history than I am in the general issue of fixity and fluidity, which is itelf a typical strategy of po-mo metaphysicians. I haven't read Grazia, but since find the rhetorical conventions of Foucauldianism tiresome in the extreme, I think I'd find the book rather chafing. It would be nice to know what specific points she makes about Malone's choice of spelling. It seems obvious to me that the Malone/Steevens choice of "Shakspeare" was derived from the tomb inscription and is linked to a claim on both historical authenticity and the 'authoritative' nature of the inscription. But I can't assert that in the text, of course. But it is clearly important in that it marks a move towards the Romantic/Victorian preference for the version "traced by his own hand". What is interesting here is the historical conflict between impulses to 'standardisation', 'modernisation' and 'authenticity'. This, of course, runs through all editorial work on historical literature. The story of the name brings that out. My experience is that solid, historically accurate articles make it easier to flush out the dreck. It would be nice to know when "Shakespeare" became the standard. Was there some agreement at some conference, or did it just happen by implicit consensus? IMO, what the article needs now is more on the Early Modern phase and more on the final standardisation phase, whenever exactly that was (c1930s?). The debates are also clearly linked to speculations about etymology; the rejection of the Enlightenment "Shakespear" spelling also arises from disputes about historical pronunciation. It's interesting that the first promoter of "Shakspere" was preoccupied with Germanic etymologies, possibly prefiguring the Romantic emphasis of Shakespeare's un-French Anglo-Saxon soul. Paul B (talk) 15:45, 1 May 2011 (UTC)

DYK

I nominated this article for DYK. It's very interesting! :) Roscelese (talk ⋅ contribs) 20:56, 2 May 2011 (UTC)

Thank you. Paul B (talk) 12:05, 3 May 2011 (UTC)

SAQ

I notice that the article has two links to the SAQ:

• in the lead, where "someone else wrote the plays" is piped to the SAQ, and
• in the first line of the SAQ section near the end of the article

My feeling is that this is overdoing it and that it would be better to remove both of those links and simply have {{Main|Shakespeare authorship question}} under the SAQ header. Just my opinion. --GuillaumeTell 17:51, 13 May 2011 (UTC)

Well, I don't see why. It's no different from normal linking that applies to all the other wikilinks in the text. WP:OVERLINKING legitimates more than one link in an article as long as they are sufficiently separated. Is it that you don't like the lede link? Paul B (talk) 21:14, 13 May 2011 (UTC)

What I meant was that it would be better if the SAQ is more unobtrusive in the article than it is now. Plus the "Main article" link is in accord with similar links at William Shakespeare. But I'm not too bothered one way or the other. --GuillaumeTell 21:37, 13 May 2011 (UTC)

The Gibson Block Quote

FWIW, I tried to get the Gibson block quote to show up as a block quote, which it never, apparently, did, though that was the intention. But I failed. The wrapping of the text around the image seems to interfere with the indentation. Might be some kind of a bug. Anyway, most important is that it shows up as a quotation, so I made it a regular one. --Alan W (talk) 07:22, 25 May 2011 (UTC)

Yeah, there's known issues with blockquotes and left-aligned images. IIRC there's a template precisely to fix this. I can take a look later today if nobody figures it out before (right now I'm rushing out the door). --Xover (talk) 08:04, 25 May 2011 (UTC)

 Done. For reference, the template in question is {{Imagequote}}. --Xover (talk) 14:31, 25 May 2011 (UTC)

Great. I'd seen that problem, but the other solutions were to move the image to the right, which created a rather ugly line of images, or expand the text so that the blockquote or {{quote format dropped below the image (I'd initially used blockquote, then changed to "{{quote", but it made no difference). I don't want to do either. In the latter case that was because I wanted to keep the SAQ stuff as a small portion of the article. But if the section does get expanded or reorganised we should revert to the old format because the new one seems to retain a deep inset even when free-hanging below the image. Thanks for the effort. Paul B (talk) 16:54, 25 May 2011 (UTC)

Yeah, for stupid technical reasons what's actually happening here is that the blockquote box (the paragraph is conceptually a box to the web browser) has an offset of 250 pixels from the left edge of the page, rather than from the right edge of the image. There's no real way to fix this (the behaviour is as specified in the Cascading Style Sheets standard) from the blockquote template. There may be some way to work around it by using a suitable template for the image, but there's no good general solution to this problem. --Xover (talk) 17:10, 25 May 2011 (UTC)

Paul, it's moot now, but I beg to differ that "removing the format does not 'fix' the problem". It fixed it as far as the average reader, who does not worry about templates, but only about appearances, would be concerned. I think that the most important thing is to present it as a quotation. It seemed way off to me when I first read it, as I did not know you were quoting, and the tone seemed unencyclopedic. That is why I came back to it and tried to fix it.

But Xover has truly solved the problem, and we can both be satisfied now. Thank you very much, Xover! I had no idea that there was a specialized template to use here, one that works around this particular problem. I did search for some such thing but came up empty. A little more tweaking now needs to be done, but that is very minor, as you will see. --Alan W (talk) 02:38, 26 May 2011 (UTC)

Removing the format did not, IMO, fix the problem because you removed the inset code and replaced it with inverted commas. Inverted commas in a fully separate paragraph can easily be missed: the reader already sees the separation in the paragraph break. This is quite different from a quotation inset into the a paragraph which is visibly separated by the quotation marks. Removing the inset code did nothing useful as far as I can tell, since it simply meant that the part of the quotation that was hanging below the image was no longer inset, confusing the reader. It also meant that any changes to the paragraph in future - if it were moved, say, or the image moved - would lose the inset. There was simply no gain and only loss in removing the format code. I restored the inset and left the quotation marks in place as a provisional measure, knowing that Xover had said s/he would find the right template later in the day. Since this lasted a matter of hours it's hardly worth getting exercised about, but I still maintain that removing it was a net loss with no discernable gain. Thanks for your copy-editing improvements. Paul B (talk) 08:37, 26 May 2011 (UTC)

Paul, I'm afraid I missed some intermediate edit or edits of yours, and I apologize for that. My own concern was about the way the block quote looked earlier, where it did not look like a quotation at all. When I first read the article, I spent some time puzzling over that, making a mental note to return to see if something should have been quoted and wasn't, or something like that. When I saw that underneath there was a template that should have made it a block quote, I removed that because it didn't seem to have any purpose. I couldn't see any way to force a block quote at that time, so I added the inverted commas/quotation marks so that at least that paragraph would show up as a quotation until someone figured out a solution. You made some other edits to the formatting after that (which you just explained, and undoing those was purely inadvertent on my part) that I did not notice. The main thing to me was to show the passage as a quotation, yet somehow I overlooked that you had yourself restored the quotation marks in some way. I had no idea that you were already awaiting a fix from Xover. Anyhow, a bit of working at cross purposes here, and I'm sorry if I made anything worse and got you a bit riled up. :^) The story has a happy ending, thanks to Xover. And you know that I wouldn't be spending all this time here if I didn't really like what you've done in this article. Very much something worth having, quite apart from any connection with the SAQ, in my opinion. --Alan W (talk) 00:15, 27 May 2011 (UTC)

And, Xover, now that you pointed me in the right direction, I have discovered that there is an {{Imagequote2}} template that is more efficient and easier to use. So I have substituted that one. --Alan W (talk) 03:20, 26 May 2011 (UTC)

copied from Edmond Malone talk page

Paul B.: Going by Spelling of Shakespeare's name (mostly yours, I see, and I very much enjoyed reading it), I modified the caption that indicates that Malone's spelling became the norm. As I interpret what you wrote, it was the norm only, or at least primarily, for scholars in their editions of Shakespeare. This is my experience as well. It certainly does not seem to be the clear norm for more general literary criticism or more popular writings. William Richardson's Essays on Some of Shakespeare's Dramatic Characters (1798) stuck to the First Folio spelling. Hazlitt's Characters spelled it "Shakespear", but Jeffrey reviewing the book had it as "Shakespeare". Coleridge frequently used "Shakspere". And so on. Certainly not the "norm" the way "Shakespeare" is today, even if it was so in a qualified sense. As a norm it seems to have been restricted to scholarly works, for the first one or two decades of the 19th century at least. (I do wonder sometimes if publishers and editors imposed a particular spelling on their authors, as they do today. If Coleridge went over to "Shakspeare", was it a personal choice? Hazlitt went over to "Shakspeare" as well in later criticism, and I suspect that was the choice of his publishers, not the same as that of Characters.)

Xover: As you see, once I saw activity on this page, I found things I could do. In view of Paul's bringing in the name-spelling thing, it occurs to me that the section title "Malone's Shakespeare" should probably be "Malone's Shakspeare", no? I didn't make the change because I don't have the volumes in front of me. (I just thought I downloaded the edition from Google but now see I made a mistake and have a much later edition from someone else.)

Also, the establishing a standard for scholarly spelling of Shakespeare's name is probably important enough to make its way into the article itself. I guess this can be done later, once there is more about Malone as a preeminent Shakesperean scholar.

--Alan W (talk) 23:42, 14 May 2011 (UTC)

I'm sorry, I didn't see you had written this until today. I meant it was the norm for a period from the 1790s to the 1830/40s. However, I am accepting the word of a rather old secondary source for that. I don't really know quite how true it is, since one would have to do a lot of primary research to resolve the matter (and even then, stictly speaking, I couldn't use it on Wikipedia!) Part of the problem with this is that it is very difficult to know when spellings are a matter of personal choice and when they are simply a publisher's decision. Shaw certainly insisted on "Shakespear", but I have no evidence that Hazlitt did. As far as I am aware 'Shakspeare' was the standard spelling for around 30-40 years, but the now-standard 'Shakespeare' spelling never went away. I admit that it's difficult to be clear about this, but I think Coleridge habitually used 'Shakspeare' in manuscripts, but that his major works were published with the 'Shakspere' spelling. I have no evidence that this was his personal decision. Paul B (talk) 08:58, 26 May 2011 (UTC)

Yes, it would be good if we had more support from reliable secondary sources. "Shakspeare" does seem to prevail in the period you point to, but I wouldn't want readers to think that it prevailed to the same extent that "Shakespeare" does today. That seems clear to anyone who has read widely in the literature of the period (as I have, though I don't claim to be an expert by any means; I did teach it for a while, though, in what now seems like a former life). Having worked in publishing for a long time (yes, another life), I know how little say authors can have over spelling, the editors imposing a "house style". My impression is that that sort of thing was beginning to happen in the period in question. Thus, editors might have thought that "Shakspeare" was established by scholarship, and so all other variants got changed by them to that one. This way Hazlitt's "Shakespear" became "Shakspeare" when he switched publishers (and both variants might have been imposed by editors, for all we know). Jeffrey was the editor of the Edinburgh Review, so there I think it reasonable to assume that "Shakespeare" was his own choice as both author and editor. Generally, as you say, it's hard to know who made what choice. And to follow this up in detail no doubt would, as you also say, end up being largely "original research", which of course we can't have. I'm just concerned that calling it the "norm" without qualification would lead readers to suppose that virtually all literate people used that spelling then the way they use "Shakespeare" now. And it doesn't take any real "research", just a superficial reading, to show that that was not at all the case. But if one hasn't done even the superficial reading, as many readers of this article might not have, one might get the wrong idea. Regards, Alan W (talk) 00:46, 27 May 2011 (UTC)

A little curio on this topic: Google Ngram view for: Shakespeare,Shakspeare,Shakspere,Shakespear. It certainly could appear that Malone's publication in 1790 killed off Shakspere after a brief popularity, and bringing Shakspeare to dominance; prevailing until around 1850 or so when Shakespeare began its path to current dominance. Is there perhaps some influential work published around 1850 that might explain it?
@Alan: as previously mentioned, all the sections from London and on are essentially untouched from the original article, so I have no particular view of the choice there. Once I get around to that bit I'll probably make a judgement call—informed by talk page discussions, obviously, if anyone cares enough to put forth an opinion—based on what, say, Martin and Schoenbaum refer to it as. My general principle on these things is to stick with the original spelling (i.e. not modernize it or similar myself) unless it's had enough notice since to have acquired a modernized consensus spelling (i.e. that diverging from the consensus spelling could be argued to be going against the sources cited or borderline original research, etc.). --Xover (talk) 09:04, 28 May 2011 (UTC)

Very interesting little curio, Xover! Of course, it is limited by the choice of books scanned for Google Books, but still very suggestive, and it seems to jibe with what we already believe. As Paul says, "Shakspeare" dominated in the early 19th century, apparently owing to Malone's influence. Still, not the way "Shakespeare" came to dominate in the later 19th and especially in the 20th century. It certainly would be great if we could find out just why "Shakespeare" took the lead after the middle of the 19th century.

Understood that you have not touched much of the article yet, Xover. When you do more, I will be happy to read it and offer what I can from my perspective. Regards, Alan W (talk) 00:04, 29 May 2011 (UTC)

I've just seen this. It's a great diagram! Does anyone mind if I copy this correspondence to the "Spelling" page? It's not really about Malone. The diagram confirms the dates of the "Shakspeare" phase and gives the two expected spikes in the "Shakspere" trend - fitting the two Gentlemen's Magazine debates in the 1780s, following Pinkerton, and 1840s, following Madden's and Hunter's books. It's interesting that the "Shakespeare" spelling increases steadily after that point. My guess is that's because the arguments for "Shakespeare" after the debate of the 1840s convinced most editors/writers - but that's just a guess. There's an intriguing third "Shakspere" spike during the 1940s, which I'm guessing is related to anti-Strat publications, but maybe it's some odd spin-off of patriotic wartime references to Shakespeare. Paul B (talk) 15:11, 15 June 2011 (UTC)

Yes, fascinating, isn't it? (To those of us interested in such stuff. I've seen these variant spellings for years without really thinking what might lie behind their use.) No objection from me, Paul, if you want to copy any of this to the "Spelling" page. This discussion certainly is more relevant there, though not entirely without its point here, since Malone was, as you have found, responsible for part of the naming trend. --Alan W (talk) 03:24, 16 June 2011 (UTC)

Another intriguing aspect is the absence of spikes for "Shakespear". Maybe that's because the sheer number of publications in the 18th century was so low that none of the do much more than bump along the bottom. It rises and falls along with others, but generally remains bottom of the pile, with a slight rise in the early 20th C - which I guess is due to G.B.S. Paul B (talk) 18:32, 17 June 2011 (UTC)

Not that I like being a wet blanket, but let's not forget that that diagram depends on the mundane fact of what books Google Books has scanned for its collection. They just may not have happened to scan that many 18th-century publications. And there are probably quite a few books and periodicals mentioning Shakespeare in that and later centuries that they have not, at least not yet, scanned. I think the diagram is of value in its corroboration of other findings in a graphic way; but we have to be cautious about accepting it uncritically. --Alan W (talk) 03:20, 18 June 2011 (UTC)

Oh, it's not just that the sample size may be small, it's a matter of how it was selected: Google Books has scanned the 18th-century books that were significant enough to keep in libraries for centuries. The two Malone editions are likely to have been kept in far more libraries than, say, Capell's or Ritson's was. Of course, one may argue that “…of works significant enough to be kept in libraries” is in fact a reasonable selection criterium here, but any conclusions would have to be qualified ones. --Xover (talk) 09:11, 18 June 2011 (UTC)

Of course I'm certainly not suggesting that it be used as a source! This is just talk speculation. Paul B (talk) 21:30, 18 June 2011 (UTC)

Back to "Shakespeare"

Well, I finally found the "missing link", a reliable source with more concrete information about how "Shakespeare" came to be the dominant spelling, and I have added to this article accordingly. (I might never have found it had I not decided to hunt for that citation that Tom recently requested on the SAQ page.) I also just looked back at that Google Ngram that Xover came up with, and it seems to corroborate quite well what I discovered. Cheers, Alan W (talk) 07:51, 14 November 2011 (UTC)

James Shapiro's Theory About Typesetting - Proposed Deletion

I really cannot understand how this is plausible or should be included in the article:

James S. Shapiro argues that Shakespeare's name was a "typesetter's nightmare" if the spelling without the central "e" is adopted. This is because the conjunction of letters in moveable type is liable to damage the type, "When setting a "k" followed by a long "s" in italic font—with the name Shakspeare, for example—the two letters could easily collide and the font might snap". He suggests that this is one reason why the form with the "e" in the centre is most commonly used, and why it is sometimes hyphenated.[10]

The first two examples of "Shakespeare" in print were Venus and Adonis and Rape of Lucrece. The name is not in italic font and they are spelled with an "e". If there *is* an "e", even if it were in italic font, there wouldn't be a need for a hyphen, if the theory about typesetting were true. But there are several examples of the name hyphenated with an "e" with non-italic font, for instance. the title page of Shakespeare's Sonnets and the name "William Shake-speare" on Lover's Complaint in the same book. The 1608 King Lear Quarto has a hyphen but no "e" but it is non-italic lettering. So this thing written by Shapiro doesn't seem to relate at all to the bibliographic evidence.

So I propose this be deleted unless people can find other independent citations that make this argument more clearly based on a thorough evaluation of the evidence. A single source can't be relied upon for such a radical and unlikely claim, especially when they don't provide any evidence backing up their assertion.

Kfein (talk) 17:08, 5 October 2019 (UTC)

I shortened the Shapiro stuff, but I think it should be completely deleted. Unless another independent source can be found that offers the same argument, since the argument is obviously false, it really should be deleted. I don't know how to prove a negative here.

Kfein (talk) 01:58, 17 October 2019 (UTC)

IIRC, that argument was first made by A.L. Rowse, but I can't find a cite (and really I haven't looked, because you're correct: it's a bogus argument contradicted by the textual evidence). Tom Reedy (talk) 06:39, 20 October 2019 (UTC)

Bogus or not, your WP:OR is not the basis of deleting it. Find a WP:RS to justify your proposed action. I saw an article proposing this (It wasn't Shapiro's and I don't think it was Rouse -- I thought it was in a typography journal or something) but you should be able to track it down if you find the original source. Bomagosh (talk) 15:55, 9 January 2020 (UTC)

"By me William Shakspeare"

I noticed that the "by me" part is on the list of signatures. I would rather chop the part off in order for the signature listed match the other signatures also listed. 3461x (talk) 07:56, 28 September 2024 (UTC)

It does seem that, owing to the scarcity of Shakespeare's signatures, the "by me" part is also given in discussions elsewhere. Other contributors to this page know far more than I about this matter. I wonder if anyone else has any thoughts about this? --Alan W (talk) 13:55, 28 September 2024 (UTC)