4. On Early Modern Spelling and Shakespeare

And why it didn't matter.

This post is brought to you by Philip Womback. Or Whomack. Wammuck, Wommock, Wommocke, or even Wembok.

All of the above are spellings used by early bearers of the surname Womack, from Johannes Wombock (John Womack) in 14th century Yorkshire, down through to the 17th century, when Bishop Laurence Womack quite happily used several variants without anyone minding, and the Westminster Abbey website records it as both Womack and Womock. I have even heard that it was sometimes spelled Hummock, and though I’ve never seen the evidence, I can well believe it. As for my first name: maybe that should be Phillip, or Filip, or even Felip?

Early Modern spellings were not a settled thing. Dip into any set of letters from the 16th and 17th centuries, and you’ll see variants for even common words like, well, “like”, which can sometimes be spelled “leke”. This is partly because of different accents, and partly because spellings hadn’t been standardised.

William Shakespeare’s name was not a particularly common one; the Oxford Dictionary of Family names gives Hugo Shakspere, a fellow of Merton College in 1487, as an early example of the bearer of the name. (Incidentally, the word ‘spear’ itself was spelled ‘spere’ and ‘speir’ at various points in time, until it settled in its current position.) It also records that poor old Hugo changed his name, as it has a “lewd” significance: perhaps he got fed up with naughty undergraduates making fun of him.

And so we have many variant spellings of the name as associated with the Shakespeare family. Will’s baptismal entry reads ‘Guilelmus filius Johannes Shakespere’ (there is an error in the Latin: Johannes should be genitive, not nominative). We also have Shakespear, Shakspeare, Shackspeare, and Shakspere, amonst others, including the rather lovely Shaxberd (you can hear an accent in there). Sometimes the “s” in the middle is long; sometimes, though rarely, there’s a hyphen, Shak-spear. The most important thing to grasp is that all of these spellings are signs pointing towards a single morpheme, or unit of meaning: the surname that all who heard it would understand as what we now spell “Shakespeare”.

Modern readers can find this wild variety somewhat puzzling, and it’s become something of a breeding ground for outlandish conspiracy theories, particularly to do with the hyphen. However, in reality, there is nothing puzzling or strange about either the variant spellings or the hyphen. It was relatively common to split up names that could fall into two words with hyphens (eg, Old-castle); the Shakespeare scholar James Shapiro has also suggested that it was done to keep the letters apart and prevent the font from breaking.

We also only have to look at other playwrights of the period. Christopher Marlowe’s name appears as Marley, Marlo, Marley, Marlin, Merling, and Morley. Again, you can hear regional variations in the spellings, and also you can hear how easily one might fold into another. Thomas Dekker’s name appears as Dekker, Decker, Deckar, Deckers, Dicker, Dickers, Dyckers, and even Dickens. Again, the sounds easily elide into each other, and you can imagine a scribe putting it down as he thought it should be written. Even good old Thomas Middleton, whose name you would have thought would be straightforward, appears as Thomas Midleton. Should we be looking for another fellow called Midleton, or should we be positing that some mysterious other person was using Middleton as a front? The answer is: no, we shouldn’t, and nor should we when it comes to any other playwright.

Eventually, Will’s surname settled into Shakespeare; but we might well have ended up with Shakspeare, as Dr Jonson has it (as recorded in Boswell’s famous biography). The standardised spelling is a convenience: and there is nothing more to it than that.