ABSTRACT
Correct spelling is generally thought of as the hallmark of literacy, and yet not only have many great writers, including Keats and Jane Austen, been poor spellers but some of the greatest, including Shakespeare, did not possess the concept of standardized spelling at all. As Samuel Johnson admits in the Preface to his great Dictionary of the English Language, sticking to ‘particular combinations of letters’ is not an essential component of effective writing. This will seem less surprising if we remember that spelling is simply a system of conventions for indicating (rather than actually reproducing) the sounds of speech and is not something inherent in the nature or meanings of words. There was no practical need for ‘correct’, as opposed to phonetically comprehensible, spelling until people began to arrange words and names in alphabetical order. The thirty-four versions of the name Shakespeare used by the poet’s family ranged from Chacsper to Shaxspere, taking in such variants as Shackspire, Shagspere and Shakysper along the way.1 This doesn’t tell us that the entire Shakespeare clan was dyslexic but simply that the phone-book and the library catalogue had yet to be invented. In fact, the first English dictionary, Robert Cawdrey’s A Table Alphabeticall of Hard Usual English Words, was not
published until 1604, when Shakespeare himself was forty years old, and even that, despite its title, was not arranged in strictly alphabetical order. There were, in fact, some sensible reasons why the scribes and printers of the past chose not to adopt a single mandatory spelling for each word in the English language. Before the Norman conquest, monastic scribes did adhere to quite strict spelling conventions, but their work was mainly intended for a local readership and reflected local pronunciation. English spelling began to be standardized at the end of the fifteenth century with the introduction of printing, although unfortunately this had the effect of fixing the written form of the language at a time when it was undergoing the major changes known as the great vowel shift. Elizabethan scholars further complicated matters by introducing new etymological spellings to reflect what they took to be the Greek or Latin derivations of words, many of which had in fact come into English via Old French. During this period, printers deliberately made use of variant spellings in order to justify their pages (give them a fairly uniform right-hand margin).
