ABSTRACT
This chapter presents an extract from an article published in Scribner’s Monthly, 12 (1876). If we had, as we ought to have, one alphabetic character for each English sound, as a reasonable people should, of course it would be easy enough to spell Sh-k-sp-r-’s name, or, for that matter, any other name. Sh-a-k; s-p-e-r; thus it is Shaksper. Mr. George Wise has, in a little treatise on “The Autograph of William Shakespeare,” given us “four thousand ways of spelling the name according to English orthography. Richard Grant White also enumerates some of the ways in which the name is actually spelled in the old documents in which it occurs. The fashion has set first toward Shakespeare; then toward Shakespear; then toward Shakspeare; and then toward Shakespeare again. Recently, however, a tendency may be noted toward the spelling which Charles Knight and Mary Cowden Clarke had adopted, before Mr. Furnival’s examination of the autographs—namely: Shakspere.
