ABSTRACT
This chapter is about what Shakespeare looks like when he is written down. Spelling is a main topic, but we shall also be looking at punctuation and the use of some letters of the alphabet. Where Shakespeare's texts are concerned, we need to remember that the user may very well not be the writer himself, but some of the many hands involved in the transmission process. When a language is just beginning to come into accepted use, very few rules for matters like spelling and punctuation will have been established by the community. One huge force for standardisation did occur in the mid fourteen hundreds the invention by the German Johannes Gutenberg of the first movable type printing press. The comma, for example, is often used to separate phrases, the semicolon can divide clauses; and, of course, the full stop marks the end of a sentence. This grammatical use can be certainly found of punctuation in Shakespeare's day.
