Shakespearean e with an accent mark full#
Shakespearean e with an accent mark series#

While Kathman terms those with the e “literary” and those without the e, “non-literary,” a more precise designation would be those derived from London (with e) and those from Stratford (without e) this because the London spelling has been exactly the same ever 1598 when it first appeared on the title pages of the second editions of Richard III and Richard II, while every version found in the Stratford archives up to that point, however extravagant the spelling, shows the s (or x or g) followed immediately by the k. This is an obvious division since the spelling used by the London printers on the plays of Shakespeare, always includes an e after the k, while in all the earlier Stratford spellings there is no e in the first syllable.

Shakespearean e with an accent mark full#

Readers interested in following Whalen’s arguments (and Kathman’s) in full can read them online where they present them better than I can here.įor purposes of comparison, Kathman chooses to separate the various spellings of the name into two groups defined by whether or not the letter k is followed by an e. Like that of the first little pig, Kathman’s house is made of straw, and Whalen goes far to blow it away. Data itself is neutral if a question is asked in the right way, it provides an appropriate answer, solid, reliable like the house of the third little pig, it’s made of bricks. While sounding impressive, it seems that it’s yet another case of we used to call GIGO, Garbage In––Garbage Out. Whalen finds, not surprisingly, that Kathman’s methodology is skewed. One Stratfordian who has given the spelling issue his attention is David Kathman, a securities analyst cum Shakespeare scholar, who explains how he arrived at this conclusion on his website: The Shakespeare Authorship Question (which he “dedicates” to the delicate sarcasm that “Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare”). Those who have dealt with it assume that the two spellings are variations of the same name, meaning that both represent the same individual and therefore the illiterate William of Stratford and the genius who wrote Hamlet must, ipso facto, be one and the same.

Shakespearean e with an accent mark series#

In a recent article in the online authorship journal Brief Chronicles, journalist and independent scholar Richard Whalen, editor of a series of Shakespeare plays richly annotated with Oxfordian data, examines the question of why generations of Stratford scribes spelled William’s surname Shakspere when it was spelled Shakespeare on the title pages of the plays, an issue that academics generally deal with, as they do with so much else, by simply ignoring it. This would explain why, in Warwickshire, before the 1590s, the name was invariably spelled so that it would be pronounced with a short a, Shaks-peer or Shax-pyeer, or Shagspyeer.

And since Warwickshire is centrally located within the geographic area known as “the Norman diaspora,” it’s more likely than not that the name originated in northern France, from whence it came over with the Norman Conquest along with William’s ancestor, a laborer named Jacques-Pierre (a frequent given name for French Catholics since both James and Peter invoke the apostolic founder of the Roman Church). Still, even in Renaissance England 83 different spellings might suggest a particular uniqueness about this name and its origin. Chambers ( Facts and Problems: 2.371-4), hasn’t raised many eyebrows. So the fact that it’s been spelled in as many as 83 different ways in Warwickshire, according to E.K. It may be that no one pays much attention to the spelling issue since English spelling in William’s time was all over the place, particularly when it came to proper names. Then why when the Lord Chamberlain’s Men decided, finally, to put the Stratford playwright’s name on the plays, was it not spelled like it was in his “hometown” of Stratford? Attempts to link it to medieval nicknames like Breakspear or Longspear have mostly failed to catch on with either side (perhaps merely shaking a spear just doesn’t seem sufficiently impressive to rate a cognomen). It’s a rather odd name, actually, when compared with most English names from that period. One of the ongoing word battles between authorship scholars and academics turns on the spelling of the name Shakespeare.