Here I must endeavour to summarise what Mr. Greenwood has written {11a} on the name of the actor, and the “nom de plume” of the unknown author who, by the theory, was not the actor.  Let me first confess my firm belief that there is no cause for all the copious writing about the spellings “Shakespeare” or “Shake-speare”—­as indicating the true but “concealed poet”—­and “Shakspere” (&c.), as indicating the Warwickshire rustic.  At Stratford and in Warwickshire the clan-name was spelled in scores of ways, was spelled in different ways within a single document.  If the actor himself uniformly wrote “Shakspere” (it seems that we have but five signatures), he was accustomed to seeing the name spelled variously in documents concerning him and his affairs.  In London the printers aimed at a kind of uniformity, “Shakespeare” or “Shake-speare”:  and even if he wrote his own name otherwise, to him it was indifferent.  Lawyers and printers might choose their own mode of spelling—­and there is no more in the matter.

I must now summarise briefly, in my own words, save where quotations are indicated in the usual way, the results of Mr. Greenwood’s researches.  “The family of William Shakspere of Stratford” (perhaps it were safer to say “the members of his name”) “wrote their name in many different ways—­some sixty, I believe, have been noted . . . but the form ‘Shakespeare’ seems never to have been employed by them”; and, according to Mr. Spedding, “Shakspere of Stratford never so wrote his name ‘in any known case.’” (According to many Baconians he never wrote his name in his life.) On the other hand, the dedications of Venus and Adonis (1593) and of Lucrece (1594) are inscribed “William Shakespeare” (without the hyphen).  In 1598, the title-page of Love’s Labour’s Lost “bore the name W. Shakespere,” while in the same year Richard ii and Richard iii bear “William Shake-speare,” with the hyphen (not without it, as in the two dedications by the Author).  “The name which appears in the body of the conveyance and of the mortgage bearing” (the actor’s) “signature is ‘Shakespeare,’ while ‘Shackspeare’ appears in the will, prepared, as we must presume, by or under the directions of Francis Collyns, the Stratford solicitor, who was one of the witnesses thereto” (and received a legacy of 13 pounds, 6s. 8d.).

Thus, at Stratford even, the name was spelled, in legal papers, as it is spelled in the two dedications, and in most of the title-pages—­ and also is spelled otherwise, as “Shackspeare.”  In March 1594 the actor’s name is spelled “Shakespeare” in Treasury accounts.  The legal and the literary and Treasury spellings (and conveyances and mortgages and wills are not literature) are Shakespeare, Shackspeare, Shake-speare, Shakespere—­all four are used, but we must regard the actor as never signing “Shakespeare” in any of these varieties of spelling—­if sign he ever did; at all events he is not known to have used the A in the last syllable.