⬆️William Shakespeare=William+Shakes+peare(though the “e” is a bit redundant).
Has anyone thought about the true meaning of Shakespeare’s name? The picture above is just a funny picture of jokes. So what’s the true secret?
The name “Shakespeare” has two parts:SHAKE +SPEAR. The word “shake” means to wave or to brandish(a sword or something). The last part “spear” is a weapon, like a long sharp stick used in fights. So if we put them together, it will create a phrase:”shake-spear”or”the one who shakes the spear”. It was a descriptive name given to an ancestor—a man who was probably a soldier or good at fighting with a spear.
Actually, there is something very interesting about how Shakespeare writes his own name.
In old documents, his signatures look very different, like:
● Shakspere
● Shakespere
● Shakspeare
The modern spelling we use now was decided later by printers and book editors, not by him.
Even big and famous writers can make mistakes(such like these low-level mistakes).
Nice meme! Last year somebody drew a ‘shake+spear’ cartoon similar to that ‘shakes+pear’ meme 😁
Regarding the spelling discrepancies, English spelling wasn’t standardised until Dr Johnson’s famous dictionary (worth researching) and even then it continued to evolve to its present form. As you probably know, there are lots of very different regional accents in England and this is part of the reason for the variation in spelling.
It is interesting that Shakespeare spelled his own name differently at different times. Nowadays there are different versions of standardised spelling (e.g. UK vs US) that are generally considered to be correct, but a typical English teacher won’t be happy to see the same word spelled differently in the same piece of writing. So, for example, if you choose to spell ‘colour’ with a ‘u’ like I do, you couldn’t write it ‘color’ without the ‘u’ later in your writing, and vice versa. We like consistency, even if this doesn’t seem to have been important to Shakespeare 😁
Thanks for commenting, Dr. Terret! I appreciate your input and the new information you shared! I will continue researching about Shakespeare!
P.S. I also write “color” with a “u” too.