page_title: Shakespeare's handwriting
section_title: Signatures
hierarchical_section_title: Shakespeare's handwriting / Signatures
caption_attribution_description: English: seals of Shakespeare, photographed and published in the 19th century
context_page_description: William Shakespeare's handwriting is known from six surviving signatures, all of which appear on legal documents. It is believed by many scholars that the three pages of the handwritten manuscript of the play Sir Thomas More are also in William Shakespeare's handwriting.
context_section_description: There are six surviving signatures, attached to four legal documents, that are generally recognised as authentic:
  a deposition in the Bellott v Mountjoy case, dated 11 May 1612
  the purchase of a house in Blackfriars, London, dated 10 March 1613
  the mortgage of the same house, dated 11 March 1613
  his Last Will and Testament, which contains three signatures, one on each page, dated 25 March 1616
  The signatures appear as follows:
  Willm Shakp
  William Shakspēr
  Wᵐ Shakspē
  William Shakspere
  Willm Shakspere
  By me William Shakspeare
  The first signature includes a short horizontal stroke above the letter "m" and a horizontal stroke or flourish in the stem of the letter "p", which may be read as "per" or, less likely, as an indication of abbreviation. The fifth signature also contains a horizontal stroke above the letter "m". All of his signatures are written in his native English script, which he would have learned as a young boy in school. He used the long Italian cursive letter "s" in the center of his surname, a concession to the new style, except for the fifth signature, in which he reverts to the native English long "s".
  Three of these signatures are abbreviated versions of the surname, using breviographic conventions of the time, which was common practice. For example, Edmund Spenser sometimes wrote his name out in full (spelling his first name Edmund or Edmond), but often used the abbreviated forms "Ed: spser" or "Edm: spser". The signatures on the Blackfriar's document may have been abbreviated because they had to be squeezed into the small space provided by the seal-tag, which they were legally authenticating.
  The three signatures on the will were first reproduced by the 18th-century scholar George Steevens, who copied them as accurately as he could by hand and then had his drawings engraved. The facsimiles were first printed in the 1778 edition of Shakespeare's plays, edited by Steevens and Samuel Johnson. The publication of the signatures led to a controversy about the proper spelling of Shakespeare's name. The paleographer Edward Maunde Thompson later criticised the Steevens transcriptions, arguing that his original drawings were inaccurate.
  The two signatures relating to the house sale were identified in 1768 and acquired by David Garrick, who presented them to Steevens' colleague Edmond Malone. By the later nineteenth century the signatures had been photographed. Photographs of these five signatures were published by Sidney Lee.
  The final signature, on the Bellott v Mountjoy deposition, was discovered by 1909 by Charles William Wallace. It was first published by him in the March 1910 issue of Harper's Magazine and reprinted in the October 1910 issue of Nebraska University Studies.
caption: The Blackfriars signatures are fitted into the narrow space of the seal holder
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