Shakespeare

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Elizabethans were as free with their handwriting as they were with their spelling. Handbooks of handwriting suggested up to twenty different – often very different – ways of shaping particular letters. Depending on one’s taste, for instance, a letter d could look like a figure eight, a diamond with a tail, a circle with a curlicue, or any of fifteen other shapes. A’s could look like h’s, e’s like o’s, f’s like s’s and l’s – in fact, nearly every letter could look like nearly every other. Complicating matters further is the fact that court cases were recorded in a distinctive lingua franca known as court hand – ‘a peculiar clerical Latin that no Roman could read’, Thomas told me, smiling. ‘It used English word order but incorporated an arcane vocabulary and idiosyncratic abbreviations. Even clerks struggled with it because when cases got really complicated or tricky, they would often switch to English for convenience.’

Although Thomas knew he had the right page and had studied the document many times, it took him a good minute or more to find the line referring to ‘John Shappere alias Shakespere’ of ‘Stratford upon Haven’, accusing him of usury. The document is of considerable importance to Shakespeare scholars, for it helps to explain why in 1576, when Will was twelve years old, his father abruptly retired from public life (about which more in due course), but it was only found in 1983 by a researcher named Wendy Goldsmith.

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