Note 56 — BEN JONSON AND SHAKESPEARE BEN JONSON AND SHAKESPEARE[44]

It cannot be proved that Shakspere ever spelt his name Shakespeare. Shakspere seems to be the form he preferred. Probably however, both he and his illiterate father Shaxper, Shaksper, Shakspear, or what not, were anything but fastidious about spellings. Persons who happen to be interested in the Shakspere family’s fifty or sixty ways of spelling their name will thank me for referring them to Sir George Greenwood’s Shakespeare Problem where they will find it stated that “the form Shakespeare seems never to have been employed by them.” Among examples of destructive criticism of the Stratford theory, I know not one so exhaustive and deadly as this of Sir G. Greenwood’s. In my Shakespeare-Bacon Essay, Shakspere, his irredeemably vulgar Will, and other doings, are relegated to an appendix.