Ciekawostka: Shakespeare spelled his OWN name several different ways

Evidence: 69 • authority: 72

The spelling of William Shakespeare's name has varied over time. It was not consistently spelled any single way during his lifetime (1564–1616), including by Shakespeare himself, in manuscript or in printed form; historians note that this was not unusual for documents in the Elizabethan era. After his death, the name was spelled variously by editors of his work, and there was no fixed spelling until well into the 20th century. The standard spelling of the surname as "Shakespeare" was the most common published form in Shakespeare's lifetime, but it was not one of the inconsistent variations used in his own handwritten signatures. It was, however, the spelling used as a printed signature to t…

Evidence: 59 • authority: 90

Shakespeare’s Name. Shakespeare played with his own name. Not only in the sonnets, but also with characters named William in the plays can we detect self-parody by Shakespeare. Made up as it is of two intelligible one syllable English words, the name Shakespeare was subject to another kind of variation, again due to whimsical spelling. Shakespeare created a number of important characters for his plays with names like his own—made up of two monosyllabic English words. Not only did Shakespeare change the name Oldcastle to Falstaff, but he publicly apologized for the knight’s earlier name. Falstaff function for Hal in the Henry IV plays is, we can conjecture, rather a bit like Shakespeare’s mu…

Evidence: 49 • authority: 92

Why Molière most likely did write his plays.. As for Shakespeare, a hard-fought debate has emerged about Molière, a supposedly uneducated actor who, according to some, could not have written the masterpieces attributed to him. In the past decades, the century-old thesis according to which Pierre Corneille would be their actual author has become popular, mostly because of new works in computational linguistics. These results are reassessed here through state-of-the-art attribution methods. We study a corpus of comedies in verse by major authors of Molière and Corneille's time. Analysis of lexicon, rhymes, word forms, affixes, morphosyntactic sequences, and function words do not give any clue…

Evidence: 49 • authority: 92

Changes in the length of speeches in the plays of William Shakespeare and his contemporaries: A mixed models approach.. Since 2007 a number of investigators have compiled statistics on the length in words of speeches in plays by William Shakespeare and his contemporaries, focusing on a change to shorter speeches around 1600. In this article we take account of several potentially confounding factors in the variation of speech lengths in these works and present a model of this variation in the period 1538-1642 through Linear Mixed Models. We confirm that the mode of speech lengths in English plays changed from nine words to four words around 1600, and that Shakespeare's plays fit this wider p…

Evidence: — • authority: 35