Hi,
I’m trying to find out if the OED still spells Shakespeare as Shakspere?
I look forward to your feedback.
davidmich
No. It’s spelt Shakespeare.
I was going to reply that it’s a Proper Noun - and therefore we shouldn’t expect to even find it in the dictionary, but of course it’s entered the language as a term in its own right - as an ordinary noun (the OED uses the example " Humboldt is the Shakespear of travellers" -spelling different here because this is a quotation from somewhere) and as a verb (“Madame de Navarro has declaimed, spouted, statuesqued, Shakespeared, and all the rest of it.”)
If I remember correctly there are a number of different spellings of the name, all from his own hand.
In the late 16th century, spelling was far from universal. People just wrote down what they heard, and it seems that no one worried about it too much. It was a century later that Samuel Johnson published his Dictionary of the English Language.
In Bill Brysn’s “Mother Tongue” p. 116 it says “Shakspere is the spelling insisted on by the Oxford English Dictionary”. I do not have an OED, which is why I’m asking the question. I’m aware that Shakespeare spelled his name 6 different ways and never as Shakespeare. If anyone has an OED I’d certainly like to know if OED had revised their previous spelling. After all everyone spells it Shakespeare these days.
davidmich
Nor is it surprising that they’ve abandoned the ‘Shakspere’ spelling. The entry on ‘Shaksperian’, published in 1914 in the original volume 8, explained that they had adopted ‘Shakspere’ as the spelling because they accepted the arguments of Sir Frederic Madden. But Madden’s theory was based on the authenticity of the inscription in a copy of Florio’s translation of Montaigne, which is now generally considered to be a forgery.
And, yes, they do now spell it ‘Shakespeare’
I’ve got an older copy - I’ll check tonight.
Bill Bryson is not known for being scrupulously accurate with the facts, so I won’t be very surprised if he’s wrong here.
This may be a rare case when Bryson deserves to be given the benefit of the doubt.
‘Shakspere’ was indeed the preferred spelling for the first edition of the OED but they changed over to ‘Shakespeare’ for the 1989 second edition. Bryson first published Mother Tongue in 1990, so it is entirely possible that the statement was true when he was writing. But if so, it was already out-of-date by the time it was published. (One does have to wonder about the sense in writing a popular book about the English language when the new edition of the OED was so imminent.)
Yes. “Mother Tongue” has quite a few inaccuracies. I practically skipped over the section on Chinese because it’s full of inaccuracies.
davidmich
This ignores the actual history of dictionaries, which often doubled as encyclopedias and atlases. You would very much expect to find places and people in older dictionaries, because they informed you how to spell them and how to pronounce them - exactly what you want from a dictionary.
One of the major complaints about Webster’s Third in 1961 - other than the change to descriptive from prescriptive - was the removal of 250,000 entries of this type to make room for 100,000 newer words.
Johnson was two centuries later - late 18th century.
No. The CD ROM OED does not contain Shakespere, I just checked it.
The only paper edition I’ve got is the 1989 7th Edition Concise - which defines ‘Shakespearean’, but nothing else.
Some dictionaries do have proper nouns. The American Heritage, for example, includes famous people and geographic places among its entries.
My Compact OED with a copyright of 1971 and a last print date of 1980 uses “SHAKS” as the abbreviation for various citation, but at the back of the book, under the “Books Quoted” section, the spelling is “Shakespeare.”