R
Robert Harrison
Guest
All indications are that the spellings "Shakespeare" and "Shakspere" (and their variants) did not represent a consistent pronunciation difference, despite our intuition based on modern spelling rules. The foremost authority on the subject, Fausto Cercignani, says in Shakespeare's Works and Elizabethan Pronunciation (p. 1) that "we do not even know how Shakespeare pronounced his own surname, since the first part of his signature (Shakspere and Shakspeare) may imply either the antecedent of present shake or a variant pronounced like shack, while both -spere and -speare may conceal either the antecedent of present spear or a form rhyming with pear." It is entirely possible that the name was pronounced differently in Stratford and London, and this may be one more factor among several contributing to the greater occurrence of "Shak-"-type spellings in Stratford. (Though recall that in London, "Shake-"-type spellings were used more often in non-literary referernces to "the Stratford man" than in literary references to Shakespeare.) If we look at Stratford and London references separately, though, the distribution of "Shake-" and "Shak-" spellings gives no indication that they represented any consistent difference in pronunciation
Robert
Robert