Do Shakspere's signatures suggest that he was illiterate?

The controversy over the authorship of William Shakespeare's classic works has Oxfordians questioning the literacy of Shakspere based on his six known signatures, while Stratfordians suggest that Shakspere never signed the signatures in question. Oxfordians believe that since Shakspere could barely write his name, then he could not have been the same author who "never blotted a line" (Mitchell 98). Stratfordians state that Shakspere's lawyer and various law clerks signed the documents on behalf of the author.

The controversy has arisen because it is not known that Shakspere ever owned a book, wrote a letter, or possessed the manuscripts of the plays and sonnets which he was supposed to have written. The four surviving documents in question contain six partly legible signatures of Shakspere, each spelled in a different manner.

Oxfordians state that the poor penmanship and the fact that Shakspere never developed a standard signature proves that Shakspere was illiterate. Stratfordians contend that Shakspere's will and the three other documents were signed by Shakspere's lawyer, Francis Collins, and various law clerks. In Mitchell's WhoWrote Shakespeare? Sir Hilary Jenkinson, an expert on Elizabethan handwriting, discovered that it was a practice for law clerks in the 1600's to sign court documents themselves and this accounts for the different signatures. The other three documents are two mortgage deeds from Shakspere's Blackfriars property and a deposition from the case of Bellot v. Mountjoy in 1612.

--William T. Felvey

Sources:

Matus, Irvin Leigh. Shakespeare, In Fact. New York: Continuum, 1994. 41.

Michell, John F. Who Wrote Shakespeare? New York: Thames & Hudson, 1996. 41, 98, 101.

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