William Shakespeare signature

Who William Shakespeare was

William Shakespeare was baptised in Stratford-upon-Avon in April 1564 and died there in April 1616. In between he became an actor, a shareholder in the company known first as the Lord Chamberlain’s Men and later the King’s Men, and the author of the plays and poems that have been read and staged ever since.

For all that he wrote, almost nothing survives in his own hand. That is why the few signatures we do have have been studied so closely.

The story of the signature

Only six signatures are generally accepted as Shakespeare’s, and every one of them is on a legal document from the last years of his life: his deposition in the lawsuit Bellott v. Mountjoy (1612), the purchase deed and the mortgage for a gatehouse in the Blackfriars district of London (1613), and the three pages of his will (1616). No letter or play manuscript signed by him is known.

The spellings differ. On the deposition he wrote a short form usually read as “Willm Shakp”; the deeds and the will have longer forms close to “Shakspere”, and the last page of the will reads “By me William Shakspeare”. English spelling was not fixed at the time, and legal clerks and signers abbreviated freely, so the variety is not mysterious. The two 1613 signatures were also squeezed onto the narrow parchment strips that carried the seals, which left little room.

All six are in English secretary hand, the everyday script of Tudor and Jacobean England. Several of its letters look strange to a modern eye, which is why the signatures can be hard to read without practice. The will signatures are often described as less steady than the earlier ones; that is an observation, and any link to his health is guesswork.

The deposition and the will are held by The National Archives in Kew. Many scholars also believe that three pages of the play manuscript Sir Thomas More, in the British Library, are in Shakespeare’s hand (“Hand D”), partly on the strength of comparison with these six signatures, but the attribution is not universally accepted.

What makes it distinctive

How to give your signature a similar feel

• Open the Type tab of the signature generator and try a thin, slightly uneven font such as Zeyada or Herr Von Muellerhoff. Keep the Slant slider low: the originals are fairly upright.
• Shorten your first name the way a clerk would, “Wm” for William or “Thos” for Thomas, then write the surname in full. It feels period-correct without copying anyone.
• Skip the underline and the paraph. These signatures are plain names on legal documents, and the effect comes from the letterforms, not from decoration.
• If you prefer the Draw tab, write slowly. The pad reacts to speed, and slower strokes give the heavier, deliberate line of a quill on parchment.

Where to see the original

These links lead to archives, libraries, museums and Wikimedia Commons.

• Wikimedia Commons: Shakespeare’s signature on his 1612 deposition (from E. M. Thompson, 1916)
• Wikimedia Commons: the signature on the third page of his will, 1616 (from Sidney Lee, 1899)