Shakespeare’s Orthography in Venus and Adonis and Some Early Quartos

Summary

When the word orthographie came into English via French in the late Middle Ages, it meant ‘right writing’. As late as 1640 Simon Daines in Orthoepia Anglicana so defined it, and distinguished it from orthoepie, or ‘right speaking’. Most of Daines’s section on Orthography deals with capital letters, punctuation, elision, etc. Grammarians of an earlier generation, such as Hart and Bullokar, seemed to give to orthography a more restricted meaning (one favoured by the New English Dictionary), viz. “that part of grammar that determines the value of letters, individually or in combination, in making sounds or words”. This was nothing more nor less than spelling, which Hart and Bullokar realized needed reform and regularity. They failed in their proposals because writers and printers ignored them as the figments of pedants, and it was eventually the more practical consideration of haste during the polemic activity of the Civil War that compelled the printers to systematize.