The most famous names in English literature were not spelled the way the world now spells them when the play that carries them first reached print. The spelling of the heroine’s name in the 1597 first quarto is Iuliet, not Juliet. The heroine of the 1599 second quarto, the fuller and more authoritative text from which nearly every later edition descends, is Iuliet again on its title page, and inside the book her name contracts and stretches through a family of forms, Iuliet, Iuli, Iu, Iule, as the speech prefixes abbreviate her. The hero stands steadier, Romeo in full wherever the full form is wanted, because his name happens to contain no letter that the early modern alphabet treated as two letters in one. The families fare no better than the lovers: the quartos write Mountague where every modern edition writes Montague, the Prince enters as Eskales where every modern edition prints Escalus, and the first quarto sends on two serving-men of the Capolets. This article examines the spelling of the lovers’ names in early print as documentary evidence: what the title pages, speech prefixes, stage directions and family names of the quartos and the Folio actually record, whose habits those spellings preserve, and what an age of unstandardized spelling shows about the way the play travelled from manuscript to printed page.

The verdict can be stated at once. The variant spellings of the names are not errors scattered over an otherwise stable text, and they are not the author’s own spellings preserved in amber. They are the normal condition of a text manufactured by hand in shops where spelling was a compositor’s convenience rather than a rule, set from copy whose own spellings were already unfixed. Modern editions that print Juliet, Montague and Escalus in one unwavering form are performing a translation, and the translation is justified: Stanley Wells made the case for it once and for all, and this article accepts his conclusion for the reading page. But a translation that conceals itself falsifies the record. The names are the place where the concealment costs most, because a name is the one word in a play that readers take to be identical with the thing it names. Restoring Iuliet, Mountague and Eskales to view does not change what the names mean. It changes what readers understand a printed play to be: not a monument with its lettering cut once, but a manufactured object whose most intimate words were set letter by letter, by several hands, under no obligation to set them the same way twice.

The claims of this article are checkable in an afternoon, and the checkability is part of the argument. A generation ago the evidence for the names’ early forms sat in reading rooms, behind applications and gloves, and an editor’s assurance that the old spellings were mere noise had to be taken largely on trust by readers who could not inspect the witnesses. The facsimiles and diplomatic transcriptions now published by the Folger Shakespeare Library and the Internet Shakespeare Editions have ended that dependence. Any reader can open Danter’s title page beside Creede’s, watch the prefixes contract through a scene of either quarto, and test every document cited in the sections that follow. The modernization debate changes character under those conditions. When the evidence was hard to reach, regularization in silence was a venial editorial shortcut, since few readers could detect it and fewer still were harmed. When the evidence sits one search away, silence becomes a choice with a visible alternative, and the editions that state their practice openly, the Folger’s introduction regularizing Mountague and Eskales in so many words, read as the honest party in the transaction. This article’s method follows from the same condition: documents first, in their own spellings, quoted exactly; inference second, labelled as inference; and a verdict that a sceptical reader can retrace step by step against the facsimiles. Scholarship that cannot be retraced is merely another registry, fixing by authority what it should be showing in evidence.

How the Lovers’ Names Stand in the Early Printed Texts

Begin with the census of title pages, because the title page is the one part of an early book that every catalogue, bookseller and library since has had to describe, and the census is short enough to be damning. The first quarto of 1597, printed by John Danter, announces AN EXCELLENT conceited Tragedie OF Romeo and Iuliet. The second quarto of 1599, printed by Thomas Creede for Cuthbert Burby, announces THE MOST Excellent and lamentable Tragedie, of Romeo and Iuliet, with the boast that the text stands newly corrected, augmented and amended. The correction and augmentation, whatever they did for the play’s words, did nothing for the heroine’s name: Creede’s title page spells her exactly as Danter’s had. The third quarto of 1609, reprinted from the second for John Smethwick, is the first title page in the sequence to print Romeo and Juliet with the modern J, a decade and more after the play’s first printing and seven years after the fuller text had supposedly settled the play’s form. The fourth quarto, undated and assigned by modern bibliography to the early 1620s, swings back: ROMEO and IVLIET. The First Folio of 1623 heads the play The Tragedie of Romeo and Ivliet, the same name as Danter’s in the capital letterforms of the Folio shop. Five early title pages and headings, four of them Iuliet or Ivliet, one of them, in the middle of the sequence, Juliet. The J that the whole world now uses won a single early skirmish and then lost the next two engagements, and its eventual victory was won not in the period at all but by the editors of later centuries, who regularized the headings along with everything else.

The modern book faces the same display problem as Danter’s and solves it by the opposite policy. A modern edition’s cover and spine are its title page, the surface a browser meets first, and on that surface the names stand in their fixed modern forms with a uniformity enforced across every publisher on earth, since a spine lettered Romeo and Iuliet would be returned as a misprint by the trade itself. The fixity the modern reader takes for granted is therefore not merely editorial but commercial, a condition of the book’s circulation, and it reaches its perfection exactly where the early book was freest, on the outside. Danter could afford Iuliet on his title page because his buyers read the form without friction; a modern publisher cannot afford it because modern buyers read the form as an error, and the difference measures the distance the alphabet travelled between the two trades, from a tool every workman bent to a standard every reader polices.

The instability does not stop at the heroine. Danter’s own name stands on his title page as Iohn Danter, his Christian name caught by the same convention that caught the heroine’s, and Smethwick’s name appears in imprints as SMETHVVICK, the double V doing duty for the letter W. These are not curiosities pasted onto the argument. They are the argument in miniature: in the books that first carried the play, no name was safe from the letterforms of the shop that printed it, not the heroine’s, not the printer’s, not the publisher’s. A modern catalogue that transcribes the 1599 title as Romeo and Juliet, as many do, is already editing, silently, in the act of describing. The Folger Shakespeare Library’s introduction to its edition is scrupulous by contrast, entitling the second quarto The Most Excellent and lamentable Tragedie, of Romeo and Iuliet, and the scruple matters: the library that holds the largest collection of these books refuses to tidy the heroine’s name even in passing prose reference.

Is Iuliet simply a misprint?

No, and the word misprint is the wrong tool for the subject. A misprint is a departure from a correct form, and Iuliet departs from nothing: it is a licensed shape of the name in a writing system whose letter stock made I serve for both the vowel and the consonant that modern type separates into I and J.

Danter’s compositors set Iuliet on the title page because the form was correct in the only sense the period recognized, the sense of current usage in a printing house. Calling it a misprint smuggles the modern fixed alphabet backwards into a shop that had never seen it, and the smuggling is the habit this article exists to correct.

What the census shows, then, is not carelessness but system. Title pages were display matter, set large, often set first or last and sometimes set by a different workman from the body of the book, and their spellings belong to the shop’s display habits rather than to the manuscript copy. Yet the body of the books tells the same story in a smaller type size, which is why the title pages cannot be dismissed as advertising license. Inside the second quarto the heroine’s full name stands as Iuliet in her entrances and speeches, while the prefixes that head her speeches run through their graded contractions. Inside the first quarto the wedding scene gives the hero the line My Iuliet welcome, and a few lines later So Romeo hath expected Iuliet, the early text of the marriage scene (2.6) wearing the I form in the middle of the play’s most intimate exchange.

The sequence has a coda that proves how slowly the fixity arrived. The fifth quarto of 1637, the last of the early separate editions, restored the claim of correction to its title page and presented the heroine to buyers a full forty years after Danter, and the descriptive tradition that followed the books into libraries has never settled her either: Dowden’s Arden edition of 1900 transcribes both early title pages with Iuliet in its introduction and then prints Juliet on its own, the scholarly norm ever since, record in the apparatus and regularity in the text. A nineteenth-century reprint of the Folio text, issued when old-spelling presentation still carried antiquarian prestige, kept the Folio’s own heading, The Tragedie of Romeo and Ivliet, on its title page, so that a Victorian buyer could purchase Ivliet from a bookseller while reading Juliet in the schoolroom. The name’s history in print is therefore not a march from Iuliet to Juliet with the quartos as its primitive stage. It is an oscillation, each generation of the book trade and the editing trade choosing the form its own habits preferred, and the oscillation is still visible to any reader who compares a catalogue transcription with the title page it describes.

Two further habitats of the name complete the census, and both complicate the story in useful directions. Inside the first quarto, the running title that heads the openings repeats The most excellent Tragedie of Romeo and Iuliet across the book, so that the heroine’s I form is not a single display decision on the title page but the most frequently reprinted string of her name in the entire edition, standing over page after page of text whose prefixes meanwhile contract her to Iul. The book disagreed with itself at two type sizes simultaneously, display above and shorthand below, and felt no strain. Outside the play’s own editions, the J form was already available in the literary marketplace: Francis Meres’s Palladis Tamia of 1598, the first printed survey to praise the playwright’s works by name, lists among the tragedies his Romeo and Juliet, the modern letters in a literary man’s list while the play’s own printers were setting Iuliet in the same years. The coexistence is the deepest lesson of the census. England in 1598 did not possess a spelling of the heroine’s name that some printers got right and others got wrong. It possessed two current spellings, distributed by milieu, the literary list favouring the newer letter, the playhouse books favouring the older, and the distribution, not any single form, is what a spelling history recovers. A reader who meets those lines in a facsimile meets the play in the dress its first buyers saw. A reader who meets them in a modern edition meets them translated, and the translation, however necessary, has already made a decision about how much of the book’s manufacture the reader is allowed to notice.

Why I and J Were One Letter: The Alphabet Behind Iuliet

The explanation begins with the size of the alphabet. Early modern English printing worked with a letter stock in which I and J were not separate letters but one letter with two uses, and U and V likewise one letter with two shapes, the shape governed by position: V at the front of a word, U in the middle, in the usage of much continental and English printing. Romeo and Iuliet is therefore not a title in which one name is spelled modernly and the other strangely. It is a title in which the heroine’s name begins with the consonantal value of the letter I, a value every contemporary reader supplied without thought, exactly as the same readers supplied the consonantal value in Iohn Danter or the initial I of Iulius Caesar. The name on the page and the name in the ear were the same name. What differs between 1597 and a modern edition is not the heroine but the alphabet: the separation of I from J, and of U from V, was a slow typographical divorce completed only across the seventeenth century, and the play’s early books were printed while the marriage still held.

The u and v half of the convention explains the Folio’s Ivliet. In the capital letterforms used for display, the Folio shop’s V serves where a modern page prints U, so the heading The Tragedie of Romeo and Ivliet is letter for letter the Iuliet of the quartos, dressed in capitals: I, then the vowel written V, then L, I, E, T. The same convention writes the publisher’s name on quarto imprints as SMETHVVICK, where the doubled V builds the letter W, a letter English printing had imported late and often improvised from parts. A reader trained to modern type reads Ivliet as an exotic variant and Juliet as the name itself. A reader trained to the period’s type reads three shapes of one sequence of sounds, and the variation shrinks to what it is: the ordinary behaviour of a writing system whose letters carried double duty. Bibliographers call such variation accidental, belonging to the accidentals of the text, its spelling and punctuation and capitalization, as against its substantives, the words themselves. The classification is useful and this article keeps it, with one reservation pressed throughout: a proper name is the accidental that behaves like a substantive, because changing its letters feels like changing the person, and the whole editorial question of the names lives inside that discomfort.

Did Iuliet sound different from Juliet in the playhouse?

No. The consonantal I at the head of the heroine’s name carried the sound that modern spelling assigns to J, and no actor of the Chamberlain’s Men shaped a different name for her than actors shape now. The difference between Iuliet and Juliet is visible only, a fact about type and not about voice.

The point cuts both ways in the argument to come: it is the strongest point in favour of modernization, since modernizing this spelling changes nothing that was heard, and it is also the reason the early spelling survives as pure evidence, a record of manufacture untouched by any difference of meaning that might excuse an editor for discarding it.

The long s, the letter that looks like an f without its crossbar and fills every line of the early texts, belongs in the same account: nobody supposes that the first readers pronounced the play’s words with an f wherever the long s stands, and nobody proposes that editions keep it. The names sit at the far end of a spectrum of accidentals that runs from the purely graphic, like the long s and the positional u and v, through the merely habitual, like Danter’s Iohn, to the forms that brush against identity, like Mountague. Editorial practice has always drawn the modernization line somewhere along that spectrum. The dispute examined later in this article is not whether a line exists but where the names fall along it, and the dispute is sharpest precisely because the names straddle the boundary: Iuliet is as graphic as the long s, while Mountague, with its extra letter tucked inside the word, looks to some eyes like a different name altogether and to other eyes like the same name in period dress.

The letter stock was not an abstraction; it was a wooden case of compartments on the compositor’s frame, each compartment holding its sort of type, and the case imposed its own pressures on spelling. A sort that ran short mid-forme had to be borrowed, substituted or spelled around, and the doubled letters of the period, the vv that builds Smethwick’s W, the u and v and i and j doing double duty, are partly the visible residue of an economy of sorts, a shop making its letters stretch across more words than a modern case allows. The heroine’s name compounded the pressure with foreignness. Iuliet is an Italian name naturalized, Giulietta with its G long shed and its ending trimmed by Brooke, and an English compositor setting it met a word with no native habit to guide the hand, no settled English shape such as his own Christian name possessed. Names from home he set by reflex; names from Verona he set by approximation, and the approximations of two shops, and of several men in each, are the variants the record preserves. The instability of the lovers’ names is thus overdetermined, produced by the alphabet, the case, the budget and the foreignness of the words all at once, and an explanation that reaches for a single cause, an author’s whim or a printer’s error, has mistaken a climate for an event.

The Author’s Own Name: The Playwright Spelled Five Ways

The lovers’ names had company in their instability at the highest level of the book, because the author’s name was in no better order. The first quarto of the play is anonymous. The second quarto is anonymous. The play passed through its early editions with no author’s name on the book, and the Folio of 1623 gathered the plays under the style of Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies, the title page presenting a surname in a form, Shakespeares, that its owner never wrote. What he wrote, on the evidence of the six signatures that survive from his hand, is a small anthology of variants: the surname appears across the legal documents of his last years as Shakspere, Shakspeare, Shakespere and in clipped forms, Shakp among them, the baptismal record of his infancy having entered him in Latin as Gulielmus filius Johannes Shakspere. Samuel Schoenbaum’s documentary life of the playwright collects the forms with a bibliographer’s patience, and their collective testimony is unambiguous: the man whose name now anchors the largest author brand in literature spelled that name as the occasion and the pen suggested, and the fixed form Shakespeare, one word, one spelling, is a product of print and of the editorial tradition that standardized him, exactly as Juliet is a product of the same process applied to his heroine.

The parallel is not decorative. Textual scholars who hunt for the playwright’s own spelling in the play texts, Honigmann’s enterprise described in a later section, begin from those signatures and from the three manuscript pages of Sir Thomas More attributed to his hand, and the pages themselves spell with the period’s freedom. A culture that had not fixed the author’s name had no machinery for fixing his characters’ names and no concept that either needed fixing. The modern title page of a Shakespeare edition, the author’s name in one form above the play’s title in another, both invariant across every printing in the world, is a double portrait of editorial achievement disguised as a fact of nature. Danter’s book offers the corrective in a single glance: no author’s name at all, a heroine called Iuliet, and a printer called Iohn, three names afloat on one page, in the year the play was new. The fixity came later, and it came from outside the documents, which is why the documents must be kept where readers can check what the fixity cost.

Spelt to Fit the Line: Names Under the Compositor’s Measure

One engine of the variation deserves a section of its own, because the brief for this study names it and because readers habitually underestimate it: the compositor spelled to fit the line. Hand composition is a negotiation with a fixed measure. The compositor sets type in a composing stick adjusted to the width of the page, and each line must end full, justified, its letters and spaces packed so the forme locks tight. Copy rarely cooperates. A line of copy that falls short must be padded, and a line that overflows must be squeezed, and the compositor’s toolkit for both operations was orthographic before it was anything else. Early modern spelling, unstandardized, offered him long and short forms of the same word between which he could choose without error: do and doe, go and goe, here and heere, ben and beene, forms differing by a silent letter that cost nothing in sense and bought or saved exactly the space in question. Charlton Hinman’s Folio attributions rest heavily on the observation that workmen differed in their preferred forms; the obverse of the observation is that each workman used his preferences as filler, a private stock of longer and shorter spellings deployed line by line to make the measure. Spelling, in the shop, was partly a branch of joinery.

Proper names sit awkwardly in such a system, because a name has fewer licensed variants than a common word and none that change its length by much. A compositor could not stretch Romeo the way he could stretch here into heere. The names’ elasticity therefore collected where elasticity was free, in the speech prefixes, where the label stands outside the verse line and outside the metre, a marginal element that prose measure and page layout govern alone. Iuliet can stand in a prefix, or Iuli, or Iu, and the choice among them costs the text nothing while buying the setter exactly the room his stick requires at the head of the speech. In the dialogue itself, the names are comparatively protected by the verse: a pentameter that scans with Capulet resists Capulett, and the metre acts as a weak preservative, holding the spoken forms nearer to the copy’s spellings than the margins hold theirs. The distribution of the variants follows the prediction. The wildest variance in the names lives in the prefixes and directions, the prose margins of the text, while the names inside spoken lines stay nearer their full forms, and the surnames’ intrusive letters, Mountague above all, stand in directions and prefixes far more securely than any single spoken instance could establish them. A student who wants to watch the printing house think should watch the margins, where its economics were unconstrained by the poet’s numbers.

The prose scenes show the same economics working at line length rather than at the margin. In prose there is no metre to protect any word, and the opening brawl of the first quarto, Sampson and Gregory trading insults in Creede’s and Danter’s prose alike, runs in spellings chosen under pure justification pressure, the copy’s phrases expanded or contracted as the stick filled. Nobody collates the servants’ names for profundities, and that is the point: the pressure that bent the small words bent the great ones by the same law, and the heroine’s prefix shrank from Iuliet to Iu under no more mysterious force than a full stick and a short line. The romance of the unfixed name dissolves, on inspection, into workshop routine, and the dissolution is valuable, because it relocates the wonder. The wonder is not that printers were careless with the most famous name in the repertory. The wonder is that a text passed through such routine, twice in two years and twice more in a generation, and emerged with its speeches so nearly intact that four centuries of readers have mistaken the product for a monument.

Romeo, Rom, Ro: The Speech Prefixes and the Shrinking Names

If the title pages show the names at their most public, the speech prefixes show them at their most private, in the working shorthand of the text. A speech prefix is the abbreviated label set before each speech to name its speaker, and the early texts treat the labels as elastic. The documentary inventory was set out most fully by Eric Sams in his reappraisal of the first quarto, offered there in the service of his larger argument about the play’s texts, an argument later sections weigh separately; the inventory itself is a matter of the printed record and can be checked against any facsimile. In the second quarto the hero is introduced as Romeo, Rom and Ro; the heroine as Iuliet, Iuli and Iu; the villain as Tibalt, Tib, Tyb and Ti. Around them the same elasticity governs the household: Benuolio and Benuo and Ben for Benvolio, Capu and Cap and Ca for Capulet, Frier and Fri for the Friar, Mount and Moun for the Montague serving-men, Nurse and Nurs and Nur, Paris and Par, Prince and Prin. The first quarto, supposedly the corrupt text, runs the same system with contractions of its own, Capo, Fr, Iul, Mont, Pry among them, while the second adds Benuol, Iule, Mounta, Pari, Ty. Sams counted some forty-five different identity cards presented in print by the twelve main characters across the two quartos. The lovers hold ten or eleven of them between them.

Three conclusions follow, and they order the rest of this article. First, the abbreviations are not corruption. They are the fossil of a manuscript practice: a playwright drafting at speed writes Ro and Iu in his margins because the full names would slow the hand, and a playhouse document keeps the contractions because its users, the book-keeper and the actors taking their parts, needed no more. Editors since the eighteenth century have expanded all of it into uniform full headings, ROMEO and JULIET in sovereign capitals, and the expansion is one more silent regularization, invisible to any reader who has not seen a facsimile. Second, the full forms, when the prefixes do spell out, agree with the title pages: the heroine at full stretch is Iuliet in both quartos, never Juliet in the second quarto’s prefix system, and the J form’s one early title-page appearance in 1609 belongs to a reprint whose text descends from the second quarto while its display page follows newer habit. Third, the elasticity itself is evidence about the copy behind the print. A prefix that shrinks and grows from page to page, Ro here and Romeo there, is the mark of copy that had not been tidied for the press, the working papers of the playhouse rather than a transcript prepared by a scribe with a house style. The inference is one strand of the larger case about the second quarto’s copy weighed in the study of compositor analysis and the printing house, where the method stands on its own ground; here the narrower point suffices, that the names in their shortened forms are the play’s backstage names, the forms the document used when nobody was displaying anything.

What does an abbreviation like Iul. actually record?

It records economy under pressure, in two places at once. In the manuscript, the contraction saved the writer’s time across some three hundred speeches; in the printing house, it saved the compositor’s type and space at the head of each speech, and a contraction could tighten or loosen as a line required.

Iul. is therefore not a third spelling of the heroine competing with Iuliet and Juliet. It is the same spelling under compression, and its evidential value lies in the pattern of its compressions, which follow the habits of the copy and the shop rather than any rule a modern reader could state.

A single scene shows the system at work at closest quarters. In the first quarto’s wedding scene, the exchange at the Friar’s cell runs on prefixes that alternate against the full forms in the dialogue itself: Iul heads a speech; Rom answers; within the hero’s own lines the full name stands written out, My Iuliet welcome, and again, So Romeo hath expected Iuliet, so that a single page of the early book presents the heroine three ways, as prefix, as vocative and as the object of expectation, Ro’s partner Iu one moment and Iuliet the next. No reader of the scene in 1597 registered an inconsistency, because none existed by the standards of the page; the standards themselves are what changed. A modern edition prints JULIET over every speech and Juliet inside every line, and the uniformity, projected backwards, makes the early page look like a draft of the modern one, a rough state of a thing whose fair copy editors later supplied. The fair copy was never supplied because it was never needed: the rough state was the finished object, finished to the tolerance its makers worked to, and the tolerances of hand manufacture, not any failure of care, are what the prefixes record.

The supporting cast extends the lesson in both directions, toward the title and toward anonymity. The Friar exists in the books under two designations that never meet in the prefixes: the directions name him Laurence at his entrances, Frier Laurence with his basket of herbs, while the speech prefixes know only his office, Frier and Fri, as if the margin recognized the cassock and left the man to the directions. The Nurse inverts the arrangement. No early text gives her a personal name at all; Nurse is a function declined like a name, and her prefixes, Nurse and Nurs and Nur, shrink a job description through the same graded contractions the lovers’ true names undergo, indistinguishable in form from Iuliet’s. The prefix system, followed across the cast, thus maps a whole economy of identity in the playhouse document: Christian names for the principals, an office for the churchman, a function for the servant, each spelled and respelled under identical pressures. Modern editions level the map into uniform full headings, and something real is levelled with it, the visible difference between a person the document names and a person it merely staffs.

The prefixes also quietly settle a question the title pages raise. A sceptical reader might grant that title pages are display matter, spelled by the shop for show, and still hope that the text inside follows the author’s own hand more closely. The prefixes dash the hope in its simple form. The inside of the book is less fixed than its cover, not more: no scribe regularized the labels, no corrector harmonized Iu with Iuliet, and the full form the system returns to when it expands is Iuliet anyway. Whatever stood in the manuscript, the printed book that England bought presents a heroine whose name the book itself never once holds still, and presents her so in the parts of the page, the speech headings, that a reader consults most often after the title. The instability is not a surface blemish on these editions. It is their deepest habit, reaching from the largest type on the title page to the smallest abbreviation in the margin of the text.

Capolets, Mountague, Eskales: The Family Names in Print

The lovers’ surnames, and the name of the Prince who judges them, wander as the Christian names do, and their wanderings are easier to track because modern editions have left fingerprints at the scene of the regularization. The first quarto opens with the direction Enter 2. Seruing-men of the Capolets, the family name in its plural household form with a single t, where the second quarto’s corresponding direction enters Sampson and Gregorie of the house of Capulet. Within a single scene the second quarto’s apparatus of modern editions records the substantive Montagues against the direction Mountague, and the first quarto’s own direction for the opposing servants enters two Serving-men of the Mountagues. Mountague, with its intrusive u after the t, is thus no stray misprint of one page: it is the early texts’ settled shape for the hero’s house, in directions and in the mouths of speakers, and the Everyman Shakespeare’s old-spelling text keeps it in print, arguing in its notes that the form the surname takes across the early texts may carry a point on mount and ague, the fever of the feud, that the smoothed Montague loses. Mainstream editions smooth it anyway. The Folger Shakespeare, the most widely used classroom text of the play in the United States, states its practice without embarrassment in its introduction: the editors correct or regularize a number of the proper names, as is the usual practice in editions of the play, so that Mountague becomes Montague, and the Prince’s name, Eskales, is printed as Escalus.

Eskales deserves its moment. The Prince of Verona enters the early texts under a name that no modern programme prints, and the direction and prefixes that present him in the second quarto know him as Eskales, a form with the k of a harder, more Italianate spelling and an ending that the Latinizing Escalus of modern editions replaces with a Roman dignity the quarto never gave him. Nobody argues that Eskales and Escalus are two princes. The regularization is as defensible as any in the book, and the Folger editors name it openly, which is more than most editions do. But a reader who has only ever seen Escalus has been given a Verona slightly more classical than the Verona the early page presents, and the gift was never announced at the point of delivery, only in an introduction few readers reach. The pattern generalizes: every modern edition of the play is a negotiated settlement between the page of 1599 and the expectations of its own century, and the names are where the settlement’s terms are easiest to inspect, because a name, unlike a spelling of the word murther or mo, cannot be waved away as a mere archaism of dress. The name is the person, for stage purposes, and to respell the person is to recast, almost imperceptibly, the dramatis personae itself.

Notice, before the thematic point, where the surnames do not appear. Neither quarto’s Prologue names the families. The first quarto’s Chorus opens on two household friends alike in dignity, the second’s on two households, both alike in dignity, and the frame of the play keeps the houses anonymous to the end, the star-crossed lovers and the parents’ rage described without a Capulet or a Montague between them. The surnames live lower in the book’s economy, in directions, prefixes and dialogue, the working strata where spelling was least supervised. The play’s most official voice, its Chorus, declines to use the names whose instability the working pages display, as if the book itself had graded its names by dignity, the lovers’ Christian names fit for a title page and a Chorus’s theme, the surnames left to the servants’ entrances and the compositors’ habits. A spelling history is bound to observe the grading, because it explains the evidence’s shape: the names that wander most are the ones the book’s ceremonial surfaces never touched.

The feud’s two households give the point its thematic edge. Juliet’s question in the orchard scene turns on surnames: she asks Romeo to deny his father and refuse his name (2.2.34), and observes that Montague is neither hand nor foot nor any part belonging to a man (2.2.40-41). The early texts put that question to Mountague, a name whose letters the printers themselves could not hold constant, as if the book’s manufacture had set out to illustrate the speech. The speech argues that names are detachable accidents, that the man would retain his perfection under any other label. Print history agrees with her more thoroughly than she could have intended: the label detached itself repeatedly in the shops, and the man, and the woman, survived every detachment. The name articles elsewhere in this series treat what the names meant before they reached the play, in the names Romeo and Juliet and where they began; the present concern is narrower and more mechanical, the letters the play’s own books actually set, and on that evidence the surname Juliet asks Romeo to refuse was, in the books his first readers bought, a name already refusing to sit still.

The List of Persons: How the Names Acquired a Fixed Address

One more piece of the book’s furniture deserves inspection, because it is the place where modern readers meet the names first and where their modern spelling does its quietest work: the list of persons. The early editions print no such list. The quartos open on the Prologue and the brawl; the Folio opens on the brawl with the Prologue dropped; nowhere in the play’s first forty years of print does a table assemble the persons and assign each a fixed name and a fixed description. The characters exist as the prefixes and directions present them, Ro and Iu in the margin, Eskales on his entrance, the Capolets as a household collective. When the Douai manuscript, a later seventeenth-century abridgement of the play, opens with a Drammatis Personae list, its annotations in the modern LEMDO edition remark the novelty: there is no such list in the Second Folio, and the Douai list is the first known of its kind for this play. The dramatis personae, that fixture of every modern edition, began as an editorial addition, and Nicholas Rowe’s edition of 1709 naturalized it for the play in print.

The list’s effect on the names is out of proportion to its size. A dramatis personae is a registry, and registries fix: Romeo, only son of Montague; Juliet, daughter of Capulet; Escalus, Prince of Verona, each name printed once, in one spelling, in modern form, before a line of the play is read. The reader who then meets Mountague in a scholarly apparatus, or hears of Iuliet from a textual note, meets them as deviations from a registry that the play’s own books never kept. Editors compile the list in good faith and readers need it; nobody proposes its abolition. But a spelling history is obliged to mark what the list does to perception. It moves the fixed form upstream of the text, so that the early forms read as corruptions of the registry rather than the registry reading as a regularization of the forms, and it completes, at the front of the book, the same operation the modernized text performs throughout: the manufacture of a stability the documents do not contain, presented as the play’s natural state. The names acquired a fixed address only when editors built them one.

Parts, Plots and Prefixes: The Names in the Playhouse Documents

Behind the printed page stand the playhouse’s own papers, and the names lived in those papers under the same elastic regime. An actor of the Chamberlain’s Men did not receive the play; he received a part, a roll of paper containing his own speeches and the short cues that triggered them, and the part was headed and cued by names the book-keeper wrote as utility dictated, in the contractions a working document allows. The book-keeper’s plot, the scene-by-scene table hung backstage to marshal entrances, listed the persons by the labels the house used, again without ceremony. The surviving actor’s part for Orlando in Greene’s Orlando Furioso, preserved at Dulwich from Edward Alleyn’s papers, shows the species: a role assembled for use, its headings and cues functional rather than formal. No part for Romeo or Juliet survives, and none should be invented; the species is what matters. The names that reached print had passed through a documentary culture in which a name was a handle, written as short as the work allowed, and the prefixes of the quartos, Ro and Iu and Mount, are that culture fossilized in type.

The distinction the playhouse enforced was between the ear and the eye. An audience never saw a spelling. The names entered the theatre through the ear, in the Nurse’s announcement at the feast, His name is Romeo, and a Mountague (1.5), in the Prince’s sentences, in Juliet’s own interrogation of the word Montague in the orchard, and what the ear received was invariant, a sound, however the pens and presses of the city were spelling it that season. Print made the names visible for the first time to a reading public, and visibility exposed them to the whole instability of the period’s letterforms at the very moment of their widest circulation. The paradox deserves emphasis because it reverses the common assumption. Performance, the supposedly ephemeral medium, held the names perfectly steady, since a sound cannot be misspelled. Print, the supposedly fixing medium, set them wandering, since a letter can always be set two ways. The early editions are not failed attempts at the fixity a modern title page achieves. They are the record of names crossing from a medium that could not vary them into a medium that could hardly help it.

The playhouse book itself, the licensed manuscript from which the book-keeper governed performances, belongs to the same account even though no copy survives for this play. Such books accumulated annotations across a production’s life, entrances marked, cuts entered, names of actors written against roles in the margin, the practice visible in surviving playbooks of the period and in the first quarto’s own directions, which preserve an actor’s name, Will Kemp, against a servant’s entrance, the playhouse’s personnel breaking the surface of the fiction in print. A document maintained in that way, by several hands across several seasons, standardizes nothing; it accretes. When such a book, or papers of its family, reached a printing house, the compositors met names already written in the mixed habits of the house that used them, and their own habits compounded the mixture a second time. The printed variance of the names is therefore a double exposure, playhouse over print shop, and the two exposures cannot be separated by looking at the photograph. They can only be honoured together, as the biography of an object that worked for its living in two trades before it became literature.

Two Shops, Two Habits: Danter and Allde, Creede and the Borrowed Pages

The variation has a geography, and mapping it turns the spellings from a general condition into evidence about particular books. The first quarto was not printed in one shop. John Danter printed the opening sheets, through signature D, and Edward Allde printed the remainder, in a smaller type with more lines to the page, a division visible on the face of the book and recorded in every bibliography of it. Two shops means two stocks of habit: the spellings of the front of the book answer to Danter’s workmen and the spellings of the back to Allde’s, and any account of the first quarto’s accidentals that treats the volume as one manufacture has already blurred its evidence at the source. The second quarto, Thomas Creede’s single production for Cuthbert Burby, presents the opposite complication, unity of shop over divided copy. For most of its length the second quarto was set, on the prevailing account, from the playwright’s working papers; for one notorious stretch, from the Capulet and Paris conversation of the second act into the Nurse’s scene (1.2.55 to 1.3.37 in modern numbering), it reprints the first quarto page for page, and through that stretch its accidentals, prefixes included, descend not from manuscript but from Danter and Allde’s printed sheets, imported bodily into Creede’s book. The spellings of a name inside that stretch are therefore evidence about 1597, not about the copy of 1599, and a collator who fails to discount the stretch will read the printing house of the bad quarto in the middle of the good one.

This geography disciplines every claim made from spelling. A form that clusters in Allde’s sheets belongs to Allde’s men until contrary evidence appears; a form that appears only inside the borrowed stretch of the second quarto belongs to the stretch’s printed copy; a form that runs from Danter’s title page through Creede’s text and into the Folio heading, as Iuliet does, has survived three manufactures and two changes of copy, and its persistence across them is the strongest spelling evidence the play offers, evidence not of an author’s preference, since no chain of custody that long preserves a preference intact, but of a period norm: Iuliet was simply how the name was written in the trade, by everyone, until habit changed around it. The third quarto’s Juliet of 1609 marks the change arriving in Smethwick’s shop while the fourth quarto’s relapse into Ivliet shows the change arriving unevenly, shop by shop and workman by workman, which is how orthographic change always arrives. The names, followed closely, become a dated stratigraphy of English spelling itself, each edition a layer, and the layers do not lie in the tidy order a story of progress would prefer.

Allde’s portion of the first quarto adds a refinement to the map that spelling alone can supply. His sheets are set in a smaller type with substantially more lines to the page than Danter’s, a page engineered to compress the remainder of the play into the sheets the edition could afford, and compression is the natural habitat of the contraction. The back of the first quarto is where the prefixes run shortest and the spellings run tightest, and the correlation between the economics of the page and the brevity of the names is not coincidence but causation of the plainest kind: smaller type and fuller pages reward every saved letter. A collator reading the first quarto’s names from the front will meet a slightly more spacious heroine than the reader of the back half meets, and the difference belongs to the balance sheet of the edition, not to its copy. Spelling evidence, handled at this resolution, stops being a blur of period quaintness and becomes accountancy, the names shrinking and swelling with the budgets of the men who printed them.

The borrowed stretch of the second quarto shows the accountancy at its most consequential, because the stretch is not a random sample of the play. The pages Creede’s men reset from Danter and Allde’s printed sheets cover Capulet’s conversation with Paris and the Nurse’s first great scene, the stretch of the play in which the heroine is talked about most densely before she speaks: her age counted, her name repeated by mother, Nurse and suitor, her marriage arranged in dialogue that names her again and again. Through those pages the second quarto’s spellings of her name and her house descend from the printed page of 1597, worn through a compositor’s eye and hand, while the pages before and after descend from manuscript. The good quarto therefore contains two orthographic regimes for its heroine, stratified by gathering, and a spelling census that ignored the stratigraphy would average them into a fiction. The point generalizes beyond this play into a rule of the craft: accidentals have a provenance per stretch, not per book, and the names, thick on the ground exactly where the provenance changes, are the tracer dye that makes the change of source visible to the naked eye.

Romeus, Julietta, Giulietta: The Spellings the Play Inherited

The play’s own books did not invent the instability; they inherited it from the tale’s earlier printings, and a compressed survey of the inheritance shows the letters changing at every border crossing. Luigi da Porto’s novella names its lovers Romeo and Giulietta, the heroine carrying the double t of her Italian diminutive. Matteo Bandello’s retelling keeps Giulietta. Pierre Boaistuau’s French version hands the names to William Painter, whose Palace of Pleasure tells the story of Romeo and Julietta, the heroine’s Italianate ending surviving in English prose while the hero settles into the Romeo the play would keep. Arthur Brooke’s verse Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet, printed by Richard Tottel in 1562 and the play’s principal immediate source, makes the opposite pair of choices: the heroine loses her final syllable and becomes Juliet, one t, while the hero gains a Latin ending and becomes Romeus. The play took Brooke’s heroine and Painter’s hero. Its Juliet is Brooke’s shortened form (whatever a given compositor then did with its first letter), and its Romeo is the form Brooke’s Romeus never wears in the poem, the stage and the prose tale between them having worn the Latin ending away before the quartos set a letter. Etymology and meaning belong to another article in this series; the concern here is the printed residue, and the residue shows that even before a compositor touched the play, its two names had been respelled at every transmission, by translators and versifiers exercising exactly the freedom with a name’s letters that modern readers assume nobody took.

Two small morals belong to this survey. First, the direction of change is not from corruption to purity. Romeus is not a debased Romeo; it is the name classicized, dressed for a poem that announced itself as a history, and Romeo is not a correction but a demotic settling, the form of the spoken stage and the prose collection. Second, the play’s texts continue the tradition they inherit rather than breaking it. Danter’s Iuliet is one more transmission spelling in a line that runs through Giulietta and Julietta and Juliet, and Creede’s prefixes continue it at the level of the single speech. To ask which of these forms is the name is to import a standard the tradition never observed. To ask which forms the documents carry, where each appears, and whose work each records, is to ask questions the documents can answer, and those are the questions a spelling study exists to pursue.

One feature of the inheritance is easy to miss and worth isolating: the hero’s name changed its spelling between source and play while the heroine’s changed its shape. Romeus to Romeo is a respelling with a subtraction, the same name shedding a syllable; Giulietta to Julietta to Juliet is a shortening of the word itself, suffix by suffix, until the English monosyllabic ending stands bare. Brooke performed the heroine’s shortening and declined the hero’s, Painter performed the hero’s and declined the heroine’s, and the play, taking Brooke’s heroine and the prose tradition’s hero, combined two separate editorial acts into the pair of names the world inherited. Neither act was performed by the playwright. The names arrived at his desk already edited, twice over, by a translator and a versifier whose choices the quartos then preserved under their own further variations. When modern editors regularize Juliet and Romeo they are therefore not restoring an authorial original that print corrupted. They are adding a fifth editorial act to a sequence that began before the play existed, and the sequence, not any single link in it, is the true subject of a spelling history of these names.

Whose Spelling Is It: Author, Scribe, or Compositor

Every spelling in an early printed play has three candidate authors, and the criticism of the last century is largely the story of their competing claims. The playwright wrote something; between his papers and the press stood, in many cases, a scribe or the playhouse’s own tidying; at the press stood the compositors, setting type letter by letter and spelling as they went. W. W. Greg’s editorial doctrine, built on R. B. McKerrow’s Prolegomena of 1939, assigned the accidentals of a printed text to its copy only as a default and warned that printers’ habits overwrite copy spelling within pages: the compositor reads a phrase, holds it in memory, and sets it in his own orthography, so the printed accidentals are a blend in which the printing house usually predominates. On that doctrine, Iuliet testifies about Creede’s and Danter’s shops, and only faintly, through them, about anything earlier. The doctrine made modernization respectable: if the spellings are mostly the printers’, an editor who respells them betrays no author.

E. A. J. Honigmann complicated the doctrine from the author’s side. In The Stability of Shakespeare’s Text (1965) and in his work on the three pages of Sir Thomas More attributed to the playwright, Honigmann hunted for spellings that persist where compositors change, the habits of the hand behind the copy. He identified a cluster of preferences in texts set from authorial papers, spellings with doubled medial consonants, with oo where modern usage has o, with y for i, with in where modern usage has en, and he argued that such recurrences let a reader glimpse the author’s own orthography through the print. The glimpse matters for method even where it fails for any single word: it means the blend is not uniform, and an editor who assumes the printing house wrote every accidental will sometimes erase the author in the act of cleaning the page. Eric Sams pressed the author’s claim harder still, arguing from the very prefix systems inventoried earlier that the quartos’ variance reproduces the variance of the playwright’s own hand, whose six surviving signatures spell his surname in a scattering of forms and never in the modern one; the argument serves his revisionist account of the two quartos and has persuaded few textual scholars, but its documentary premise is sound, that the playwright’s own writing was as unfixed as the print that followed it, so fixity cannot be the test that separates author from printer.

The bibliographer’s counterweight arrived in 1969. D. F. McKenzie’s Printers of the Mind tested the assumptions of analytical bibliography against the surviving business records of a later university press and concluded that scholars had been disastrously free to devise printing-house conditions according to need: compositors did not always work as the models required, did not set seriatim in the assumed order, did not keep one book in hand at a time, and their spelling habits, the great bulk of the evidence used to distinguish them, in T. H. Howard-Hill’s phrase, sit on less certain ground than the attributions built on them supposed. Charlton Hinman’s great Folio study of 1963 had shown what spelling evidence could do at its best, distinguishing the Folio’s workmen by preferences among forms of common words, do against doe, go against goe, here against heere; Pervez Rizvi’s re-examination of the Folio spellings in 2016 argued that parts of that method are unsound, that the statistical behaviour of the spellings does not always support the clean divisions drawn from them. The quarrel is not settled, and its unsettlement is the honest context for any use of spelling as evidence, the names included.

One further witness belongs in the section, because the printing house employed him to catch exactly the class of variation under discussion and he mostly declined to catch it: the corrector of the press. Early modern shops read proof unevenly, correcting sheets as printing proceeded and leaving uncorrected and corrected states of the same forme bound into different copies of one edition, the press variants that collators hunt with machines and patience. Correction aimed at sense, at turned letters and dropped words and nonsense; it did not aim at consistency of spelling, which no shop of the period treated as a fault worth the delay of a stopped press. The survival of Iu beside Iuliet within a single gathering is thus not evidence that nobody read the sheets. It is evidence of what reading the sheets was for. A name spelled two ways was not an error state of the text in the economy of the shop, and the modern instinct to treat the variation as a blemish to be explained away misreads the priorities of the manufacture at the deepest level. The compositors and correctors between them produced books in which the heroine’s name varies more than her character does, and they delivered those books to the trade with every professional reason to consider the work well done.

Can a single spelling ever identify the hand that set it?

No, and the negative is the beginning of method rather than its end. A single Iuliet might belong to copy, compositor, corrector or chance, and no scrutiny of the one instance can distribute the credit. Spelling evidence works in aggregate or not at all.

A form that recurs across a stint, clusters where independent evidence places one workman, and yields where the workman changes earns its attribution statistically, the way the Folio’s do and doe earn theirs, and even then under McKenzie’s caution that the shop’s real conditions may not match the model. The names obey the same law. One Mountague proves nothing; Mountague everywhere, in two quartos and across the Folio’s copy line, describes a norm of the copy and the trade, and norms, unlike instances, are facts an argument can stand on.

Mountague makes the cleanest test case for distributing the credit, because its dossier is complete. The form stands in the directions of both quartos, in the mouths of speakers across the feud scenes, and behind the Folio’s text in the copy line that descends through the third quarto; Brooke’s poem, the source, spells the name Montague, and the Italian tradition behind Brooke gives Montecchi, no intrusive u in either source. Three hypotheses compete. An authorial coinage, the mount and ague fancy the Everyman editor entertained, requires the playwright to have respelled his source’s name in his copy and every subsequent handler to have preserved the respelling intact through performance documents, two printing houses and a reprint chain, a chain of fidelity the same books nowhere else sustain. A scribal or playhouse normalization requires a single tidier somewhere upstream of both quartos who imposed the form on the tradition, possible but unattested. A trade-wide compositorial habit, the u intruding after t in an unfamiliar Italian name by analogy with words like tongue and league in their older spellings, requires no fidelity at all, only the repeated action of the same habit in shop after shop, and predicts exactly what the documents show, the form everywhere and its modern rival nowhere until editors arrive. The third hypothesis carries the case, and its victory states the section’s moral in one word: the most consistent spelling in the play’s early history is most likely the one nobody intended, the deposit left by a habit acting independently in many hands.

Adjudicated for the names, the dispute resolves into a division of the evidence. Greg and McKerrow are right about the mechanism: the compositors’ habits are the loudest signal in any short stretch of these books, and the prefixes’ contractions belong to the economics of the hand and the type case, not to anyone’s idea of the heroine. Honigmann is right about the residue: where a form persists across shops and across copy of different kinds, as Iuliet persists from Danter’s title page through Creede’s text and as Mountague persists through the directions of both quartos, persistence itself is data about the copy tradition that no theory of compositorial whim explains, since whims differ and these forms do not. McKenzie and Rizvi are right about the standard of proof: none of this licenses reading a biography of the text off a single page. What the names’ spellings finally certify is modest and solid, that the copy behind the quartos was working copy, untidied, and that the trade that printed it had not yet agreed on how the most famous heroine in its repertory was spelled. That is not a small thing to know about a book. It is the difference between the play as literature and the play as an event in a workshop.

What the Spellings Cannot Show: The Limits of the Evidence

A study that argues for the value of an evidence class earns its credibility by marking the class’s limits, and the limits here are strict. The spellings cannot recover the author’s hand. No manuscript of the play survives, the chain from hand to print runs through at least one lost document at every step, and the signatures that do survive prove only that the author’s own practice was unfixed, which disqualifies fixity as a test without qualifying any particular printed form as his. The spellings cannot date the play, localize its first performances or settle the standing of the first quarto, the three questions readers most often bring to them. And they cannot, instance by instance, be trusted even about the book in hand, because press correction means that two copies of one edition may differ in the accidentals of a page, so that a spelling quoted from a single copy may be a state of the forme rather than a fact of the edition. Collators learned to check multiple copies before arguing from a comma; the names deserve the same discipline, and the strongest claims made in this article, the persistence of Iuliet across shops, the universality of Mountague, rest on forms repeated across editions and copies, where a single copy’s state cannot explain them.

The limits bear hardest on the most ambitious use the prefixes have been put to. Eric Sams argued that the variance systems of the two quartos, their parallel families of contractions, certify a common origin in the playwright’s own papers, and from that certificate argued the first quarto upward into an authorial draft, with the second quarto as its revision. The documentary inventory behind the argument is genuine and this article has relied on it. The inference overruns it. Parallel variance is what any two playhouse-descended documents of the period display, because contraction was the house style of every theatrical manuscript, not a signature; a promptbook prepared by a book-keeper, a transcript by a scribe, a set of foul papers, all contract their prefixes, and the feature therefore cannot discriminate among them. The mainstream of textual scholarship has declined the inference for exactly that reason while keeping the inventory, which is the correct division of Sams’s legacy: a permanent contribution to the record, a temporary tenancy in the argument. The names in their printed forms witness the culture that transmitted the play, the shops, the desks, the letter stock, the budgets. Witnessed within those limits they are eloquent. Asked to testify about the author’s intentions for his heroine’s name, they have nothing to say, because the culture that transmitted her never treated the question as one that needed an answer.

What the Modernized Page Gains and Loses

The case for the modern page was made most carefully by Stanley Wells, first with Gary Taylor in Modernizing Shakespeare’s Spelling (1979) and then in Re-Editing Shakespeare for the Modern Reader (1984), the principles that governed the Oxford Complete Works of 1986. Print the text in modern spelling, the Oxford rationale runs, because modernization removes unnecessary barriers to understanding and lets the reader concentrate on the text itself, undistracted by obsolete and archaic accidentals of presentation; the modern reader’s experience is thereby brought closer to that of the playwright’s contemporaries, who also read the plays in what was, for them, modern form. The argument from the contemporary reader is the strong one. Nobody in 1599 stumbled over Iuliet; the stumble is an artefact of distance, and an editor who preserves the spelling preserves a difficulty the original audience never had, mistaking the archaeology of the page for the experience of the play. Wells reinforced the point from the history of editing itself, showing that the apparent old spellings in many inherited editions were not fidelity at all but inertia, forms preserved because editors since the eighteenth century had marked up their predecessors’ pages rather than re-editing from the early texts, keeping murther and burthen and mo alive by copying. Against that inertia, the Oxford project presented itself as a re-foundation, and it hedged its own wager in the most instructive way possible, by publishing the Complete Works in modern spelling and in original spelling side by side, two vast volumes that concede in their very existence that each presentation answers a different need. Frank Kermode, reviewing the enterprise for the London Review of Books under the title How do you spell Shakespeare?, received the novelty claims coolly; the pairing of the two versions remains the profession’s most honest monument to the problem, whatever a reviewer made of the fanfare.

Set the gains out plainly, since this article’s verdict accepts most of them. Modernization gains legibility for the readers editions exist to serve, students meeting the play at school, audiences following a text in the theatre, the whole common readership for whom Iuliet would be a pebble in the shoe at every speech heading. It gains consistency, so that a quotation can be checked, a search run, a concordance built, a classroom pointed at one page. It gains honesty of one kind: the modern editor who respells everything says openly that the page is a modern construction, where the editor who keeps a decorative selection of old forms, a murther here and a hath there, is manufacturing quaintness. And for the names specifically it gains the stability that reference requires: criticism, programmes, modern editions compared across the Arden, Oxford and Folger lines can all discuss Juliet because all of them print Juliet, and a shared name is the precondition of a shared conversation about her.

The losses are quieter, and they concentrate, as this article has been arguing, in the names. Modernization loses evidence: the reader of a modern text cannot see that the second quarto’s prefixes fluctuate, cannot see Mountague, cannot see that the heroine’s name changed its initial letter between shops, because the fluctuations that constitute the primary data for the play’s transmission have been cleaned away before the reader arrives. It loses proportion: a modern page implies a fixity at the centre of the text that the documents nowhere show, and students absorb the implication as a fact about 1599 rather than a decision of 1986. It loses, in the limiting case, meaning itself: the Everyman editor’s Mountague, with its buried ague, its fever in the name of the house of fever, may be a fancy, but it is a fancy the modernized page renders unexaminable, since the spelling that prompts it has ceased to exist in the text under discussion. And it loses the play’s own joke at its centre, the orchard scene’s demonstration that a name is a convention detachable from the thing, since the modern book presents the name as the least detachable, most invariant string in the whole text, ROMEO and JULIET in capitals of marble regularity from the first speech to the last.

The silence, moreover, has escaped the scholarly edition and colonized the common reference shelf, where the stakes are lowest and the habit therefore least examined. A widely used homework reference site, explaining the parenthesis in the play’s first title, informs its student readers that the complete title of the first quarto reads An Excellent conceited Tragedie of Romeo and Juliet: Danter’s page says Iuliet, and the site has corrected him in the act of quotation, teaching the lesson that old spellings are errors to be cleaned even inside quotation marks. School anthologies print the title page’s boast about great applause in modern spelling as a favour to young readers, and the favour compounds itself, since a student who has only seen the cleaned version has no reason to suspect a dirtier one exists. Wikipedia’s own list of the plays in quarto transcribes the title pages diplomatically, Iuliet and Ivliet intact, which shows the honest practice costs nothing but attention. The spectrum runs from that scruple to the homework site’s quiet rewrite, and most modern encounters with the early names happen far down the spectrum toward the rewrite, on pages whose makers would be astonished to learn that respelling a title page counts as an editorial act at all. The scene says the label is arbitrary. The documents agree, having worn four shapes of the label in twenty-six years. The modern page, alone among the witnesses, pretends the label was always fixed.

Does modernizing the heroine’s name change the name itself?

Philosophically the answer is the one Juliet gives: the name is a convention, and the woman is untouched by its letters, Iuliet and Juliet being one person under two states of the alphabet. Bibliographically the answer divides along the line between the play and the book.

The sound, the reference and the character survive modernization intact; what changes is the document, because a modernized edition is a new witness that reports the old ones, and a report that silently corrects its sources has altered the evidence even while preserving the sense. The heroine survives. The record of her name does not, unless the edition keeps the old forms visible somewhere a reader can reach them.

The settlement this article recommends follows from that division. Modernize the reading text, with Wells: the pebble in the shoe helps nobody, and the contemporary-reader argument is unanswerable for a text meant to be read and played. But let the modernization of names be treated as the exception that must show its working. An edition that prints Juliet should record Iuliet, as responsible editions record substantive variants; a facsimile or old-spelling text should stand within a student’s reach, as the Oxford pairing assumed; and no catalogue, anthology or website should respell the early titles in silence, since a title page transcribed as Romeo and Juliet when the book says Iuliet is not a reference but a small falsification. The Folger practice points the way on the middle ground: modernize the spelling for the reader, mark every change of wording with half-brackets so the intervention stays visible, and state the regularization of the names openly in the introduction. Visibility, not antiquarianism, is the principle. The names may travel into modern dress; they should not travel in disguise.

Meeting Iuliet Now: Facsimiles, Transcriptions and the Digital Page

A reader persuaded that the early forms matter needs somewhere to meet them, and the meeting places have multiplied beyond anything the old-spelling cause could command a generation ago. The type facsimiles of the Malone Society put the first quarto’s pages, letter for letter, into research libraries in the twentieth century. Lukas Erne’s New Cambridge edition of the first quarto prints the short text in original spelling with a modern critical apparatus, so that Iuliet speaks her wedding lines in the dress of 1597 with scholarship standing by. The Oxford project’s original-spelling Complete Works did the same for the canon entire. The Folger Shakespeare Library opens its copies of both quartos in digital collections, the actual title pages photographed at full size, Iohn Danter’s imprint and all, free to any reader with a browser; the Internet Shakespeare Editions publish diplomatic transcriptions of the quartos in which the prefixes contract and expand exactly as printed, Ro and Iu in their places. A student can now compare Danter’s title page with Creede’s in two open windows, a collation that once required a reading room, a letter of introduction and a pair of white gloves.

Behind the surrogates stands a fact about survival that the digital plenty conceals: the first quarto, the book that named her Iuliet first, comes down in two copies. Two copies are the whole material basis for the edition’s accidentals, and copies of a hand-press book are not interchangeable, since correction during printing left sheets in different states bound into different exemplars. The Iuliet a reader inspects on a screen is therefore one copy’s Iuliet, the British Library’s or the Folger’s, and the tidy notion of the text of Q1 is an abstraction collated over a pair of survivors and the states within them. The second quarto survives in greater numbers and the Folio in hundreds, which quietly skews the evidential base of the whole subject: the heroine’s name can be followed through more witnesses in 1623 than in 1597 not because the name mattered more later but because more paper happened to live. Survival, like spelling, is an accident that scholarship must discount before it argues.

The digital page, however, repeats the old editorial problem inside its own machinery. A transcription that can be searched must decide what a search for Juliet should find, and transcription practice answers by normalizing behind the scenes, expanding contractions, regularizing the long s, resolving u and v and i and j into their modern values in the index while displaying the old forms on the surface. The reader sees Iuliet and searches Juliet, and both courtesies are genuine; the display is diplomatic and the access is modernized, Wells’s settlement rebuilt in software. Even the facsimile image carries a quiet modernization of scale and context: Danter’s quarto was a small, cheap book, bought unbound and read to pieces, and its digital surrogate arrives at screen size with the aura of a treasure, which reverses the object’s original social meaning as thoroughly as any respelling. None of this argues against the surrogates, which have done more for the study of these spellings than any single edition. It argues only that the settlement this article recommends, modernize openly and keep the record visible, has to be renegotiated in every new medium, because every new medium finds fresh places to hide the join.

The library catalogue, the oldest of the modern media for these books, shows the settlement being negotiated in its purest form. Scholarly catalogues of early books, the Short-Title Catalogue tradition and its successors, transcribe title pages diplomatically as a rule of the craft, so the record of the second quarto in a research catalogue reads Romeo and Iuliet, while the same library shelves its modern editions under the uniform heading Romeo and Juliet, the heading under which all versions gather for retrieval. Both practices are correct, and their coexistence in one institution restates the article’s whole argument as a filing system: identity for reference, fidelity for record. Trouble begins only when the first practice borrows the second’s clothing, when a transcription silently wears the uniform title’s spelling, and the homework site that rewrote Danter’s title was committing in miniature the one fault the filing system exists to prevent. The names can live under a fixed heading. They cannot honestly be transcribed under one.

The InsightCrunch Spelling Note

The evidence assembled in this article compresses into a single reference table, the InsightCrunch spelling note, which sets the principal forms of the names witness by witness so that the pattern can be inspected at a glance. The note is a working collation of the kind a student of the early texts builds once and consults for years; this one is kept in a research file in VaultBook, where the forms can be checked against facsimiles of each title page and corrected as new copies are examined. Read down the heroine’s column and the article’s argument reads itself: one name, four early shapes, the modern shape arriving late, briefly, and then only by editorial conquest.

Witness	The hero	The heroine	The houses and the Prince	What the forms record
First quarto title page, 1597	Romeo	Iuliet	Not named on the page	Display spelling in Danter’s shop, the printer’s own name set as Iohn
First quarto text and prefixes	Romeo, Rom	Iuliet, Iul	The Capolets; the Mountagues; prefixes 1 Moun, 2 Moun	Working shorthand across two shops, Danter’s sheets and Allde’s
Second quarto title page, 1599	Romeo	Iuliet	Not named on the page	A corrected text announced under the old spelling of the name
Second quarto text and prefixes	Romeo, Rom, Ro	Iuliet, Iuli, Iu, Iule	Mountague in the directions; Eskales for the Prince	Untidied copy filtered through compositor habit in Creede’s shop
Second quarto, the borrowed stretch	Forms follow the first quarto	Forms follow the first quarto	Forms follow the first quarto	A reprint of the 1597 pages standing inside the 1599 book
Third quarto title page, 1609	Romeo	Juliet	Not named on the page	The J arrives on a title page, in a reprint, a generation on
Fourth quarto title page, undated	ROMEO	IVLIET	Not named on the page	The capital convention reasserts itself over the newer habit
First Folio heading, 1623	Romeo	Ivliet	The text descends through the third quarto	The same name in the Folio shop’s capital letterforms, V for U
Brooke’s poem, 1562	Romeus	Juliet	The houses unnamed in the title	The source’s classicized hero and shortened heroine
Painter’s prose, 1566	Romeo	Julietta	The families of Verona	The Italianate heroine the English stage would shorten
Modern editions	Romeo	Juliet	Montague; Escalus	Regularization, stated openly in the best introductions

Read as a narrative, the note tells three stories at once. The hero’s column is a story of near-stability broken once, far upstream, when Brooke classicized him into Romeus and the stage wore the ending off; inside the play’s books he barely flickers. The heroine’s column is the opposite story, stability nowhere: her name changes at every border, Italian, French, prose, verse, and then oscillates between two letters through six printings of the play itself, settling only when editors settle it for her. The houses’ column tells the third story, of names that modern readers treat as the play’s granite, the feud’s very substance, floating in the early books as freely as any common noun, Mountague with its stray u, Eskales with his k, the Capolets in their plural ease. A table that can hold three stories of that weight in eleven rows has earned its place as the study’s central exhibit, and a reader who absorbs it will not again mistake the modern page’s uniformity for a property of the work rather than a decision of its editors.

A Verdict on Spelling and the Sense of the Text

The cliche text of the play, the one the world quotes, is read in modern spelling, and the series thesis for these textual studies holds that restoring the early forms shows the unfixed page beneath the cliche. Nowhere is the restoration more instructive than in the names, because nowhere else does the reader’s confidence run so far ahead of the documents. A reader can accept that murther became murder without a tremor; the same reader feels Iuliet in the gut, as a wrongness in the most familiar word-string in English drama, and the feeling is the lesson. The gut has been educated by editions, not by documents. The documents, followed from Da Porto’s Giulietta through Brooke’s Romeus and Juliet, Painter’s Julietta, Danter’s and Creede’s Iuliet, Smethwick’s brief Juliet and relapse to Ivliet, tell one continuous story of a name that every handler respelled, in a trade that had not yet made respelling a fault. Behind the printed page stands the playhouse, where the same names lived in actors’ parts, in the book-keeper’s plot and in the memory of the company, the world surveyed in the account of Romeo and Juliet on the Elizabethan stage; print did not fix what performance had left fluid, because print in the 1590s was fluid in the same way, a manufacture of movable letters set by men whose spelling was a habit of the hand.

So the verdict stands as the opening gave it, with its two halves held together. As evidence, the spellings of the names are real but weak singly and strong only in aggregate, and their aggregate testimony is about manufacture, not about meaning: they show untidied copy, two shops for the first quarto and a borrowed stretch in the second, a trade-wide norm of Iuliet that no single compositor invented and no author needed to. As reading, the modern forms are right, and Wells’s case for them has not been answered because it cannot be: Iuliet obstructs a modern reader exactly where the original obstructed nobody. The failure this article charges against modern practice is narrow and corrigible, the silence. A spelling modernized in silence teaches a false history of the book; a spelling modernized in the open, with the early forms recorded and a facsimile within reach, teaches the true one, that the most famous names in literature reached the world unfixed, carried by printers who spelled them as their hands were trained to spell, and that the fixity readers now take for the names’ nature is an achievement of editors, recent, deliberate and, at its best, confessed. Juliet asked what a name is, and answered that the thing would be itself under any name. The early texts of her play are the laboratory proof of her answer, conducted by accident, in type, across thirty years of title pages: the rose kept its sweetness through every spelling the shops could give it, and the spellings, not the sweetness, are what the documents preserve.

Which spelling of the heroine’s name is the right one?

Each spelling is right inside its regime, and error consists only in mixing the regimes unknowingly. Juliet is right in a reading text, Iuliet in a transcription of the quartos, Ivliet in a transcription of the Folio heading. A page that prints Juliet claiming to show the early title page is wrong as no spelling within a regime can be.

The distinction matters because the question is the one readers bring to the subject first, usually expecting a winner. The documents refuse to crown one. They offer instead a dated sequence of settlements, each internal to a manufacture, Danter’s, Creede’s, Smethwick’s, the Folio shop’s, Rowe’s, Wells’s, and the sequence is the answer. A name in a hand-set book is not a word with a spelling but a word with a history of settings, and competence in the subject means holding the history and the current settlement in view together, using Juliet with a clear conscience and knowing, when the argument turns on evidence, exactly what the clear conscience cost and where the receipt is kept.

One practical consequence follows for the classroom, where most encounters with this play are decided. An edition that prints a single facsimile page, Danter’s title page or one opening of Creede’s prefixes, alongside its modern text teaches the whole argument of this article at a glance and at the cost of one leaf: the names arrive unfixed, the fixity is ours, and the play survives the knowledge undamaged, as it survived the fact. Until that leaf becomes standard, the spelling of the lovers’ names remains the cleanest available demonstration that a classic text is not a thing found but a thing made, made first by printers who spelled Iuliet because their alphabet told them to, and remade by every editor since who decided, in silence or in the open, what the heroine should be called.

The fixity has a civic afterlife that the unfixed centuries could not have supported. Verona answers letters addressed to Juliet, thousands of them, through the volunteers of the Juliet Club, and the correspondence works because the addressee’s name is a stable address, one spelling, known on every continent, deliverable. A letter directed to Iuliet would reach the same balcony by the same post, and everyone involved knows it, which is the final proof of the heroine’s own thesis: the name is the convention, and the convention, once a civilization has spent four centuries ratifying one form of it, acquires the weight of fact. The documents keep the earlier, lighter state of the convention, when it weighed no more than a compositor’s habit. Both states are true, and the whole duty of an edition, a catalogue and a study like this one is to keep the two truths from being mistaken for each other.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: What is the InsightCrunch spelling note, and what pattern does it expose?

The InsightCrunch spelling note is the witness-by-witness table of the lovers’ name forms set out in this article, recording how the hero, the heroine, the two houses and the Prince are spelled in each early text from Brooke’s poem to the First Folio. The pattern it exposes is a gradient rather than a scatter: the full forms are stable within any one layer of a book while the layers disagree with each other, title page against prefixes, quarto against quarto, shop against shop. Read as a whole, the table shows fixity arriving late and from outside the period, imposed by editors on documents that never possessed it.

Q: How is the heroine’s name spelled on the title page of the first quarto?

The first quarto’s title page spells her Iuliet. The page, printed by John Danter in 1597, announces AN EXCELLENT conceited Tragedie OF Romeo and Iuliet, and the I is not an error but the consonantal value of the period’s single I/J letter. The same page sets the printer’s own Christian name as Iohn, which confirms that the form belongs to the alphabet and the shop rather than to any peculiarity of the heroine. Every facsimile and diplomatic transcription of the edition preserves the form, and only modernized references to the edition replace it with Juliet.

Q: Why does the first quarto print Iuliet with an I where modern books print a J?

The first quarto prints I because the early modern alphabet treated I and J as one letter with two values, vocalic and consonantal, and printers commonly used the I form for both. The separation of J into a letter of its own was a gradual typographical change completed across the seventeenth century, after the quartos were printed. A compositor setting the heroine’s name reached for the sort his case offered for that sound, and the sort was I. The spelling is therefore evidence about the letter stock of the 1590s, not about a different name, a different pronunciation or a mistake in Danter’s shop.

Q: How is the heroine’s name spelled on the title page of the second quarto?

The second quarto’s title page also spells her Iuliet. Thomas Creede’s edition of 1599 announces THE MOST Excellent and lamentable Tragedie, of Romeo and Iuliet, beneath the claim that the text stands newly corrected, augmented and amended. The survival of the old spelling on the very page that advertises correction is the neatest demonstration in the play’s bibliography that spelling was not part of what correction meant: the words of the play could be augmented by hundreds of lines while the heroine’s name kept the form the trade had always given it. Modern references that transcribe the title with Juliet are modernizing silently.

Q: How many forms does the heroine’s name take inside the second quarto?

Inside the second quarto the heroine’s name takes four forms in the speech prefixes and entrances: Iuliet at full length, and the contractions Iuli, Iu and Iule. The inventory was catalogued by Eric Sams from the printed text, and any facsimile confirms it. The contractions are not rival spellings but compressions, graded to the space and speed of the copy and the setting, and they mirror the hero’s parallel set of Romeo, Rom and Ro. Counted with the title page’s Iuliet, the book presents its heroine under a small family of shapes, all of them hers, none of them an error.

Q: Why is Romeo’s name steadier than Juliet’s across the early editions?

Romeo’s name is steadier because none of its letters belonged to the doubled pairs of the early alphabet. The heroine’s name begins with the I/J letter and so inherited every fluctuation of that letter’s unsettled history, while R, O, M, E and O had one shape each and offered a compositor no choice to make. In full form the hero is Romeo in every early edition of the play, varying only under abbreviation to Rom and Ro. His steadiness across the sources is another matter: Brooke’s poem had called him Romeus, and the shorter form reached the play through the prose tradition and the stage before print fixed it there.

Q: Which quarto first prints Juliet with a J on its title page?

The third quarto, printed for John Smethwick in 1609, first prints Juliet with a J on its title page. The edition is a reprint of the second quarto’s text, so the new letter arrived through the display page of a derivative book rather than through any fresh authority for the play’s words. The innovation did not hold even within the quarto sequence: the undated fourth quarto reverted to IVLIET, and the First Folio’s heading followed with Ivliet. The J form’s permanent victory belongs to the editorial tradition of later centuries, which regularized the heading along with the text.

Q: How does the First Folio head the play, and what does its spelling of the heroine show?

The First Folio heads the play The Tragedie of Romeo and Ivliet. The form is the quartos’ Iuliet written in the Folio shop’s capital letterforms, in which V serves for the vowel U, so the heading is letter for letter the old name rather than a new variant. Its presence in 1623 shows the I form still current in a great collected volume printed from copy descended from the third quarto, the one edition whose title page had tried the J. Display habit in the Folio shop outlasted the single experiment, and the heroine entered the canon under the spelling her first printers had given her.

Q: How is the Capulet household named in the first quarto’s opening direction?

The first quarto’s opening direction names them the Capolets. The direction enters two serving-men of the Capolets, the family name carrying a single t in its household plural, where the second quarto’s corresponding direction speaks of the house of Capulet. The difference is small and entirely typical: a surname in the early texts is spelled by the same unfixed habits as any other word, and the plural household form, the name under which the servants fight, varies between the two books that report the same brawl. Modern editions print Capulet throughout, and the variant survives only in facsimiles, transcriptions and apparatus.

Q: Why do modern editions print Montague when the early texts print Mountague?

Modern editions print Montague because editors regularize proper names as a stated part of modernization, and the received modern form of the hero’s surname lacks the u that the early texts carry. The second quarto’s directions enter the Mountagues and speak of Mountague, a form that runs through the early printings; the Folger editors state openly that Mountague becomes Montague in their text, as is usual in editions of the play. The change costs nothing in reference, since no second family is involved, but it erases a consistent feature of the copy, and the old-spelling Everyman text keeps Mountague in print on the argument that the form may carry a point on the fever, the ague, of the feud.

Q: What happens to the Prince’s name Eskales in modern editions?

In modern editions Eskales is regularized to Escalus. The Prince enters the second quarto under the name Eskales, with a hard k spelling and an ending the Latinized modern form replaces, and the Folger introduction names the change directly among its corrections of proper names. No editor supposes two princes, and the regularization follows the same policy as Montague: a name is given its received modern shape so that reference stays stable across criticism and the classroom. The cost is a small falsification of the early page’s Verona, which knew a less classical prince than the Escalus of modern programmes and editions.

Q: Why can one quarto spell a name one way on its title page and other ways inside?

One quarto can divide its spellings because a title page and a text were different kinds of work. The title page was display matter, set large, frequently set at a different time and sometimes by a different workman from the body of the book, following the shop’s display habits. The text inside followed the copy, speech by speech, through the hands of compositors whose own habits blended with the manuscript’s as they set. The second quarto therefore announces Iuliet in display type while its prefixes contract the same name to Iuli and Iu, without contradiction: two processes, two spelling regimes, one book.

Q: Could a compositor lengthen or shorten a name to fit the space of a page?

Yes, lengthening and shortening names was part of the ordinary elasticity of hand setting, most visible in the speech prefixes. A prefix is set at the head of a speech where space is tight and type is precious, and the quartos grade the lovers’ labels from Romeo and Iuliet down through Rom and Iuli to Ro and Iu as the setting requires. Within verse and prose lines the same pressure worked on spellings generally, since a compositor justifying a line could prefer the longer or shorter current form of a word. The prefixes preserve the clearest record of the practice because their contractions are systematic rather than occasional.

Q: Did the spelling Iuliet change how the heroine’s name was pronounced?

No, the spelling Iuliet changed nothing that an audience heard. The initial I in the name carried the consonantal value that modern spelling writes as J, and the name spoken in the playhouse of the 1590s was the name spoken in theatres now. The distinction between Iuliet and Juliet exists only on the page, which is why Wells’s case for modernizing the spelling is strongest at exactly this word: altering the letters alters no sound, no rhythm and no meaning. The early form’s value is wholly documentary, a record of how the name was manufactured in type, and it survives as evidence rather than as utterance.

Q: How do old-spelling editions present the heroine’s name?

Old-spelling editions present her as Iuliet, following the copy text letter for letter. Lukas Erne’s edition of the first quarto for the New Cambridge Early Quartos prints the text in its original spelling, heroine included, and the Oxford Complete Works appeared in an original-spelling volume alongside its modernized twin, so that the two presentations could be read against each other. Facsimiles and diplomatic transcriptions, such as those of the Internet Shakespeare Editions, preserve the title pages and prefixes entire. In all such presentations Iuliet is not an affectation but a fidelity, the edition declining to translate what it exists to document.

Q: What is lost when every modern edition prints Juliet in one fixed form?

What is lost is the visible evidence of transmission. A fixed Juliet hides the fluctuations of the quartos’ prefixes, the Iuliet of both early title pages, the single J experiment of 1609 and its reversal, and the stratigraphy by which a reader could watch English spelling itself changing around the name. The loss is not sentimental: those fluctuations are primary data for how the play’s books were made and from what copy, and a text that removes them removes the student’s access to the questions textual study asks. Editions that record the old forms in an apparatus or introduction limit the loss; editions that regularize in silence complete it.

Q: What does modernizing the lovers’ names gain a reader?

Modernizing the names gains the reader an unobstructed meeting with the play. Stanley Wells’s argument for the Oxford edition holds that modern spelling removes barriers the original audience never faced, since Iuliet puzzled nobody in 1599, and lets attention rest on the words and the action. A fixed Juliet also gives criticism a stable reference: essays, classrooms, programmes and searches all meet the same heroine under the same letters. For the names the gain is sharpened by the fact that nothing audible is surrendered, the spoken name being identical under both spellings. The gain is real, and this article’s verdict accepts it for the reading page.

Q: Do the name spellings help show that the two quartos were printed from different kinds of copy?

Yes, cautiously, as aggregate evidence rather than proof from any single form. Both quartos run elastic prefix systems, Iul and Iule and their fellows, but the systems differ in their particular contractions, and each book adds forms the other lacks, the pattern expected when two shops set two different manuscripts rather than when one book copies another. The one stretch where the second quarto does copy the first, the borrowed pages of the second act, is the exception that confirms the reading, its accidentals following the printed page of 1597. Under McKenzie’s caution the spellings corroborate the copy histories; they cannot carry them alone.

Q: Where did the spelling Romeus lose its ending on the way into the play’s texts?

The spelling Romeus lost its Latin ending in the passage from page to stage that separates Brooke’s poem from the play. Brooke’s Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet of 1562 classicized the hero with a final us, while Painter’s prose tale, printed four years later, already calls him Romeo, the form the spoken theatre used and the form every early edition of the play retains in full. No document records the moment of the change, and the likeliest account is cumulative: a name spoken nightly sheds its learned tail, and the printers of the play set the name as the playhouse knew it.

Q: How can an essay use the InsightCrunch spelling note to argue that spelling is evidence?

An essay can use the spelling note by arguing from its pattern rather than from any single striking form. The note arranges the names witness by witness, so the essay can show the heroine’s Iuliet persisting across two shops and two kinds of copy, the prefixes contracting by system rather than by chance, and the family names holding forms, Mountague and Eskales, that modern editions must actively remove. That arrangement converts spelling from decoration into testimony about manufacture and transmission. The essay should concede the modernizers their reading page, then insist that a class of evidence an editor must erase to make the page readable is evidence still, and belongs in the record.