Whereas the handwriting argument attempts to establish Shakspere as Hand D, the spelling argument attempts to establish Hand D as Shakespeare. There are five unusual spellings in the Hand D section that are also found in early printed texts of Shakespeare plays. This is how Hand D spells 'silence' ('scilens'). The same error is found 18 times in Henry IV Part Two, where it hasn't been automatically corrected because it is a character's name. In the same play, and in Hand D's text, 'German' is spelled 'Iarman', an error only found elsewhere in the manuscript play John of Bordeaux, apparently created by the transcriber. Three other odd Hand D spellings: 'elamentes' for 'elements', 'a levenpence' for 'eleven pence', and 'deule' for 'devil' occur in editions of Shakespeare's plays. They do occur in other works too, mostly poems, and 'a leven' for 'eleven' is in fact reasonably common until you add the pence. But as Jackson puts it, "all five exceptional Hand D spellings appear in early printed texts of Shakespeare's, Whereas only one makes so much as a single appearance in all of the rest of Literature Online: English Drama, some 1,200 works." This sounds impressive, until you realize we have absolutely no idea how Shakespeare's play texts were transmitted from author to print house. Scholars believe they can identify which texts were printed directly from the author's papers, but we have no firm evidence that any of them were. Here, we need to introduce an important point. Penmanship does not equate to authorship. The original script, it has been agreed, was written by Anthony Munday. Yet very few people believe Anthony Munday was the sole author of this play. Not all of the hands identified as contributing to this manuscript were dramatists. There is agreement that Hand C was a copyist, a scribe. Hand D, just like Hand C, uses phonetic spellings, indicating that the text has been expanded from some kind of shorthand. Let's imagine for sake of argument, that the scribe responsible for writing out part of Sir Thomas More also had a Hand in copying out the texts of John of Bordeaux, Henry IV Part Two, Love's Labour's Lost and Henry V, where these odd spellings occur. The spellings would not belong to the author, but to the scribe. If Hand D was a theater company scribe, that would be a perfectly good explanation for the shared spellings between this part of Sir Thomas More and three Shakespeare plays. We'll come back to this idea towards the end of this lesson. Here's another thing to ponder. Hand D is an appalling speller. Jackson, enthusiastically endorsing his identity as Shakespeare, lists 16 spellings which are unique to him across all searchable texts on the LION database of early modern English literature. Adicion, aucthoryty, ffraunce, inhumanyty, liom, obedienc, another version of obedience, offyc, parsnyp, quallyfy, shreef, shrevaltry, supposytion, sylenet, thappostle, ynnovation. But in enthusiastically supporting the case for Shakespeare as Hand D, through five rare shared spellings, the disparity between this instinctive phonetic speller and the likely spelling habits of a widely-read author is forgotten. Scholars have demonstrated that Shakespeare was a voracious reader. From Holinshed's Chronicles to Philip Sidney's Arcadia, from Chaucer's Canterbury Tales to Foxe's Book of Martyrs, Shakespeare's reading across English literature covers hundreds of sources. And not just English sources, for it is apparent that Shakespeare read dozens of texts in other languages, including the short stories of Bandello in Italian, Ovid's Fasti in Latin, and Belleforest's Histoires Tragiques in French. Though variations in spelling were common in the period, the spellings of the words that Hand D mangles so uniquely were far more standardized than his versions suggest. And given that Shakespeare could read the romance languages - Italian, Latin, and French - it would seem extraordinary if he misspelled so comprehensively, so many words with Latinate roots. One only has to look at the spellings in letters by other professional writers of the period, to see that their spelling is far more standardized than that of Hand D. See the letters of Thomas Nash, Thomas Decker or Samuel Daniel for example. Jonson, like Shakespeare, was a big reader. He had a library of his own. He came from humble beginnings but his grammar school education and voracious reading habit led to a relatively standardized spelling habit not exhibited by Hand D. The spelling argument, in other words, counts against itself. Unless you are happy to believe these are the spellings of a well-read man.