Could Shakespeare Spell?!

When pedants, with respect to careful editors of course, jump on my writing head over some sometimes wonky spelling, my immediate reposte is ‘look at Shakespeare’s spelling’. But then of course, with language in such transition, both aurally and in terms of spelling – I remember some schooltime something about ‘the great vowel shift’- perhaps that space before and beyond the OED was vital to a poet. Perhaps it’s something about the Science/’God’ debate too, today’s fracturing and specialisation of consciousness even, that means the return of a mind and voice like that, a psyche like that, is impossible. There is something about the Shakespearian imagination that itself generates language, through story and feeling, which is why we’ve quoted him in The Poet’s Sweatshop. Do forgive us for blog mistakes, it will be properly edited too, but the voice comes first.