William Shakespeare's Signature Worth $3 Million

by Rigel Celeste (RSS feed)
Sep 19th 2007 at 8:02AM

Celebrities spend a lot of time signing autographs, but besides personal value the ones that really end up being worth lots of cold hard cash are the rarest ones. In today's day and age it's hard to get through a single day sometimes without signing for a credit card purchase or something else, but hundreds of years ago things were different. Even for somebody who spent most of his time with a quill in his hand.

For all the writing William Shakespeare did he apparently didn't sign his name very often. Today there are only six of the playwright's known authenticated signatures in existence, which helps make his John Hancock one of the most valuable in the world. One can be found on a conveyance for a house in London, one on a legal deposition, one on his mortgage documents, and three in his will. And any one of those is worth $3 million, seriously.

Tags: autograph, autographed, famous, john hancock, JohnHancock, most expensive, MostExpensive, name, play, plays, playwright, rare, shakespeare, sign, signature, signed, william shakespeare, WilliamShakespeare, write, writer, writing

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DDias Jan 29th 2008 9:45PM

Right Eric, however, Einstein was a high school drop out and he wrote the theory of relativity. What would the same "scholars" say about that?????

charles hedbring Feb 11th 2008 7:05AM

Oh yes, and how do some autistic students, totally untrained and with exquisite spontaneity, compose music, create beautiful paintings, write incredible prose, display voluminous memories, and yes, quote Shakespeare endlessly? Longtime NYC autistic teacher, charlie hedbring

John S Feb 22nd 2008 9:45AM

Marggus' comment is very typical of those of the "Orthodox" persuasion...long on invective and pitifully short on facts. It is obvious, even to someone lacking expertise in handwriting analysis, that whomever signed this was functionally illiterate. The other five signatures are worse. This is the best one. Most of the others are incomplete scribbles and hardly proof of authorship.

Nick Fowler Mar 20th 2009 10:00AM

William Shakespeare has been making the headlines again recently: ‘A portrait owned for nearly 300 years by the Cobbe family in Hatchlands House in Surrey, is claimed as the only known picture painted of William Shakespeare during his lifetime. The claim is supported by Stanley Wells, Professor of Shakespeare studies at Birmingham University’. The Sunday Times 8th/March/2009.

For your interest, I am selling the domains: ShakespearesAutograph.co.uk, ShakespearesAutograph.com, ShakespearesSignature.co.uk, WilliamShakespearesAutograph.co.uk and WilliamShakespearesSignature.co.uk . They are available for immediate transfer.

These brand new domains are without content or history, and would be ideal for any business involved in the sale or auction of rare and highly sought after autographs / signatures.

These are prime domains, featuring a strong, but memorable, generic term, and would prove an excellent asset, helping to drive valuable customers to your website.

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Eric Sep 25th 2007 12:35PM

His signature may not be worth very much for long. There is currently a group of eminent scholars and actors (Shakespearean) who have come forth in the past few months to declare that they believe William Shakespeare did not write all the works attributed to him. Although they cite much "evidence" in support of their claim, the most persuasive of those is the question of how Shakespeare, who was not an educated man, could have known enough about such topics as law, politics (especially in foregin countries), etc., to write as intricately and as detailed as he supposedly did. In other words, the group of scholars/thespians claim that because Shakespeare was not formally educated, there is really no way he could have possessed the requisite information about any number of subjects which are featured in the writings attributed to him.

Perhaps that signature isn't worth as much as once was thought?!?

Brian Jun 16th 2009 5:19AM

ridiculous.
this is not new talk. its a whole bunch of people who are too ignorant to comprehend how intelligent other humans could possibly be.
they are like moon landing conspiracy theorists. if the argument is 'the plays are too smart to have been written by someone who didn't go to school' then Da Vinci couldn't have drawn a helicopter because he didn't have a pilots license and Paine couldn't have written his essays because he didn't live in a democracy. You can't teach someone to do something that hasn't been done before. His work is not the product of executed convention... it is revolutionary and an invention of intelligence in and of itself. The writer of the work is clearly a savant, and anyone who reads it can see that his details in feilds beyond the english language are not always accurate and the parts that are accurate could easily be attributed to someone who simply reads a lot and has friends in an international court.
If he didn't write them, then who did? A group of actor's and writers working together? Because one man could not have complete these?
I find it even harder to believe that a group of people... or even TWO people could create work as cohesive and complete as his work. The great works of human achievement are always out of the mind of a single artist or thinker, and they are always of too large a scope for the ignorant to accept.
One man wrote these plays. And every piece of evidence and logic from over 400 years of well documented history points to that man being William Shakespeare. I refuse to believe that the most amazing collection of work in the history of communicable language was written by someone who refused to take personal credit for it, and instead created and progressed a patsy that fooled Queen Elizabeth, Ben Jonson, Christopher Marlowe, the entire English Court, and 400 years of literary scholars, until a group of oxymoronic University theatre teachers, who spend most of their days misteaching the meaning of the word 'wherefor', decided that Hamlet is too intelligent for someone who didn't have a college a degree to have written it.
It's confounding... insulting even. Lay off it, already.

Shakespeare's secret lover Mar 24th 2010 8:02PM

HE DOES NOT HAVE TO GO TO SCHOOL TO GET ALL THE KNOWLEGE SHOWN IN HIS PLAYS!!! JUST BY LIVING LIFE HE COULD HAVE LEARNED THAT!!! HE DID WRITE THOSE PLAYS NO DOUBT ABOUT IT. IT TICKS ME OFF SO MUCH WHEN PEOPLE SAY HE IS A HOAX!!!! HE WAS AN AMAZING GENIUS!!! SOME OF THE MOST KNOWN AND RESPECTED SCHOLARS IN THE WORLD NEVER HAD MORE THAN AN ELEMENTRY SCHOOL TRAINING. THOU HAST NO MORE BRAIN THAN I HAVE IN MINE ELBOWS!!!

Rick Sep 26th 2007 3:42PM

Sorry but that's not Bill's signature. Bill always used a Corolla Typewriter with a FICA 12 font. So, don't buy it. It's a fraud!

Suzanne Sep 25th 2007 1:46PM

Well Eric, it's a good thing we have people as smart as you to set us straight.

ericnda626 Sep 27th 2007 3:07AM

Shut up you dumb idiot.

marggus Sep 25th 2007 7:06PM

Alas poor Eric. Casting slings and arrows of outrageous.. supposition. Suffering long with such anal porishness, to thy self be true. Looking long and without fett to your pithless vision, your course doomed to be one of self gratification, nary a partner to jointly succumb, a sole short effort.. Ignoramus idiotum.

Red1NFla Sep 26th 2007 12:26AM

dumb idiot...ignoramus idiotum...double negatives...shakespeare might not have written all that yahoo...who cares...yaaawwn.

who is the fool that would pay 3m for anyones signature?

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