David Pott wrote: >>It seems more likely to me that >> he meant 'forescore', but deliberately spelled it 'fourscore'; or that the >> text got so altered. >> John Barton >One major problem with this argument is that there was no fixed way of >spelling anything in this period. Agreed. This is an argument surely *against* the idea that Shakespeare couldn't have written 'forescore' if he meant 'fourscore'. Precisely because spelling had not been formalised till the Civil War tracts of 1641, it could either have been a slip of the pen, a result of ambivalent spelling, a printer's foible, an idiosyncrasy of Shakespeare's personal preferred spelling (different people usually though not always spelled a word their own way consistently), or a deliberate confusion - which spelling inconsistency would make difficult to discover. All I am saying is that the view of some modern professors, that he seriously intended "the eightieth of April", and was merely burlesqueing/mocking contemporary ballads which often did include such absurdities, is simply not good enough. Shakespeare was quite capable of managing triple meanings in a passage, and never wrote crude nonsense unless there was such a double-entendre. The plays of course became mangled during publication, and it is quite likely that an original 'forescore', fully intended to mean 19th (a nonce-word, but easily understood one), was misunderstood by the printer and altered. Since David Garrick printed the word as forescore, in the 18thC when spelling had definitely become formalised, it seems incumbent on even the most sceptical of researchers to allow that either meaning (19 or 80) MIGHT be intended, and to follow that line to wherever it leads. Particularly if it leads to establishing, after over 400 years of speculation, the date of birth of the Stratford contender to authorship. John Barton