I met a guy whose last name is Shakespeare today.

[fleur-de-lisa]

Last edited Tue Sep 11, 2018, 03:04 PM - Edit history (1)

I am my family's historian, so I pay attention to surnames. It's kind of a hobby.

I was dropping my car off at the mechanic's this morning. The guy behind me gave his name as Jordan Shakespeare. I have never run into anyone who had that last name before.

I didn't have a chance to ask him about his name since he had a friend waiting to pick him up and he was out the door in a flash.

Shakespeare. Weird.

[Ron Obvious]

1. There are a few around.

The former interim manager of Leicester City FC (English soccer club) is called Greg Shakespear.

I don't know if they are descendants.

[haele]

2. One of the people I work with has the surname Shakespeare...

He's from the Caribbean, with a very unusual old English/Caribbean type of first name - straight out of the 17th/18th century - which is why I won't give it out.
The name is cool, but I certainly wouldn't want to name a child it unless he was born in a culture that supported that sort of name.

Haele

[Sneederbunk]

3. Saw Shania Twain once.

[BluesRunTheGame]

4. There's a fairly famous Jamaican bassist named Robbie Shakespeare.

[Aristus]

5. Althought rare today, Shakespeare was far from an uncommon name in

Elizabethan times.

Warwickshire, Will the Bard's home, was known to have a number of families named Shakespeare, not all of them closely-related to the one we know.

A similar name, 'Breakspeare', was fairly common throughout the High Middle Ages and the Renaissance. The only English Pope, Adrian IV, was born Nicholas Breakspear.