As for the nature of his signatures, yes, idiosyncratic scrawls were used then as now, but where these are obviously signatures, William’s suggest the kind of labored effort shown by the signature of a six-year-old, a drawn image, taught by his parents, that as yet has no meaning for him in terms of a sequence of known letters. Although this copy can’t reproduce the shades of ink that give greater clarity to the signatures, there’s no doubt that the man who wrote these versions of Shakspeare did not know how to write anything but his last name, and that not well. He seems to have remembered it up to the k, at which point his memory would fail him. In (e) and possibly (d) it seems he actually attempted the William. Orthodox scholars tend to agree that the other Williams were written by the scribe who penned the rest of the document.