Did Shakespeare Really Hide His Name in Psalm 46?
It's a word-counting party trick that keeps resurfacing: count 46 words into Psalm 46 of the King James Bible and you land on "shake." Count 46 words back from the end and you land on "spear." Put them together and you get Shakespeare — supposedly slipped in on purpose by the playwright himself, who turned 46 around the time the translation was being finished. Most pages that repeat this either state the count without showing it, or wave it off as coincidence without saying why. We did the count ourselves, against the actual text, and chased the two key words back further than most retellings bother to.
The claim
William Shakespeare secretly embedded his name in the King James Bible: the 46th word of Psalm 46 is "shake" and the 46th word counting backward from the end is "spear," a deliberate cipher tied to his 46th year, the same period the King James Version was being finished ahead of its 1611 publication.
Source trail
Nobody we found can name who first noticed this or when. One currently-ranking source, tips.translation.bible (checked 2026-08-25), traces its popularization to "an article in the Times some forty years" before that page was written — itself undated, so this only places the trail somewhere in the mid-to-late 20th century, not at an original source. From there it circulates today almost entirely on personal sites, apologetics blogs, and academic-adjacent essays rather than through any major outlet: a Bible-translation resource, a novelist's personal blog, a King James Version defender's own site, an academia.edu upload, assorted WordPress and Substack posts, and Quora. Wikipedia's own Psalm 46 article (checked 2026-08-25) gives the theory one sentence — "some theorists have suggested" Shakespeare's involvement, "although many scholars view this as unlikely" — and stops there, with no word count, no date, and no name attached.
What's confirmed
- The count itself is real — we did it ourselves against the text, not against anyone's summary of it. Psalm 46 in the King James Version, fetched directly from Blue Letter Bible and cross-checked against an independently hosted verse-by-verse quotation of the same text (both checked 2026-08-25, wording identical), runs to 204 words across 11 verses, including three instances of "Selah." Counted straight through from the first word, word 46 is "shake," in verse 3: "...though the mountains shake with the swelling thereof." Counted backward from the last word and setting aside the three "Selah"s — the customary way this claim is stated, and the way that makes the arithmetic land exactly — word 46 is "spear," in verse 9: "...cutteth the spear in sunder..." We verified this with a full verse-by-verse word tally, not a single count-through, and it checks out both ways.
- Shakespeare's birthdate isn't actually on record — only his baptism is — and the "46" itself lands a year earlier than the KJV's publication, not the same year. The Folger Shakespeare Library's own page (checked 2026-08-25) states the earliest documentary record is his baptism on 26 April 1564, and that he was "probably" born 23 April 1564 "but we don't know for sure" — tradition, not a parish record. Working from that baptism year, tips.translation.bible (checked 2026-08-25), citing Oxford theologian Susan Gillingham, states "Shakespeare would have been 46 in 1610, the year before the publication" of the KJV in 1611 — so the numerology depends on the year the translators were finishing their work, not the year the book actually came out.
- The specific words "shake" and "spear" were already sitting in these same two verses of English Bible translations decades before Shakespeare was born. A directly fetched essay by King James Version defender Will Kinney (hosted via a document mirror, self-identified in its own text as originating at brandplucked.webs.com; checked 2026-08-25) quotes verse 3 and verse 9 of Psalm 46 from six English translations that predate the King James Bible: Coverdale's Bible (1535 — "the mountaynes shoke..."/"knapped the speare in sonder"), the Great Bible (1540), Matthew's Bible (1549), the Bishops' Bible (1568), and the Geneva Bible (1587), each rendering the same two verses with the same two key words, in the same two places, well before Shakespeare — born 1564 — could have written a word of anything. The vocabulary, in other words, is a translation-tradition constant going back to 1535, not something invented for 1611.
What isn't
- Whether the same word positions — not just the same words in the same verses — also cluster near 46 in a pre-Shakespeare translation. A separate source, novelist Austin Ratner's own essay (checked 2026-08-25), states that an unnamed scholar's letter found "shake" at word 46 and "spear" at word 48 in Coverdale's version — nearly the same position, decades early. We could not verify this ourselves: several direct attempts to fetch a complete, verbatim text of the Coverdale-descended Book of Common Prayer Psalter this session were blocked, redirected without content, or returned only page navigation, not the psalm text. We can confirm the words match across translations; we cannot confirm the position claim independently, and we're reporting it as Ratner's account, not as something we checked.
- Who actually first noticed this, and when. Every source we reached repeats the claim without naming an originator or a first publication; the one specific detail we found — a Times article "some forty years" before an undated page was written — doesn't resolve to a year we could check.
- Whether landing on two ordinary short words at position 46 from each end is statistically remarkable at all, versus something that would turn up by chance in most psalms of similar length. No source we found runs this calculation, and we aren't attempting it either — noting the gap rather than filling it with a number nobody has actually checked.
Verdict
The count is real. We checked it against the text ourselves, twice, and "shake" and "spear" land exactly where the claim says they do. What doesn't hold up is what the count is supposed to prove: the same two words sit in the same two verses of English Bible translations dating back to 1535, when Shakespeare hadn't been born yet, which makes this look far more like an inherited feature of how English translators kept rendering this particular psalm than something the King James committee slipped in for a living playwright's benefit. Whether the exact word count survives that far back too, we couldn't confirm ourselves this session.