On the part of a playwright who is reputed never to have been concerned with the publication of his dramatic works, the extreme attention devoted in his texts to the question and layout of the letters of the alphabet may well seem surprising. In this Shakespeare clearly anticipates on Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, where the association of letter and litter is a recurrent obsession. All the magic devoted to language in the Renaissance hermetic philosophy and in the kabbala dissolved here in a series of verbal contortions where the mixing and of languages (« a great feast of languages » says Moth) (5.1.35-6) recalls the rather poor jokes of schoolboys when they are faced with the learning of the alphabet. Pôles apart from the proverbial « nomina sunt numina » (names are divine), it reveals the arbitrary and facetious nature of the sign which remains slippery and is presented as a trap to anyone who gives it any sort of trust.