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Historical Backgrounds of Elizabethan and Jacobean Punctuation Theory

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Walter J. Ong
Walter J. Ong*
Affiliation:
St. Louis University
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Extract

The disputes centering about the oratorical value of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century punctuation in England have hinged mostly upon a study of printed tests current in Elizabethan times or shortly after. Professor Charles C. Fries, in a monograph surveying the whole of the discussion about Shakespeare's punctuation, notes that “some significance attaches to the fact ”that all of the five Elizabethan and Jacobean grammarians whose theories he adduces to help settle the dispute “refer to the use of these terms, comma, colon, and period, in classical rhetorical theory. ” And yet, in considering the question of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century punctuation, no one has investigated the systems of pointing which were associated with classical rhetorical theory and which may have been carried with that theory through the Middle Ages into Elizabethan and Jacobean England. Until an investigation of this matter is made, we are likely to be guilty once more of the pernicious practice of reading history backwards, understanding phenomena in terms of what succeeded them instead of what preceded, and explaining in terms already at hand for us phenomena which are not reducible to these terms.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 59 , Issue 2 , June 1944 , pp. 349 - 360
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1944

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References

1 “Shakespearian Punctuation, ”University of Michigan Publications: Language and Literature, Vol. i, Studies in Shakespeare, Milton and Donne (New York: The Macmillan Co., 1925), p. 80. Mr. Fries reviews the bulk of the literature, which need not all be listed here. Among the more important writings on Elizabethan and Jacobean punctuation might be mentioned: Percy Simpson, Shakespearian Punctuation (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1911) and “The Bibliographical Study of Shakespeare, ”Oxford Bibliographical Society: Proceedings and Papers, i (1922–26), 33–41; Sir Sidney Lee, in The Year's Work in English Studies, 1919–20, ed. for the English Association by Sir Sidney Lee (London: Oxford University Press, 1921), pp. 64–67; and Raymond Macdonald Alden, “The Punctuation of Shakespeare's Printers, ”PMLA, xxxix (1924), 557–580.

2 These marks, for which the grammarians occasionally give the Greek as well as the Latin names () derive from the Alexandrian schools of the third century b.c. See Sir Edward Maunde Thompson, An Introduction to Greek and Latin Paleography (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1912), pp. 60–61. Thompson notes how the scribes confused the marks with one another, and himself makes the equivalent to the semicolon and the to our comma (p. 60), whereas most authorities have it the other way around. See, for instance, A Greek-English Lexicon, ed. by Henry George Liddell, Robert Scott, Henry Stuart Jones, and Roderick McKenzie (rev. ed.; Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1940), ii, 1645 and 1896. Sometimes the early grammarians, too, are not very clear in this matter. The kind of equivalence to expect between these marks and those of present-day punctuation will come out in the course of the present study.

3 In Henry Keil (ed.), Grammatici Laiini (Leipzig: Teubner, 1857–80), i, 437.

4 Ibid., vii, 380.

5 Ibid., 215.

6 In this connection see Morris W. Croll, “The Baroque Style in Prose, ”Studies in English Philology: A Miscellany in Honor of Frederick Klaeber, ed. by Kemp Malone and Martin B. Ruud (Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 1929), pp. 454 ff.

7 Keil, op. cit., vi, 273.

8 Diomedes, Ars Grammatica, ibid., i, 437.

9 Ibid., iv, 372.

10 De Littera, De Syllaba, De Pedibus, De Accentibus, De Distinctione Commentarius [in Donatum], ibid., iv, 484–485.

11 Ibid., v, 34.

12 Ibid., vi, 192.

13 Excerpta Donatiani Fragmentum, ibid., vi, 273.

14 Donatus, Ars Grammatica, ibid., iv, 372.

15 Printed with the Opera Didascalica of Bede, Sectio iia, “Dubia et Spuria, ”in Patrologia Latina, ed. by J.-P. Migne (Paris: J.-P. Migne, 1844–64), xc, 613 ff.

16 In Keil, op. cit., Supplementum, ed. by Herman Hagen (Leipzig: Teubner, 1870), pp. 230–231.

17 See Article “Donet ”in A New English Dictionary, ed. by Sir James Murray et al., iii (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1897), 599.

18 In Migne, op. cit., ccx, 508.

19 Ed. by Brother Charles Henry Buttimer, F. S. C. (Dissertation; Washington, D. C.: The Catholic University Press, 1939), p. 46 (ii, 29).

20 See Charles Sears Baldwin, Medieval Rhetoric and Poetic (New York: The Macmillan Co., 1928), pp. 87, 95, 130, etc.

21 Migne, op. cit., lxxxii, 95.

22 Ibid., ci, 858.

23 Joannis Saresberiensis Opera Omnia, ed. by J. A. Giles (Oxford: J. H. Parker, 1848), v, 51 (i, 20).

24 A New English Dictionary, for example, says that “The function of the comma is to make clear the grammatical structure, and hence the sense of the passage ”(n, 666, Article “Comma”), and that the colon is a “punctuation-mark … usually indicating a discontinuity of grammatical construction greater than that marked by the semicolon, but less than that marked by the period ”(ii, 633, Article “Colon”; italics inserted). Similarly, John Franklin Genung, in The Working Principles of Rhetoric (Boston: Ginn and Co., 1900), pp. 328–329, notes that the comma “is the mark of the closer dependent clause, ”etc., and prescribes it “when a long or involved subject is finished, ready for its verb; … when a constituent clause is of subordinate, not coördinate significance ”(cf. Genung's remarks on the office of punctuation, ibid., pp. 325–326). These examples need not be multiplied.

25 Op. cit., p. 76.

26 Ibid., p. 81.

27 Mulcaster's Elementarie, ed. by E. T. Campagnac (“Tudor and Stuart Library”; Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1925), p. 167 (italics inserted).

28 Ibid., p. 166.

29 The Arte of English Poesie, ed. by Gladys Doidge Willcock and Alice Walker (Cambridge: The University Press, 1936), pp. 73–74 (Book ii, iiii [v]).

30 Ibid., pp. 76 and 75 (Book ii, iiii [v]).

31 An Apology for Actors, from the edition of 1612 compared with that of W. Cartwright (London: The Shakespeare Society, 1841), p. 29.

32 The Works of Ben Jonson, ed. by F. Cunningham after W. Gifford (London: Bickers and Son, 1875), ix, 316. C. H. Herford and Percy Simpson in their Ben Jonson, ii (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1925), 424–428, discuss the variations of the Cunningham-Gifford text (which was based on the 1692 edition of the Grammar) from the original printing of the Grammar in the 1640 folio, which they note itself reproduced the Grammar “very incorrectly ”(p. 417). The Grammar has not yet appeared in the Herford and Simpson edition, but the Cunningham-Gifford edition, which I have used as the basis of the present discussion, serves the purpose here even better than a new collation since it represents a revision which brought the text up to date in 1692 (Herford and Simpson, op. cit., ii, 424) and thus shows the tradition we are interested in persisting to a much later date than that of Jonson's death in 1637.

33 The Works of Ben Jonson, ix, 316.

34 Ibid., 317.

35 See above, p. 350.

36 The Works of Ben Jonson, ix, 318.

37 Ibid.

38 Simon Daines' Orthoepia Anglicana, heraus, von M. Rösler und R. Brotanek (“Neudrucke Frühneuenglischer Grammatiken, ”3; Halle a. S.: Max Niemeyer, 1908), p. 71.

39 Ibid., p. 70.

40 Ibid., pp. 70, 72–73.

41 Ibid., p. 72.

42 The pertinent passages are cited by Fries, op. cit., p. 77, from The English Grammar, pp. 58–59.

43 Alexander Gill's Logonomia Anglica, heraus, von. Otto L. Jiriczek (“Quellen und Forschungen zur Sprach- und Cultur-geschichte der Germanischen Völker, ”xc; Strass-burg: Karl J. Trübner, 1903), p. 135: “Accentui inseruiunt interpunctiones: quia illae vt sensū aperiunt, ita quantü possunt accentui viam sternunt. ”

44 Ibid.: “Eaedē sunt nobis quae Latinis, & usus idem.”

45 Op. cit.

46 Fries, op. cit., pp. 83–84.

47 Ibid., p. 75.