Making a Point (6 page)

7

Breath, blood, and spirits

During the sixteenth century, two trends emerged that would change attitudes to punctuation. One was the interest in it shown by scholarly writers on orthography, especially those who were seriously involved in the task of spelling reform. The other was a recognition by playwrights that punctuation gave actors useful guidelines about how lines were to be said, as well as sometimes providing them with an intriguing plot device.

First, spelling reform. Although punctuation wasn't central to the task of standardizing spelling, it was seen as being affected by the same arguments that motivated the reformers – the need to develop a clear and uniform approach to the writing of English. Headteacher Richard Mulcaster, for example, devotes a whole section to punctuation in his educational guide called
The Elementarie
(1582). Foreigners do wonder at us, he says, ‘both for the vncertaintie in our writing, and the inconstancie in our letters'. And in a section headed
Of distinction
, he describes thirteen marks (he calls them
characts
) which help ‘the right and tunable vttering of our words and sentences'. In fact only seven of them are punctuation in its everyday sense, as he includes marks to show long and short vowel values, as well as a ‘seuering note' (what we would now call a
dieresis
) separating the pronunciation of adjacent vowels.

It's interesting to see how Mulcaster handles punctuation, as his approach is typical of later writers. It's very much a phonetic perspective, all to do with breath and melody.

• Comma
  : a small croked point, which in writing followeth som small branch of the sentence, & in reading warneth vs to rest there, and to help our breth a litle.
  
• Colon
  : two round points one aboue another, which in writing followeth som full branch, or half the sentence.
  
• Period
  : a small round point, which in writing followeth a perfit [perfect] sentence, and in reading warneth vs to rest there, and to help our breth at full.
  
• Parenthesis
  : two half-circles, which in writing enclose som perfit branch, as not mere impertinent, so not fullie concident to the sentence, which it breaketh, and in reading warneth vs, that the words inclosed by them, ar to be pronounced with a lower & quikker voice, then the words either before or after them.
  
• Interrogation
  : two points one aboue another, wherof the vpper is somtimes croked which both in writing & reading teacheth vs, that a question is asked there, where it is set.
  

He also recognizes the two functions of the hyphen, marking them differently:

• A uniting line
  : a long stroke betwene two syllabs, whereby it is ment that those two syllabs ar parcells of one word.
  
• The breaker
  : two outright strokes one vnder another in the end of a line, and giueth vs to wit, that the word which it so breaketh is parted by full syllabs, whereof som be writen in the line before: som in that which followeth.
  

Clearly, punctuation for Mulcaster is primarily to do with reading aloud – what would later be called a
rhetorical
or
elocutionist
approach to the subject.

At the same time as the reformers were worrying about spelling, the dramatists were beginning to produce the works
that would eventually make this period a golden age of playwriting. And in what people generally regard as the first comedy of that time, we actually see punctuation becoming part of the plot. This is Nicolas Udall's
Ralph Roister Doister
, written around 1550. In Act 3 Scene 4, the foolish braggart Ralph writes a love letter to a rich widow, Dame Custance. Matthew Merygreeke reads it aloud to her, but ignores the original punctuation, so that the sense is the reverse of what was intended, and Roister is rebuffed. Roister then blames the scrivener, who says it wasn't his fault: it was the reader not following the correct punctuation.

ROYSTER: I say the letter thou madest me was not good.

SCRIUENER: Then did ye wrong copy it of likelyhood.

ROYSTER: Yes, out of thy copy worde for worde I wrote.

SCRIUENER: Then was it as ye prayed to haue it I wote [am sure],

But in reading and pointyng there was made some faulte.

There certainly was. Here are the two texts side by side. Note the length of the extract. Although there are earlier punctuation poems in English, nothing remotely resembles the scale of Udall's composition, which puts short pieces of wordplay (such as
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
) very much in the shade.

The ingenuity of this long passage impressed contemporary writers. Thomas Wilson, an influential writer on logic and rhetoric, uses it to illustrate ambiguity in the third edition of
The Rule of Reason
in 1553 – ‘an example of soche doubtful
writing, whiche by reason of poincting maie haue double sense, and contrarie meaning'.

It was a clever idea, and it was repeatedly employed. Shakespeare uses it during the play-scene in
A Midsummer Night's Dream
(5.1.108). Peter Quince addresses the assembled nobles with a prologue beginning:

Theseus comments drily: ‘This fellow doth not stand upon points.'

The device wasn't restricted to comedy. Towards the end of Christopher Marlowe's
Edward II
(line 2238ff), we see Young Mortimer plotting the death of the king. He knows he has to do it cunningly, so he leaves the punctuation out of a letter, allowing the text to be read in two ways. If he's accused, he plans to be able to say he had no part in it. The crucial unpunctuated line is:
Edwardum occidere nolite timere bonum est
. A word-by-word translation of the Latin is: ‘Edward kill don't fear good is.' And Mortimer explains it in this way:

Edwardum occidere nolite timere, bonum est,

Fear not to kill the king, 'tis good he die:

But read it thus, and that's another sense;

Edwardum occidere nolite, timere bonum est,

Kill not the king, 'tis good to fear the worst
.

Unpointed as it is, thus shall it go.

That, being dead, if it chance to be found,

Matrevis and the rest may bear the blame,

And we be quit that caus'd it to be done.

(Spoiler alert.) His plan doesn't work out the way he hopes. The king dies, but so does he.

So, with both scholars of orthography and playwrights recognizing the role of punctuation, by the end of the sixteenth century the climate had altered, and this shows clearly in a new perspective: grammar. Grammarians had nothing to say about English punctuation in the fifteenth century for the simple reason that there were no English grammars. The first piece of writing that outlines the subject was written by a Sussex printer, William Bullokar, in 1586: a highly abbreviated treatment called
Pamphlet for Grammar
. It closely follows the standard Latin grammar of the time, by William Lily, with a focus on parts of speech, etymology, and spelling. Sentence construction and prosody are given very little space; and punctuation – which of course relates to these two areas – isn't mentioned at all.

We see the new orientation in a work that comes from an unexpected quarter: Ben Jonson's
English Grammar
, written sometime in the early 1600s. Who would have thought a dramatist would write an English grammar? But this was a special interest of Jonson's, who collected as many grammars of languages as he could find. In fact what has come down to us is an abbreviated version. The original full text was destroyed in a house fire in 1623.

At the end of his opening chapter Jonson vividly identifies the central role of punctuation in language:

Prosody, and orthography, are not parts of grammar, but diffused like the blood and spirits throughout the whole.

Orthography for him is ‘right writing'. And after talking about syntax he develops the metaphor:

All the parts of
Syntax
have already been declared. There resteth one general affection of the whole, dispersed thorough every member thereof, as the blood is thorough the body; and consisteth in the breathing, when we pronounce any
sentence
. For, whereas our breath is by nature so short, that we cannot continue without a stay to speak long together; it was thought necessary as well for the speaker's ease, as for the plainer deliverance of the things spoken, to invent this means, whereby men pausing a pretty while, the whole speech might never the worse be understood.

He goes on to describe the use of punctuation to mark these breathings: a comma (‘a mean breathing'), a semicolon (‘somewhat a longer breath'), a parenthesis (equivalent to a pair of commas), a colon (‘two pricks', which he calls a
pause
), a period, an interrogation (?), and an admiration (!). An enthusiast for the new practices being used in Europe, he also devotes a separate chapter to the
apostrophus
, ‘an affection of words coupled and joined together'.

Jonson is very concerned that people don't always get punctuation right, and he knows who to blame:

Apostrophus
is the rejecting of a vowel from the beginning or ending of a word. The note whereof, though it many times, through the negligence of writers and printers, is quite omitted, yet by right should, and of the learneder sort hath his sign and mark, which is such a semi-circle (‘) placed in the top.