Making a Point (7 page)

Writers don't care about it; nor do the printers.

The ‘negligence' of printers. I have some sympathy for the
poor compositors who had the responsibility of typesetting Jonson's works for the impressive 1616 Folio edition, which is heavily punctuated. He was always breathing down their necks, calling in at the printing-house most days and correcting as many errors as he could. ‘Negligence' is actually quite mild compared with the falling-out Jonson had with a later printer when too ill to make routine calls to the printing-house. In a letter written in 1631 to the Earl of Newcastle, he calls John Beale a ‘lewd printer' and an ‘absolute knave', and observes: ‘My printer and I shall afford subject enough for a tragicomedy, for with his delays and vexations I am almost become blind.'

Doubtless many of these vexations would have been because printers failed to respect Jonson's preference for heavy punctuation, reflecting the value he placed on it as a reader of scholarly texts as well as plays. He even inserted a colon between the two parts of his signature,
Ben:Jonson
– a practice common enough among scholars of the time when they abbreviated their first names. And in a short poem called ‘To Groome Ideot', he tells someone off for reading his verse badly:

For offring, with thy smiles, my wit to grace,

Thy ignorance still laughs in the wrong place.

And so my sharpnesse thou no lesse dis-ioynts,

Than thou didst late my sense, loosing my points.

The last line: you obstructed the sense by not attending to the punctuation. Poor Groome, who not only reads Jonson's lines badly, but listens to it badly too, by laughing in the wrong place.

Jonson is unique in being both playwright and grammarian – and moreover one with a solid scholarly background, who knew about current humanist trends in mainland Europe as
well as the role of punctuation in antiquity. He is the first in a series of seventeenth-century writers who took the subject very seriously, and saw it within the context of grammar. Not that the writers all agreed about how to punctuate. On the contrary. Jonson has an illuminating paragraph in his series of short observations (we would today call them blog posts) published in 1641 after his death under the heading
Timber: or Discoveries made upon Men and Matter
:

What a sight it is to see writers committed together by the ears for ceremonies, syllables, points, colons, commas, hyphens, and the like? fighting as for their fires and their altars; and angry that now are frighted at their noises, and loud brayings under their asses skins.

Strong stuff. No wonder he fell out with his printers.

Printers would not have been used to such a combination of learning and temperament from a playwright. The printing industry was still quite small in the early 1600s. The book trade was concentrating on serious material, especially Bibles and other religious works. Plays were the least in the publishing kingdom. They were sporadic: less than a fifth of all plays were printed in the decades around 1600. They attracted small print runs, and made booksellers little profit. The playwright's world was also seen as a dangerous place, with theatres excluded from certain localities in London, and the content of plays viewed with suspicion on moral, religious, or political grounds. Thomas Bodley famously banned what he called ‘riff-raff' books – including cheap quarto play editions – from his Oxford library. The number of presses and master printers was tightly controlled by the Stationers Company and by ordinances issued by the Star Chamber, and printers had to cope with far bigger issues than punctuation.

Accordingly, while printers took a great deal of care over
the way they typeset religious, legal, educational, historical, and other scholarly works, they were notoriously casual when dealing with plays, as they knew they would not be treated with the same level of attention. They must have been taken aback when they encountered a playwright who cared. But the new genres of spelling guide, dictionary (the first in 1604, Robert Cawdrey's
A Table Alphabeticall
), and grammar were a different matter. And during the seventeenth century we see a large increase in their numbers, with the authors looking in unprecedented detail at the way their writing was presented, and keeping an eye on punctuation as never before.

8

Grammar rules

The century after Jonson saw the publication of many pedagogical guides to punctuation, but there's no agreement among them about how best to handle it. The messy situation of the sixteenth century, outlined in
Chapter 6
, remained. Is punctuation a guide to pronunciation or a way of making a text easy to read? Is its purpose elocutional and rhetorical, or is it to do with meaning and grammar?

As the teaching of grammar became routine in schools, and as more treatments of English grammar became available, we see the second approach becoming the norm. Grammar offered the possibility of system and order where previously there had been variation and idiosyncrasy. An approach favouring actors and orators highlighted the problem: how could half-a-dozen or so marks ever cope with the multifarious tones, tunes, and pauses of the speaking voice? Grammars, by contrast, recognized just eight parts of speech and showed an apparently limited number of ways of combining these into sentences. If anything could bring punctuation under control, it was going to be grammar.

That is why we begin to see such titles as Mark Lewis's
Plain and Short Rules for Pointing Periods Grammatically
(published in about 1672). Not all grammarians were interested, but during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries about 60 per cent of the published grammars did deal with the topic, even though we can sense at times a certain reluctance
to do so. For writers with a prescriptive temperament, looking to establish clear-cut grammatical rules of correct usage – the approach that became the norm by the second half of the eighteenth century – punctuation was something of a nuisance.

We can see these reservations in the most influential school grammar of the mid-eighteenth century: Bishop Lowth's
A Short Introduction to English Grammar
(1762), which ends with a chapter on punctuation. He draws a contrast between speech and writing: we have a variety of ways in speech to express the connections between sentences, he says, but in writing ‘the whole number of Points, which we have to express this variety, amounts only to Four … the Period, Colon, Semicolon, and Comma'. And he goes on:

So the doctrine of Punctuation must needs be very imperfect: few precise rules can be given which will hold without exception in all cases; but much must be left to the judgement and taste of the writer. … It remains, therefore, that we be content with the Rules of Punctuation, laid down with as much exactness as the nature of the subject will admit: such as may serve for a general direction, to be accommodated to different occasions; and to be supplied, where deficient, by the writer's judgement.

Lowth has often been described as the source of grammatical prescriptivism, but his grammar is much more nuanced in his descriptions, as these remarks illustrate.

This is the pattern followed by all the grammar-books that deal with punctuation. They start off confidently, list a series of rules, and conclude by warning readers that the rules don't always work. Books exclusively devoted to punctuation follow the same course. Joseph Robertson's
An Essay on Punctuation
(1785) illustrates the continuing emphasis on grammar. By
contrast with writers such as Mulcaster and Jonson (
Chapter 7
), his opening definition doesn't even mention pronunciation at all:

Punctuation is the art of dividing a discourse into periods, and those periods into their constituent parts: namely, a comma, a semicolon, a colon, &c.

He then lists forty rules governing the use of the comma in various parts of the sentence, and illustrates them in detail. Other marks are dealt with in less detail, and are similarly handled in terms of ‘rules'.

But at the end of the book, Robertson has a prominent page headed ‘Conclusion', where we read:

These rules, I must confess, are liable to some exceptions, and are not sufficient to direct the learner in EVERY imaginable combination of words and phrases. It would indeed be impossible to frame such a system of rules, as should comprehend the whole extent of the language.

He just hopes that his approach will help the reader to

divide his sentences, both in reading and writing, with greater accuracy and precision, than they are usually divided in the generality of books, wherein the punctuation is arbitrary and capricious, and founded on no general principles.

The problem is that, when we examine his rules in detail, we find they don't avoid the same criticisms. For instance, he's against inserting a comma between the subject and verb of a clause:

The society of ladies, is a school of politeness.

This is ‘improper', he says, and the comma should be omitted.

On the other hand, he sensibly recognizes that it may be necessary to pause after a lengthy construction:

When the clauses are short, and closely connected, the point may be omitted. On the contrary, a simple sentence, when it is a long one, may admit of a pause.

And he illustrates this from another sentence:

The good taste of the present age, has not allowed us to neglect the cultivation of the English language.

But if we compare the number of syllables in ‘short' and ‘long' examples, we find that they are the same – eight in each case. So why the comma in the second case and not the first? What counts as a ‘long' sentence element? This is the kind of question the grammarians were unable to answer.

The year after Robertson published his
Essay
, David Steel wrote
Elements of Punctuation
, in which he goes through Robertson's rules one by one, adds his own commentary, and illustrates good practice from a variety of authors (notably Milton). He's in total agreement that grammar ‘ought to be the basis of punctuation', but we quickly see the warnings appear. The use of periods poses few problems, he suggests, and the placement of commas can be decided with a good grammatical awareness of sentence construction, but when it comes to the distinction between colon and semicolon, he gives up:

they are both chiefly useful in marking the degree of connexion between one sentence and another, and, in this, the connexion may be so variously felt, by different people, that two will seldom agree in the use of these points in the same passage.

He concludes:

A nice acquaintance with punctuation is not, in my opinion, attainable by rules, as a knowledge of syntax may be acquired, but it must be procured by a kind of internal conviction, that the rules of grammar are never to be violated.

Where do we get this ‘internal conviction' from? By reading good authors: ‘a reference to books would teach the minutiæ better than any rules.' But as authors show diverse practices, it all comes down, in the end, to personal preference. He acknowledges that his own preference is to overpunctuate:

Whenever I am doubtful if a sentence will admit a comma, I generally end my hesitation by inserting it, provided it does not militate against grammar; always preferring a rigid to a relaxed punctuation.

We see a similar subjectivity in the most influential of all the eighteenth-century grammars, written by Lindley Murray. His
English Grammar
(1795) sold over 20 million copies, and was popular on both sides of the Atlantic, continuing to be used throughout the nineteenth century and being repeatedly acknowledged. The essayist Thomas de Quincey, writing in
Blackwood's Magazine
(April 1839), described the way it ‘reigns despotically through the young ladies' schools, from the Orkneys to the Cornish Scillys'. And in
Chapter 29
of
The Old Curiosity Shop
(1840–41), Charles Dickens describes Mrs Jarley's efforts to attract a new class of audience to her waxworks:

And these audiences were of a very superior description, including a great many young ladies' boarding-schools, whose favour Mrs Jarley had been at great pains to conciliate, by altering the face and costume of Mr Grimaldi as clown to represent Mr Lindley Murray as he appeared
when engaged in the composition of his English Grammar …

Whenever the satirical magazine
Punch
wanted to draw attention to ‘bad grammar', it would always refer to Murray, even in the closing decades of the nineteenth century.

When he comes to punctuation, Murray is well aware that he's dealing with something special. He treats it in a separate chapter, immediately adding a footnote:

As punctuation is intended to aid both the sense and the pronunciation of a sentence, it could not have been exclusively discussed under the part of Syntax, or of Prosody. The nature of the subject, its extent and importance, and the grammatical knowledge which it presupposes, have induced me to make it a distinct and subsequent article.

He then follows Lowth and earlier writers by repeating the phonetic equation:

The Comma represents the shortest pause; the Semicolon, a pause double that of the comma; the Colon, double that of the semicolon; and the Period, double that of the colon.

He accepts that the pauses can't be given an absolute value, as speech can be faster or slower; but he insists that ‘the proportion between the pauses should be ever invariable'.

He then gives examples of the four main marks, devoting most space to the comma. Again following earlier writers – and often copying their examples – he identifies twenty rules relating commas to various types of syntactic construction. Some rules would later be contentious, such as his use of the ‘serial comma' (see
Chapter 26
):

The husband, wife, and children, suffered extremely.

David was a brave, wise, and pious man.

And some of his rules would now be seen as unnecessarily heavy, such as his recommendation that words like
so
,
hence
, and
first
should be set off by commas:

He feared want, hence, he over-valued riches.

But all of his rules would be followed, often slavishly, by several generations of grammarians and schoolteachers.

However, even Murray could see that there were factors present that couldn't be reduced to simple rules. His final paragraph on the comma reiterates Robertson's concern about length: ‘In many of the foregoing rules and examples great regard must be paid to the length of the clauses, and the proportion which they bear to one another.' But note how he concludes: this will ‘enable the student to adjust the proper pauses, and the places for inserting the commas'. In the end, it comes down, as Lowth had said, to ‘the writer's judgement'.

An important point to note is that Murray clearly saw the two functions of punctuation: ‘to aid both the sense and the pronunciation of a sentence'. This is a significant improvement on the views of people like Robertson, and it had already been identified by Steel, who saw how grammar and pronunciation could be connected:

Punctuation should lead to the sense; the sense will guide to modulation and emphasis.

This anticipates the important role given to semantics in the twentieth century (see
Chapter 11
).

Steel and Murray were writing towards the end of the eighteenth century, and had evidently been influenced by the new breed of elocutionists, who had been attacking any approach
to punctuation that focused exclusively on grammar. The most influential of these elocutionists was Thomas Sheridan (1719–1788), the father of playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan. His mid-century lectures on elocution were delivered to packed halls all over the country. A series could attract well over 1500 people, each paying a guinea to attend – which, translated into modern values, would be around £150,000. He also published his lectures as a course, selling at half-a-guinea a time. Elocution was big business, and people were prepared to pay for it in their desire to acquire a manner of speaking that would be elegant and acceptable in high society. There is, says Sheridan in his opening sentence, ‘a general inability to read, or speak, with propriety and grace in public'. A correct understanding of punctuation, he thinks, is part of the solution.

He's in no doubt that punctuation is partly to blame for the malaise. Echoing Ben Jonson in the previous century, in his fifth lecture he points the finger at two familiar characters:

There is no article in reading more difficult than that of observing a due proportion of stops, occasioned by the very erroneous and inaccurate manner, in which they are marked by printers and writers.

For Sheridan, concerned with effective reading aloud, the punctuation system is hopeless. He observes that it works inefficiently in both directions: there are many occasions when you need to pause in speech but there are no commas in the writing to guide you; and there are many occasions when there are commas in the writing but there should be no pause in speech. The grammarians are to blame, he thinks, because they have developed a model of punctuation that is of little relevance to the public speaker:

The truth is, the modern art of punctuation was not taken from the art of speaking, which was never studied by the moderns, but was in great measure regulated by the rules of grammar.

And there is a third villain in Sheridan's sights: teachers. In his opening lecture he talks of the way the schools have failed in providing students with a proper understanding of ‘the visible marks of the pauses and rests of the voice':

the masters have not only been more negligent in perfecting pupils in the right use of these, but in their method of teaching, have laid down some false rules, under the influence of which, it is impossible that any one can read naturally.

False rules – the perennial and unavoidable criticism of spelling and punctuation manuals that has continued down to the present day.