Slay, Saint! Shakespeare, a bad punctuator?
Today’s Saint George’s Day, 23 April. That’s the patron-saint of England, the one who liberated the city of Silene in Libya from a dragon with an incorrigible taste for humans. The hero, however, is not from England, and never even set foot in it: he was born in modern-day Turkey, and was a high-profile soldier in the guard of the Roman emperor (then still pagan). Refusing to recant his faith, George was beheaded in 303 C.E.. Two generations later, Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire. And another 100 years after that, George was declared a Saint by Pope Gelasius. So how did this Middle Eastern hero end up as patron saint of an obscure island at the Western-most edge of Europe? And what does it have to do with Shakespeare and punctuation?
Christianity took several hundreds of years to take root in the British Isles (really only cementing itself with the Norman conquest in 1066). From the ninth century onwards, the English started celebrating Saint George, but it was only during the reign of the Tudors in the sixteenth century that the martyr became a patron for England, memorably captured in Shakespeare’s play on the life of Henry V, he of the battle of Agincourt against the French in 1415.
In the justly famous battle-speech, the King encourages his fellow Englishmen to attack the enemy with courage and honour, ordering cry ‘God for Harry, England, and Saint George!’. (I’m putting the quotation in italics, because it contains direct speech, and it all becomes confusing with the different inverted commas.)
This is not Shakespeare’s punctuation.
This is also not the original punctuation of early printed texts of the play. And not for quite some time.
So, how does original Shakespeare or at least Renaissance punctuation of the line (and the bard’s works as a whole) look like? Incidentally, 23 April is Shakespeare’s death day, and birthday. Allegedly, anyway. So happy birthday, Will, and let’s get up close and personal with your dots and dashes! Here are four things you need to know about Shakespeare’s punctuation, and what it can tell us about how we interpret his works and his times through those little signs.
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1) Shakespeare didn’t use any punctuation at all.
Okay, that’s not entirely true. He almost didn’t punctuate at all. Sadly, we have no surviving manuscript by Shakespeare of his plays or poetry except three pages of a piece he co-wrote with a few other playwrights. The three pages that scholars believe are by Shakespeare show very little use of the punctuation repertoire that was well-enough established by then.
The play is about the life and times of Sir Thomas More, the beloved political and literary figure who lost his head under King Henry VIII three generations or so before, at the beginning of the sixteenth century. I know the style of hand in the picture above is difficult to decipher for an untrained modern eye (including mine who’s much out of practise!). But you can still note that there are no question marks whatsoever, nor exclamation marks, nor dashes, or hyphens, quotation marks, or dot dot dots. I believe I can’t spot a full stop in this excerpt, but a smattering of commas here and there, for instance in the centre of line 4.
Does that mean Shakespeare didn’t know a comma from a colon? Was he a bad punctuator? Probably not. There are a lot of practical reasons for the lack of punctuation in this rare manuscript witness: Shakespeare might have been writing quite fast, for example, and not really cared about punctuating – much like us today who don’t capitalise our “i” or beginnings of sentences when we dash off text messages. And anyway, he was writing a script for a play. He knew actors would take it wherever they wanted to take it. It was irrelevant to punctuate anything if an actor was going to give the rhythm his own spin, since a large part of punctuation means communicating tone on the silent page. But if the page is not silent anymore, why bother?
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The play was never printed, perhaps because it didn’t survive the censorship of the Master of the Revels who had to authorise books. So we don’t have a printed version to compare anything with. That puts us in a bit of a quandary: we only have three draft pages ascribed to Shakespeare but no printed version. And then we have printed versions of poetry and plays that are by him (some of that authorship today doubtful) but no handwritten copy whatsoever. On top of that, some of the printed texts have shorter versions published individually (called quartos referring to their paper-size). Some of those quartos also have longer versions of the same play printed in Shakespeare’s collected works of 1623 (called Folio). Some of his plays only exist in the Folio. All of those versions differ from each other, often substantially so with entire speeches such as the Saint George one present or not. Needless to say there is a lot, a lot, (a lot!!!) of ink that’s been spilled on re-constructing the book history of Shakespeare’s works, as well as his potential composition habits and the theatrical context into and out of which he wrote.
So. While Shakespeare received the best school education a man of his social class could have, allowing us to draw the conclusion that he probably knew of the power and impact of punctuation, the manuscript we have doesn’t give many clues as to whether the punctuation of his plays is his or by someone else. Well, seeing that those three pages are not very punctuated at all, the rest of his writing for the stage probably wasn’t either. So, how did questions, exclamations, and other marks enter his texts?
2) The Punctuation of Shakespeare’s plays comes from a lot of people – except him.
Theatre director Peter Hall scoffed at what he called ‘absurdly over-punctuated’ original Shakespeare, alleging the printers ‘popped in some extra-punctuation’, which they most certainly did. Scholars have spent many many years and lifetimes reconstructing the Renaissance book scene from production to selling, from writing to reading. What’s clear is that making books was a social affair with varying degrees of power or interest and dedication to the text. Today, we have Amazon self-publishing, putting choices nearly 100% into the hands of the author, but traditional publishing still works pretty much as it did 400 years ago: an editor is looking over pages, a typesetter prepares the text to be printed, a proof-reader checks the page, and gives it free for mass-printing. The author may or may not cast an eye over things at different stages.
It’s hard to know what of Shakespeare reached the print shop, and in what state it was: an original manuscript? Blotched and rough, or a fair copy? Written by Shakespeare himself or by someone else? A so-called prompt-book, a kind of marked-up copy for the stage manager, containing all lines, stage directions, lighting, music, cast and crew, or scene shifts? But none of those exists for any play attributed to Shakespeare.
If the author wasn’t too involved in their texts, other book-people had to make choices by force. And those people were generally knowledgeable enough, spending ten hours a day reading or preparing type. Any choices the writer’s contemporaries did with whom they shared a similar educational background are naturally closer to the author than the interference of subsequent editors, however expert, hundreds of years later. So, original punctuation of Shakespeare’s printed texts might seem a bit messy or too much, but it has a higher claim to authoritativeness than any modern editor could ever stake.
Shakespeare’s first collected edition of 1623 has been subject to intense investigation, encouraging scholars to piece together the process of producing such a costly laborious venture. Five type-setters probably worked on the big book, some more some less experienced. Those had different habits, education backgrounds, trade-experience, and simply preference, and would feel free to add and subtract marks according to their predilections. It’s not that anything goes – all of the pages need to come together as economically and neatly as possible – but the copytexts were not sacrosanct relics followed to the last T. In many ways, convenience and personal preference reigned the printshop in those early days.
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3) The punctuation of Shakespeare’s works was a matter of practicality as much as it was the typesetter’s educated guess.
So, we don’t know what kind of pages the printers received, and we are not sure how the group of typesetters set the texts. Some might have had handwritten pages propped up close to them, reading a line and setting the type accordingly. Spelling was not yet standardised at the time, so both copier and typesetter might spell however they saw fit. The typesetter might misread the handwriting, and anyway do whatever he thought best, since Shakespeare doesn’t seem to have been a writer who was unduly keen on being involved in the printing process (unlike some contemporaries like Sir Edmund Spenser, or fellow playwright Ben Jonson).
It’s also possible someone read the text out loud for ease and speed, and someone else set it, picking out individual letters from cases in front of him. And then if this wasn’t enough to show how dependent on contingency and chance Renaissance punctuation was in the print shop, the availability of type was limited, and sometimes some marks (like !) might simply not have been part of the cases. Or they might have been used up and bound into the typeset page already, necessitating that typesetters either adapt and help themselves with similar-looking type combinations, or choose another mark, or none at all.
Punctuation in English is elocutionary to a large degree, that means it’s based on rhythm and breath which are somewhat predictable and somewhat subjective. My writing is a little heavier on the dots and dashes (of course), because it’s conversational, so I like to communicate a sense of how I’d be speaking to you, where I’d pause, hesitate, emphasise. German punctuation, on the contrary, is 100% grammar-based, clarifying syntactical relationships between sentence elements. You have to learn the rules. A mistake is a mistake, and teacher can prove it! Not much (not any) space to explore, experiment, and develop your writing personality.
In Shakespeare’s time, punctuation was a matter of rhythm, taste, and education of the writer, so some marks like the ellipsis or points of suspense were simply not established enough yet to make it into early playtexts. It’s also a little harder than you might think to understand and translate tone. Imagine someone being agitated and shouting “what” – that could be an incredulous “what?” or an indignant “what!”. Or even a mixture of both in the rhetorical question “what?!”. So, it’s no surprise that we might not find certain punctuation marks at the end of lines in the printed texts that we now know how to use. Bear in mind also that these are dramatic texts, so it’s possible the assumption was that they’d be read out loud, or read with a theatrical voice in mind. Perhaps the reader was supposed to supply tone as they saw fit. Perhaps we have become more passive as readers along the way, simply consuming rather than actively making.
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Printing did not issue into an endless vacuum like digital text production nowadays: any sign on the page meant an actual material piece of type; any blank space on the page similarly meant a real piece of type rather than emptiness. So, sometimes typesetters needed to squeeze space and crunch letters and punctuation marks together; at other times, miscalculations meant there was too much space available on the page, so lines become distributed across several lines and a big decorative image takes up space. Because punctuation (and to a certain degree spelling and any other aspect of text) was dependent on what the print shop afforded at the time, and what the typesetter thought best to do, is called “accidentals” in the jargon of bibliography, or book history studies. Bibliographers describing the nuts and bolts of books and book production say that accidentals are not important. There’s no need to record them, or pay attention to them. They don’t mean anything, since the author didn’t choose them, and they might simply issue out of a practical context.
I’d like to argue that “accidental” is a misnomer in and of itself, because nothing in the process of printing is accidental. Everything comes to us based on choices and material conditions, and hence it all deserves attention. Whether we want to build an exhaustive case on a comma depends on the case and the strength of the evidence. Surely, one could defend a deliberate use of parentheses in Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale that’s all about the passing of time, and how the play jumps those ‘gaps’ by fast-forwarding the action (this told to the audience by a chorus-like commentator, himself called Time). “Accidentals” of printing like punctuation can provide curious ways into the text that it would be foolish to dismiss. Are they originally Shakespeare? Probably not. Does it matter they’re not authentically author? Probably not. They’re still worthy and worthwhile thinking about.
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4) Modern editors change our perception of characters and situations based on the punctuation they have inherited and add themselves.
Editing has a long, long, very long history. Some of the first editors also gave us the earliest punctuation in the sense of a sign that’s not a letter, telling us something about the origins of the sentence. The librarians at the fabled library of Alexandria developed a system of signs for marking duplicate passages in long texts like The Odyssey, and for separating out the grammatical elements of a sentence for ease of reading.
During the Renaissance, editing started to look like it does today with the editor comparing different versions of texts, and trying to pick one that best suits the purpose of the edition (are we trying to reach the earliest occurrence of a word, for example, or are we producing a text that is most readable or interesting, and might hence pick a different word from a later version of the same text). Shakespeare’s earliest editor was Nicholas Rowe, publishing his works in 1709, followed by Alexander Pope in 1725.
These early editors tried to compare the different kinds of versions of texts that have circulated for more than one hundred years, quickly drawing fierce criticism about their inferences and approaches. And so it is today. The amount of vicious enmity between Shakespeare editors is breath-taking, though of course not known to the general public. The ordinary reader will simply hold a text in their hands that has gone through innumerable stages and decisions of people with varying degrees of expertise. What is certain is that editors have profound impact on the understanding of a text by readers who do not look at originals, and who do not have research degrees in the literary background at the time to be able to make sense of them.
Let’s go back to the line from Henry V. Its first spelling in the big Folio edition from 1623 reads: Cry,God for Harry, England,and S.George. (Act 2, scene i according to Folio separation).
This is somewhat surprising to us, perhaps, since this seems like an exclamation, whipping up motivation and energy, followed by stage directions calling for alarums, that is, military trumpet flourishes. Modern editions hence punctuate the line thus: Cry ‘God for Harry, England and Saint George!’
There are quotation marks for the king’s order, and a seemingly appropriate exclamation mark in order to correspond to the emphasis of that order. The original punctuation, however, remained intact for as long as the texts were being reproduced without editorial interference. The first, second, third, fourth, and fifth Folios of 1623, 32, 63, 85, and 1700 bore the full stop punctuation. Sadly, I don’t have online access to what’s called the Variorum Shakespeare, a huge series of books collecting all the versions all editors have chosen across the hundreds of years of Shakespeare scholarship. I’d have to call it up at the local research library, so I was a bit lazy and restrained my urge to go down a rabbit-hole of an entire day. I’d be curious to find out who put the first ! after Saint George, though. In this instance, it seems sensible to add an exclamation mark, although I believe a dramaturgical case might be made for the power of an eerily whispered line, contrasting with the loud alarums right after. Compare these two alternatives both by the utterly fabulous Tom Hiddleston, one rousing and heroic, one subdued and intimate.
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Editorial choice becomes more problematic when punctuation may change how we read a character. What if editors choose to append speech of a certain group of people with exclamation marks, surfing on the bad press of ! as signs of irrationality, hysteria, and excess? (What’s wrong with that, I ask, but the world generally sees them as undesirable no-nos.)
Punctuation matters. Choices matter. It’s not so much about right or wrong, good or bad, but about taking time to look, ask. What is this dot doing here? What if it was another sign? Would that change anything, imply anything? It’s not a problem that not even the earliest punctuation of Shakespeare’s texts is probably his. It’s still a witness to his times, and as such we had better take it seriously.
There is one moment in A Midsummer Night’s Dream that’s very much authorital punctuation, because the joke hinges on punctuation mistakes. But that’s for another post.
As always, stay vigilant. Look at the small print. Keep slaying the dragon of distraction.
Happy Birthday, William, and happy Saint George’s Day everyone!