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1. Punctuation.
Attempts have been made to show that Webster deliberately punctuated his manuscript in order to supply directions to the actors.[10] This notion, pretty unlikely anyway (the prompt-book and parts would have been made up by the book-keeper or his scribe, neither of them particularly likely to cherish Webster's foul-papers punctuation), is proved false by a detailed examination of the Quarto's punctuation. Altogether, not counting punctuation in the headline, the catchword, or that following a speech-prefix, there are used in the text of The White Devil 1476 periods (including 205 black-letter periods),
More important, the character of the punctuation changes, as the following short tabulation of the number of specific punctuation marks per page will illustrate. The first three columns list respectively the minimum number of each punctuation mark occurring on each page, the maximum, and the average for each page of the text of the play. Columns 4-6 give the same breakdown of figures for the 32 pages B1r-E4v; the numbers in brackets in column 4 indicate the total number of pages in this part of the book entirely lacking the punctuation mark in question. Columns 7-9 break down the figures for F1r-M2v. These figures do not distinguish between italic and roman ; : ! ? or between roman and black-letter periods, since there is nothing to suggest that the compositors were doing anything other than picking up the first sort that came to hand, from cases where the punctuation sorts had besome somewhat disorderly.
minimum | maximum | average | B1r-E4v min. | max. | average | F1r-M2v min. | max. | average |
. 7 | 28 | 17.5 | 7 | 24 | 14.44 | 11 | 28 | 19.33 |
, 8 | 56 | 24.32 | 9 | 56 | 27.34 | 8 | 39 | 22.46 |
; 0 | 14 | 2.92 | 0 (14) | 4 | 0.78 | 0 (3) | 14 | 4.23 |
: 0 | 8 | 2.82 | 0 (4) | 5 | 1.78 | 0 (4) | 8 | 3.46 |
! 0 | 5 | 1.095 | 0 (24) | 3 | 0.31 | 0 (12) | 5 | 1.58 |
? 0 | 17 | 3.46 | 0 (9) | 10 | 2.09 | 0 (5) | 17 | 4.31 |
The semi-colon is used only 25 times up to E4v, and 14 pages lack it altogether; from F1r on it is used 5.4 times as often: 220 occurrences altogether, and only three pages are without one. There is significant variation in frequency of use of other marks: the exclamation mark is used 5.1 times as often; the question mark 2.1 times, the colon 1.9, and the period 1.34 times as often (this last being more significant than it seems, in view of the numbers involved). However, the use of the comma drops by nearly a fifth, to 0.82 times as frequently. Both compositors A and B use this "new" punctuation for the remainder of the play without much statistically significant difference. Table 2 assigns 22 pages to Compositor B and 25 to Compositor A (some of them doubtful); L2v is not included in the count since it was almost certainly shared between the two compositors, and gathering M cannot be reliably assigned to either. In B's pages, the semi-colon is used altogether 106 times, or 4.8 times per page; in A's, it is used 97 times, or 3.9 times per page. The
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