:: :: University of Virginia Library

Problems of spelling must be considered with other problems, of which the choice of punctuation is the most important. At first, spelling and punctuation seem to offer very much the same difficulties: as early compositors altered the spelling of their copy so they altered its punctuation in accordance with their own predilections, the availability of type, and the exigencies of justification; and the author's punctuation, like his spelling, may have been modified by professional scriveners, and printing-house editors and correctors. Moreover there are some ambiguities in Elizabethan usage, notably the use of '?' where a modern writer would use '!' and the occasional omission of queries. So it may be said that the right place for the 'old punctuation' is the first edition or a photographic reproduction of it. There is no point in reproducing it in a modern, critical edition, because only a reader who knows how and where the compositor may have modified the author's original punctuation can begin to interpret it properly; if he does not know, for instance, that Nicholas Okes' 'Compositor A', around 1612, very frequently added unnecessary punctuation to the ends of verselines or that William Jaggard's 'Compositor B', around 1622, frequently introduced parentheses,[33] and if he does not know where these compositors have been working and under what conditions, the punctuation of a first edition from either of these workshops would seriously mislead him with regard to its author's intentions; a reader of a modern edition with 'old' punctuation can take no single punctuation mark on

trust. In failing to interpret to those who require interpretation, and in failing to present all the evidence to those who can interpret for themselves, an editor reproducing the old punctuation in a modern edition is ignoring his responsibilities in two directions.

But there is one important difference between spelling and punctuation, namely that there is no one, standard, modern punctuation, as there is a standard spelling. This means that an editor may punctuate to please himself, but not to conform to any generally accepted model; so he needs a further directive than simply the call to modernize. When patient analysis of an original edition discovers no trace of the author's punctuation the modernizing editor must be told to modernize in the light of his own taste and his own knowledge of his author's style and artistic intentions. But when circumstances are more favourable and the editor can distinguish some individual marks of punctuation that were probably in his author's manuscript, then he may be counselled to attempt to develop a kind of punctuation for that particular text which will retain—or, better, represent—those authorial elements. This will never be an easy task but anyone who has taken part in a theatrical performance will know how radically a change of pointing can alter the speed, tone or force of almost every line of dialogue; in comparison the choice between lanthorn and lantern is often trivial. For this reason special care should be taken with the punctuation of dramatic texts and an editor should not rely solely on his own ideas of standard modern punctuation until he has tried every means of discovering the nature of the pointing of the author's manuscript behind the first authoritative edition. Very occasionally it may be possible for him to attempt a 'restoration' of the original punctuation; often he may be able to evolve a mode of punctuation that reflects some traces of it. Spelling must be either 'old' (reproducing the copy-text exactly) or 'new' (in accordance with the modern standard), but punctuation, by its nature, can have many variations, and therefore admits a compromise solution.

The use of italic type and capitals, and the treatment of compound words and elisions, may occasionally allow similar compromises, for a reader can accept modifications of standard modern practices in these respects without much difficulty. Capitals were usually used, not where emphasis was required (as A. W. Pollard once suggested they were[34]), but wherever a word began with 'C', 'T', 'M', or 'A', or some other group of letters depending on meaningless tricks of the author's hand-writing or the compositor's setting, or on the availability of type; an

editor will therefore usually conform entirely to modern usage. Likewise, when elision is clearly erratic, counteracting the metre at many points, then an editor will allow himself considerable freedom in this respect. But where any of these details, or the use of italics or hyphens, appears to be authoritative, there it is the responsibility of a modern editor to present his own text in a manner which will reflect as fully as possible what, in his judgment, the author intended. And in all these details, the only place for a complete acceptance of the 'old' usage—the usage of the book, not of the author—seems to be a photographic reproduction in which the student may have all the evidence by which to judge and interpret it. An editor can assume no responsibilities and show all the evidence by photographic means, or else he should assume all the practicable responsibilities.

The principles suggested for the treatment of spelling would hold good for punctuation and all these other details of an editor's task—with some modifications in favour of the restoration of the author's usages wherever an editor judges that he can undertake this with a fair chance of success. These principles are different from those which underlie most of the editorial work in progress today. Yet they have been determined in the light of new and developing textual and bibliographical techniques and take advantage of new techniques for preparing cheap photographic reproductions of the original editions; these are factors which have become important after the present orthodoxy was established, and therefore the alternative editorial principles might well be worth serious consideration.

They have only been stated in simple form in this paper; elaborations would have to follow. Fortunately, experience of modern-spelling editions has been gained in preparing the multi-volume editions of Shakespeare, like the Yale, New Cambridge, and New Arden Shakespeares, and in the new complete editions by Professors Alexander and Sisson; here many different editors have experimented with ways of collating the spelling of the original edition where this affects the choice of an emendation, of restoring and interpreting what they judge to have been the author's punctuation, lining and so forth, of representing ambiguities and, generally, of being both fully responsible and fully interpretative. Their methods have not always been informed by up-to-date textual and linguistic understanding, but, when they have been, these editors have achieved useful work. The highly developed methods for editing type-facsimile reprints would likewise aid the preparation and overseeing of the new photographic reproductions. For complex textual authorities, involving more than one substantive

text, photographic reproductions would be required of each text, and a convenient method would have to be developed to provide, with them, a collation of their differences, substantive and, perhaps, accidental.

These difficulties need not stand for long in the way of preparing modern photographic reproductions and modern, fully interpretative, critical editions, if such texts would truly fulfil the present-day needs of students and readers, and what can be guessed of those of tomorrow. In considering these alternative principles for editing and reproducing Elizabethan and Jacobean plays, each reader should consider his own experiences and ask how frequently he has wished for a closer approximation to the original edition than a type-facsimile reprint or an old-spelling, critical edition could provide, and how frequently he has wished that obscurities had been resolved when he has been reading an old-spelling, critical edition, without a primary concern for textual matters. He should ask, too, whether a photograph and a fully responsible, modernized, critical text would not answer all his needs.