University of Virginia Library

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),

2043 commas, 245 semicolons, 237 colons (including italic), 92 exclamation marks (including italic) and 291 question marks (including italic). This is light punctuation for a play of over 3000 lines; it works out to fewer than three punctuation marks per two lines. Even so, as experience of contemporary dramatic manuscripts tells us, it is probably a good deal more than was in the holograph. However, more detailed investigation turns up a most surprising fact. Between B1r and E4v, the total quantity of punctuation is 1496 items for the 1182 lines, 1.27 punctuation marks per line. From F1r to the end of the play, there are 2879 punctuation marks in 1923 lines, or 1.5 per line. This is a statistically significant change.

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

other punctuation marks follow a similar pattern: B uses 61 colons, 2.77 per page; A 82, 3.24 per page. B uses 43 exclamation marks, an average of 1.95; A uses 36, an average of 1.44 per page. The question-mark is used 110 times by B, or 5.0 per page; A's figures are 112, 4.48 per page. These averages are not identical (nor in view of the variety of the copy could they be expected to be), but they inhabit a different statistical world from the averages in column 6 of the table above. Various hypotheses may be advanced to account for these observations, but none is as persuasive as the likeliest and simplest: that two new compositors took over at the beginning of gathering F from the workman who had set B-E.