Elizabethan Punctuation and the Actor: "Gammer Gurton's Needle" as a Case Study

Abstract

Punctuation changed rapidly with the development of printing. Most immediately, printers needed rules to work by; these grammar could supply, whereas rhetorical punctuation must always vary with the context and the authorial intention. More generally, printing developed eye readers, who looked to punctuation as a guide to the meaning of the text on the page, not to its speaking or imagined sound. The rate of change was such that the punctuation of the Shakespeare folios, published in 1623, is noticeably more grammatical than that of the quartos of some twenty years earlier. In general, the earlier the text, the more rhetorical is its punctuation. By the early eighteenth century, a gammatical system of punctuation was firmly established.'