Abstract
Punctuation in Elizabethan drama has been a recurrent topic of research in the relevant literature published in the last century, the other genres being often underestimated on account of their lack of standardisation and arbitrariness. Unlike other prose compositions of the period, legal texts were composed under the patronage of the court and they provide a unitary view of the Elizabethan attitude towards pointing. In light of this, this work analyses the uses and functions of the punctuation symbols found in a collection of 68 Elizabethan warrants, housed in G.U.L. MS Hunter 3. With this approach we obtain evidence of (a) the existence of a conventional punctuation system by Elizabethan scribes, which is systematically used to signal both micro- and macro-textual relations; and (b) the preference for grammatical punctuation in spite of the rhetorical nature of the texts under scrutiny. Finally, the present-day English equivalents are proposed by taking into consideration the underlying function displayed by punctuation symbols.
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