Historical Backgrounds of Elizabethan and Jacobean Punctuation Theory

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Abstract
The disputes centering about the oratorical value of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century punctuation in England have hinged mostly upon a study of printed tests current in Elizabethan times or shortly after. Professor Charles C. Fries, in a monograph surveying the whole of the discussion about Shakespeare's punctuation, notes that “some significance attaches to the fact ”that all of the five Elizabethan and Jacobean grammarians whose theories he adduces to help settle the dispute “refer to the use of these terms, comma, colon, and period, in classical rhetorical theory. ” And yet, in considering the question of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century punctuation, no one has investigated the systems of pointing which were associated with classical rhetorical theory and which may have been carried with that theory through the Middle Ages into Elizabethan and Jacobean England. Until an investigation of this matter is made, we are likely to be guilty once more of the pernicious practice of reading history backwards, understanding phenomena in terms of what succeeded them instead of what preceded, and explaining in terms already at hand for us phenomena which are not reducible to these terms.

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