I’ve been reading Reinhold Niebuhr’s Moral Man and Immoral Society, published in 1932, and I’ve been surprised by his use of commas.  He uses them before restrictive relative clauses, between subjects and verbs, before or after long constructions.  If one reads some of his sentences aloud, they work well, and at least some of the odd commas seem to mark pauses.  What surprised me was that by the 1930s comma use had fairly well stabilized, and here’s a major writer who does what he wants with them.

Herb

From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Paul E. Doniger
Sent: 2009-03-19 06:17
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Sonnet grammar analysis help

It looks like the punctuation in Scott's copy of the sonnet matches the _Riverside Shakespeare_, which is a good edition, but even in a good edition, punctuation of Elizabethan textx is open to many questions. This is especially true of not only semi-colons, but also of commas. It seems clear that most of the punctuation of the various quartos & folios is the work of their editors rather than the author, whose actual intent must always be interpreted.



It's curious that this came up just as my students are finishing up their study of Jane Austen's _Pride & Prejudice_. We had a discussion the other day about Austen's use of commas, especially how they often seem so very different from from the basic comma rules of today and how confusing it sometimes is to the students.



And yes, navigating through W.S.'s meanings is very satisfying -- and doing so as an actor is not so very different for me as doing so as an English teacher. I'd love to go back four hundred years and listen to Shakespeare's actors rehearsing his texts.



Paul


"If this were play'd upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction" (_Twelfth Night_ 3.4.127-128).
________________________________
From: "STAHLKE, HERBERT F" <[log in to unmask]>
To: [log in to unmask]
Sent: Wednesday, March 18, 2009 8:23:36 PM
Subject: Re: Sonnet grammar analysis help
Ed and Paul,

I don’t know who edited the edition Scott is using, but you are clearly right that the semi-colons are open to question.  I think a modern editor was trying to encode sentence structure into a sonnet that would cause problems for students.  Doing so is always risky since building in structure is also building in meaning.  I think the editor got it right, but I’d feel more comfortable with Shakespeare’s punctuation, at least as we have it in the 1609 edition.  The sonnets should be read aloud, and a first reading is inevitably rough.  It takes a few tries and some thought to read it in a way that makes good sense and hangs together well, even if it isn’t necessarily the sense Shakespeare’s contemporaries would have made of it.

I agree, Paul, that the “then” is the hinge on which the sonnet turns.

Any time I’ve sat down with a Shakespeare sonnet, I’ve found working out the meaning and how he achieves his very remarkable effects a very satisfying effort.  And sometimes it is a bit of work.

Herb

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