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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