GoKawiilShakespeare and friends would call punctuation “distinctions,” according to the Latin tradition, or “pointing,” because of the medieval practice of placing dots or points at different levels of the line. The first occurrence of the word “punctuation” happens in the French dialogue book Orthoepia Gallica from 1593 by translator and language teacher John Eliot, whose funny and colloquial conversations in facing columns on the page influenced Shakespeare’s witty repartee. Eliot challenges London French teachers to “find fault” with his “pricks, nicks, and tricks,” referring to his punctuation and rhetoric.
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He was certainly a flamboyantly creative writer and inspired teacher; yet one can take him seriously here: “Pricks” performed “tricks” as punctuation became a vehicle to think about the technological revolutions of the time, gender relationships, and literary genres reflecting social and historical concerns like kingship or geographical exploration.
Punctuation was also a channel for exploring interior worlds: the mind, memory, emotions. Particularly when something wasn’t working quite right: In a society that prized eloquence above all else, writers became more interested in depicting the delay, interruption, or even failure of speech rather than its glorious fullfilment. Perhaps the sons (and some daughters) of the humanists hesitated to put their faith in language quite as much as previous generations had.
Yet, considering how his own life was cut short so tragically at the height of his social and literary success, it’s hard not to entertain interpretations of the interrupted sentence as an eerie omen.
And perhaps it was precisely the opposite: Writing had become so powerful at expression that it could now subvert itself without losing any of its magic. One such master of consciously suspended speech was the uncontested king of brackets: Sir Philip Sidney.
On October 16, 1586, a young man writes a desperate letter to his friend: “My dear Weyer: Come. Come. My life is in danger and I long to see you.” Weak from the festering wound in his thigh, he scribbles those few lines in a shaky, hardly legible hand. Will the famous doctor be able to save him? When Weyer arrives the next day, the letter writer is already dead. Sir Philip Sidney, courtier, poet, and fervent Protestant soldier under Queen Elizabeth I, had been fighting Catholic Spain in the Netherlands when a bullet struck him, burying itself deep in the flesh of his thigh. The life of the dazzling superstar of Tudor high society was cut short, at the age of thirty-one, in a way eerily mirrored by his own writing: Just before leaving for his holy war, Sidney interrupted the epic story about erring knights, which he had been working on for years, in the middle of an exciting battle, leaving the action hanging mid-sentence. On a parenthesis.
Anaxius lept away. Whereat ashamed (as having never done so much before in his life)
Readers, like the sentence and the plot, are on tenterhooks about what comes next. The work, of course, remains unfinished, although the parenthesis’s open-endedness functioned like a magnet for countless later writers, inviting them to graft their versions of how the book should continue. Sidney was merely following a common composition practice of pausing mid-sentence or mid-matter, only to use the parenthesis as memory springboard when it was time to pick up the pen again (or quill rather).
Yet, considering how his own life was cut short so tragically at the height of his social and literary success, it’s hard not to entertain interpretations of the interrupted sentence as an eerie omen.
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