Friday, September 24, 2010

Homebaked Shakespeare

"O, let me make the period of my curse!"
(Richard III 1.3.705)

I'm sure you all don't need me to remind you that it's National Punctation Day. Is it just me, or do those crepe paper semicolon garlands come out earlier and earlier each year? And don't get me started on all the pressure put on us overburdened moms to bake comma cupcakes for the class party and to find some cute, original em-dash craft.

Now, Shakespeare didn't give a rat's ass about punctuation when it came to his plays. They were meant to be heard, not read, and any edition of his plays that you read now (including those in the First Folio and the Quartos) was brought to print by someone else—not Shakespeare (or Queen Elizabeth, or that Earl of Oxford guy, or your great-great-great-great Uncle Morty, or whoever else you think he is).

This hasn't stopped scholars from fighting to the death about how to punctuate certain lines that don't seem to "work." My favorite one comes from a speech of Helena's in All's Well that Ends Well. She's having a very dicy conversation with the love of her life's friend, Paroles, about how a woman might lose her virginity "to her liking." When Paroles asks her if she plans to do anything with her virginity, she replies "Not my virginity yet: / There shall your master have a thousand loves, A mother, and a mistress, and a friend," etc. At least that's what the first printed edition of the play (1623) has. Later editors replace the colon with a dash, and sometimes an ellipsis to make it out like she's saying, "I'm not doing anything with my virginity, yet I am thinking about this other thing that has nothing to do with that, so let's move on, shall we?" Maybe it's just too freaky for them to imagine a sweet girl like Helena saying, "I'm not doing anything with my cherry YET, but I will— trust me."

Ah, the politics of punctuation. It never gets old.