There is a discreet bourgeois fascism that used to murmur on the edges of British society, and is now stepping rather triumphantly into the middle. It always used to be the encrusted old fogey who would bark at the Times leader column: "What is that semi-colon doing there? It should be a colon, colon, COLON!" Now, following in the wake of that Eats Shoots and Leaves book (and has a book title ever been based on a more mimsy, more-tea-vicar joke?), everybody is at it.
"Whatever has happened to the English language?" people sigh at soirees. "How can we teach our children to speak proper English?" parents moan. The ability to speak in fully formed sentences could well be replacing penile dimension as the mark of a man.
It often seems that the English language is heading off in two separate directions. On the one hand there are the wild abbreviated inventions of texting, all the different pidgin languages that are born on the street corner when an ethnic language bangs into English and the technospeak of modernity. All these separate strands of invention are blurring together to create a new English with a hybrid vigor.
On the other hand there are the forces of reaction, pulling up the drawbridge to keep modernity out, all sitting around with taut, strained faces and trying very deliberately to excrete fashioned sentences like those of Henry James. Having fallen in love with the English language through the rough improvised medium of romantic poetry and beat-generation prose, I know which side I'm on.
The forces of reaction often like to cite as evidence for their rightness that massy monolith, The Past, imagining an unending eternity going backwards, full of Jane Austen heroines speaking with a polished wit.
Having spent the past few weeks ploughing through two of Shakespeare's First Folio texts, I can assure them that the past is no recourse of security for their argument. The first published editions of Shakespeare's work make teen mags like Smash Hits look positively Augustan. The punctuation is wildly random; colons reappear with a hammering repetition and are often preferred to full stops; commas cluster together in short bursts; parentheses and dashes wander around the page looking for a home. Frequently, any attempt at punctuation disappears altogether.
Now, much of this is down to the printers, since proofing and subediting were still pretty much at the caveman stage.
"What shall we do with all these words then?" they would ask. "I don't know, squeeze them into the bottom of the page," they'd be told. "They don't fit." "Then push harder."
Generations of editors have performed heroic tasks to correct much of the slipshod work of these early publishers. But, looking again at the First Folio, it seems evident that in many cases the editors have gone too far. Much of the roughness in the punctuation, much of its freedom, much of its random music, sounds very much like a writer talking.
The first time I worked with a literal translator on a play by Anton Chekhov, I was astonished by the contrast between the jagged, broken roughness of the original and the smooth, schoolteacher mellifluousness of most English translations.
Where the Russian broke his language up with his punctuation into beats and loaded silences, the English tended to comb it all out into long, gentle Latinate constructions. Much the same thing happened on investigating August Strindberg, whose punctuation often borders on the surreal.
These writers punctuate in order to create a mosaic of brief eruptive fragments from which the music of thought dancing can be created. We know and respect this in modern authors such as Harold Pinter and David Mamet, who use full stops, colons and commas as musical notation: Pinter to create cold inflections of silence, Mamet to enforce a pneumatic energy. For some reason, we try to pretend that the old masters were in some way different. With Chekhov and Strindberg, all those creases and wrinkles are ironed out through translation; with Shakespeare, through editing.
Of course, it was more than just the punctuation that was essentially expressionist. The jumbling effect of Random Capitalization was thrown into the mix, and spelling itself was far from a rigorous science. This is why we inherited so many different versions of Big Will's surname -- from "Shaksper," through "Shagsbeard" and "Shaxper," to the very occasional "Shakespeare." It's hard not to imagine the poet standing over the various clerks registering his marriage or his children or his property dealing, and saying testily, "Actually, it's S-h-a-k-e-," and the clerk cutting him off with a weary, "Yeah, yeah, whatever." (And isn't it a sign of God's enduring sense of humor that he gave his biggest scoop of genius to a man with one of history's daftest names. A Mozartian prodigality of music and thought given to a man whose forebears were named for doing helicopters with their privates.)
The wild freedom of the Elizabethan and Jacobean age was in large part responsible for the creation of the broad and varied landscape of language that we have been pitching our small tents on ever since.
It was not an age distinguished by its wrist-slapping correctitude over punctuation.
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