Shakespeare Electronic Conference, Vol. 1, No. 81. Monday, 15 Oct 1990.
Date: Mon, 15 Oct 90 23:32:54 EDT
From: Ken Steele <
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Subject: Possessives and Apostrophes
On HUMANIST tonight, Roy Flannagan posed the
following question:
Query about c-17 compositors and apostrophes with italics. A
weird question for anyone on the list who can answer it. I
have noticed that the compositors who set *Paradise Lost*
rarely, if ever, used apostrophes with possessive nouns unless
they happened to be setting proper names in italics, proper
names that happened to be in the possessive. Does anyone
who has messed around with early printing methods or with
setting their own books in hand-presses have any explanation
for this? The type face for the 1667 and 1674 editions was a
form of Garamond and the point size about ten. Thanks for
any help.
My apologies for responding here on SHAKSPER -- but
I'm not going to pretend to answer Roy's query, only to use it to
demonstrate the Shakespeare Text Archive's potential
applicability to such bibliographical questions.
A quick check of the Archive suggests that this
tendency may be more widespread than one might think. There
are a great many instances of *'s in Shakespeare's original texts
-- 4332 to be exact -- and they are distributed as follows:
Frequency -- Percentages --
Range Names Count Actual Expect Diff
-----------------------------------------------------
First Folio 3280 76% 66% 10%
Good Quartos 596 14% 26% -12%
Bad Quartos 183 4% 7% -3%
Minor Poems 273 6% 2% 4%
Comedies 1104 25% 27% -2%
Histories 588 14% 27% -13%
Tragedies 1615 37% 31% 6%
Romances 683 16% 9% 7%
Jacobean 2222 51% 30% 21%
Prefatory 5 0% 0% 0%
The concentration of apostrophes (of all kinds) seems
*significantly* higher in the Folio texts, in the plays composed
in the Jacobean period, and in the "later" genres (Tragedies and
Romances), all of which suggest an increasing use of the
punctuation mark. (I have found similar results for the use of
the semicolon, which surges in the Folio texts.)
Of course, most of these occurrences are not
possessives but contractions, and a manual weeding-out of all
4332 would be a little tiresome at this hour of the night. Using
words beginning with the letters A through C, however, as a
somewhat random sampling (can you tell I'm no statistician?) we
find a grand total of 69 *possessives* (all proper names,
incidentally) which use an apostrophe:
alecto's, angelo's, anthonie's, anthonio's, antonio's,
apollo's, appollo's, ariachna's, art's, astrea's, attalanta's,
austria's, banquo's, bassanio's, bassiano's, bellona's,
bianca's, bohemia's, calcha's, calcho's, calphurnia's,
camillo's, caska's, cassandra's, cassio's, cato's, claudio's,
cleopatra's, cytherea's
These 69 possessives are distributed as follows:
Frequency -- Percentages --
Range Names Count Actual Expect Difference
-----------------------------------------------------
First Folio 59 86% 66% 20%
Good Quartos 8 12% 26% -14%
Bad Quartos 0 0% 7% -7%
Minor Poems 2 3% 2% 1%
Comedies 20 29% 27% 2%
Histories 3 4% 27% -23%
Tragedies 28 41% 31% 10%
Romances 9 13% 9% 4%
Authorial 51 74% 70% 4%
Jacobean 37 54% 30% 24%
Prefatory 0 0% 0% 0%
Again, we see significantly higher occurrences in the First Folio
and later plays.
In confirmation of Roy's findings, all but *three* of
these 69 apostrophes occur in italics. The three notable
exceptions, which perhaps prove the rule, are all from the Folio:
Reuenge from Ebon den, with fell Alecto's Snake, for
(2 Henry 4 (F1) 5.5:35)
Cleopatra's {Maiestie:}
(As You Like It (F1) 3.2:141)
Attalanta's {better part},
(As You Like It (F1) 3.2:142)
Furthermore, note that the two occurrences from AYLI are
roman type *in italic verse* -- in short, the apostrophes are used
in an italic context, although the proper names are in roman
type. (I should point out that italicization in this textbase is
indicated through the use of curly braces.)
Of these 69 apostrophized possessives, then, only one,
Pistol's ranting prose, actually occurs outside italics:
Reuenge from Ebon den, with fell Alecto's Snake, for
(2 Henry 4 (F1) 5.5:35)
This seems overwhelming (though statistically a little vague)
confirmation of Roy's observation -- but does anyone have any
explanations? Shakespeare's compositors clearly did *not* avoid
the apostrophe in roman type -- they *often* use it for
contractions. Only when dealing with possessives do they seem
so particular -- the apostrophe is used only with possessive
proper nouns, which are almost always italicized. Was the
apostrophe thought unnecessary when dealing with possessive
ordinary nouns? And why does Pistol merit one in roman type?
For that matter, why isn't Alecto italicized?
Abbott's *Grammar* doesn't seem to help here, and now I'm
curious too.
Ken Steele
University of Toronto
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