The Marking of Sententiae in Elizabethan Printed Plays

THE indication of rhetorical figures, especially the sententiae, so thatthey are easily noticed on the page is natural in an age which attachesimportance to ma-girTi? as a basis of exhortation ana of literary con-struction. The use of certain typographical devices to pick out sententiae is fairly common in certain classes of books printed in Europe between the approximate dates 1500 and 1660.1 Thereafter the practice seems to dis-appear and eighteenth- and nineteenth-century scholars seem to know little of its use.2 Even in the early years of this century one finds considerable scholars interpreting commas and inverted commas as quotation marks indicating indebtedness.3 Dr. Simpson's Shakespearian Punctuation (Oxford, 1911), pp. 101 f£, includes a mention of this use of commas and italics and there is also a mention of the practice in McKerrow's Introduction to Bibliography (Oxford, 1928), pp. 316 £ Explicit treatments of the practice are not easy to find in Elizabethan works, but I may quote the words of Charles Butler: Adnotari porro hie potest, Praeceptionem aut Sentrnfiam observatu digniorem