Punctuation and Style in Christopher Marlowe's Tamburlaine the Great and Ben Jonson's Volpone

Is there a discernable relationship between style and the development of punctuation in early modern English dramatic texts? This paper will focus on the comma in the early editions of Marlowe's Tamburlaine Part One (1590) and Ben Jonson's Volpone (1607). Throughout early editions of Marlowe's drama, the comma is used very flexibly and heavily. Its function ill-defined, it is rarely medial but occurs primarily at the end of lines of verse, often in complete disregard for syntax. Such comma usage facilitates a characteristically Marlovian style: extended passages of considerable beauty but imprecise sense produced by the open-ended accumulation of loosely coordinated phrases rich in vocabulary and pregnant with meaning. The most striking example is Tamburlaine's meditation on Zenocrate's beauty in 5.2.72-127 of Tamburlaine Part One. Systems of punctuation in the period, however, were tending toward more precise definitions of the functions of punctuation marks. The circumscription of the 's function and the increased use of other punctuation marks had stylistic consequences, necessitating a clearer articulation of the parts of sentences, the relations among those parts, and their coherence within a complete grammatical movement. The significance of these consequences can be seen Volpone's speech to Celia and Celia's reply in 3.7 of Volpone, a text whose printing Jonson carefully supervised. Sublime Tamburlainian fantasy gives way to the glittering, destructive, and ultimately exhausted rhetoric of itemized and commodified pleasures fit for the new realities of nascent capitalism. Moreover, Jonson's increasingly precise sense of the function of another punctuation mark, the dash, necessitates a change in Celia's character that suggests that the realm of the material object and its shallow seductiveness can be transcended only through its demystification and denial. © Edinburgh University Press.