Ep 94: James Loehlin and the 16th Century Question Mark

No one asks a question better than William Shakespeare. When we explore his plays, they are full of question marks but it turns out that for the 16th century, the concept of what constituted a question was still a new thing for printers who were in charge of selecting the actual marks which would go on the page to indicate a question. Not to mention, since Shakespeare’s plays were written on paper originally, or recounted in letters, often times the text that printers were working with to compile works like the First Folio required the printers to interpret pretty hard to read Elizabethan handwriting. That resulted in what is known as punctuation variations, and as our guest this week presented at the recent Blackfriars Conference, there were even some writers who suggested there be brand new kinds for question marks all together. Our guest, James Loehlin, is here this week to take us back to Shakespeare’s England and explore how we know when Shakespeare was actually intending to ask a question.