On 11/10/06, Joanna Boulter <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> I too use the things myself. The impression I get though is that it doesn't
> seem to be occurring to these people that it's ok, might even be fun, to try
> these techniques and see where they take you. Somebody even pointed out that
> you don't find brackets in Shakespeare or Keats ..... (I would love it if
> someone could prove that wrong, by the way.)
This is, as far as I know, an accurate transcription of sonnet 126
from the 1609 quarto:
O thou my louely Boy who in thy power,
Doest hould times fickle glasse, his fickle, hower:
Who hast by wayning growne, and therein shou'st,
Thy louers withering, as thy sweet selfe grow'st.
If Nature (soueraine misteres ouer wrack)
As thou goest onwards still will plucke thee backe,
She keepes thee to this purpose, that her skill,
May time disgrace, and wretched mynuit kill.
Yet feare her O thou minnion of her pleasure,
She may detaine, but not still keepe her tresure
Her Audite (though delayd) answer'd must be,
And her Quietus is to render thee.
( )
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which most certainly included parentheses/brackets. (Even empty ones,
how post-modern!) There are quite a few of them in the plays. The
problem with Shakespeare is of course figuring out whether he himself
wrote them in or if they are an editor's addition.
And then we have Keats, "To Some Ladies," (which sounds rather like a
poem dedicated to two characters from Little Britain), lines 25-28:
For, indeed, 'tis a sweet and peculiar pleasure,
(And blissful is he who such happiness finds,)
To possess but a span of the hour of leisure,
In elegant, pure, and aerial minds.
There's also a pair of brackets in "To My Brother George;" and on line
112 of Lamia, Part II. Not a whole lot, but hey, he died young.
As for the "double dash," isn't this an issue of typesetting and how
one wishes to render certain kinds of punctuation? There is the
n-dash, the m-dash, the double-dash -- the latter of which has become
much more popular now with the Internet, where m-dashes are harder to
write. In the case of Dickinson there will always be a distance
between the lines of the handwritten manuscript and the typeset
rendering.
--Knut
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