Are Shakespeare’s Commas Really That Important?

Shakespeare begins Twelfth Night with Duke Orsino describing the effect of the music he’s listening to.

Here are his first eight lines, in English and Hungarian (thanks to Ádám Nádasdy):

Orsino

If music be the food of love, play on,
Give me excess of it, that surfeiting
The appetite may sicken and so die.
That strain again, it had a dying fall.
O, it came o’er my ear like the sweet south
That breathes upon a bank of violets,
Stealing and giving odour.
Enough, no more,
’Tis not so sweet now as it was before.

Herceg

Ha a zene étel a szerelemnek,
hát játsszatok! So˝t, tömjetek tele,
hadd fojtsa meg a vágyat a csömör!
Ezt még egyszer! . . . Szép, elhaló a vége,
suttog fülembe, mint édes lehellet,
mely ibolyák fölött az illatot
teríti lopva. – Elég már, elég!
Már nem édesek ezek a zenék.

Apparently, that final word, zenék, means music—but in the plural. For some reason, the translator has chosen to say that These musics (i.e. songs) are no longer so sweet. (“K” used as a suffix is the marker of a plural in Hungarian.)

Eight lines that are not rhymed, except where in English they conclude—conclusively—on a pair that rhymes very neatly. No more. Before. I did initially think it a shame that the Hungarian can’t do this, but I’m told by Hungarian friends that the terminal -g (elég) and the terminal -k (zenék) sound almost indistinguishable, so there is an end-line rhyme, just like Shakespeare’s, but also a (new) perfect internal rhyme in that line. Shows how much I know . . .

So—aha—this also explains why the songs are in the plural, then, because unlike a singular music (zene), this plural zenék allows that perfect rhyme.

Punctuation was actually what I noticed first, though. Even without knowing the words, I expected to be able to make certain assumptions about the translator’s intentions and map the text onto the familiar English, roughly shape for shape. But there are some small differences.

English punctuation usage is a fair guide for Hungarian punctuation, I’ve been told, so it reassures me that I can navigate the text using it. But while the passages look broadly the same, I did notice two unexpected commas. After the exclamation mark (which follows the “play on,” in this case shunted onto the second line), we have

So˝t, tömjetek tele,
hadd fojtsa meg a vágyat a csömör!

which has no possible correspondence in the English; and then in the next line, after the next exclamation mark (that strain again!)

. . . Szép, elhaló a vége

Ádám’s commas are clues that something has changed. The word So˝t, he tells me, means “indeed” or “Nay”—and it is, indeed, an addition, to bring some emphasis, and discreetly fill a syllabic gap.

You don’t mess around with them wantonly, for rhythm or breathing or whatever.

Regarding the second, in the line “it had a dying fall,” Ádám is miti-gating the fact that Hungarian doesn’t have any equivalent to an “it has” in a case like this, so he plugs the gap by here giving the fall a second adjective. It is not merely dying, but szép—beautiful. It’s beautiful comma dying.

English does have “it has,” and so English fills out its phrase with a single adjective, and so English doesn’t need an extra comma.

Here’s the same speech again, this time in Vassilis Rotas’s Greek translation:

Αν του έρωτα τροφή ’ναι η μουσική, ε, παίζετε,
παραχορτάστε με, ώσπου απ’ την κατάχρησην
ο πόθος ν’ αρρωστήσει, κι έτσι να πεθάνει.
Πάλι το ίδιο! Σιγοπέθαινε στο τέλος.
Ω, χάιδεψε τ’ αυτί μου σαν αχός γλυκός
που, πνέοντας πάνω από βραγιά με μενεξέδες,
κλέβει ευωδιά και δίνει. Φτάνει! όχι άλλο πια:
τώρα δεν έχει πια τη γλύκα που είχε πριν.

In most respects, Greek also uses the comma (το κόμμα) like English, so some of Rotas’s commas likewise reveal something that’s been changed. That parenthetical ε in the first line is unexpected, but an insignificant bit of encouraging filler; and there’s a comma where the English has none in line three—”the appetite may sicken[,] and so die”—but again, that’s not a big deal, since English could easily use it, too. The one that surprised me is the one near the start of line six (the line in bold)—the line whose English is “That breathes upon a bank of violets”—the comma is after the first word.

What’s happening? Well, it’s just that πνέοντας is not breathes, but breathing. The Greek line is “that, breathing upon a bank of violets, steals fragrance and gives it.” My guess is that this is only to do with space on the line—the next line is the crowded one, so this avoids needing to fit two participles in there, the way the English has it (stealing, giving). The stealing being the first word in line seven: κλέβει (klévei, hence our kleptomaniacs and kleptocracy).

Of course, some languages use punctuation entirely differently to English, thus allowing/requiring different things of a translated text. German has far more rigid rules—you put a comma where a comma goes and nowhere else. You don’t mess around with them wantonly, for rhythm or breathing or whatever.

And note also that some languages have punctuation discrepancies that might look substantial, but are in fact only cosmetic—so, for example:

Armenian full stops look like :
Bangla full stops like ।
Greek question marks look like ;

but they still work like our full stops and question marks.

For the most part, translators are inclined to follow the adage “punctuate the translation, don’t translate the punctuation.” Though here matters are complicated not only by grammatical structure and what a language allows or requires, but also the exigencies of performance—making lines that an actor can follow, in which an actor can breathe, and so on.

We don’t and can’t know Shakespeare’s exact intentions.

Niels has admitted (hmm, that’s a loaded word ) that his use of punctuation can be unorthodox, not only compared to Shakespeare but also questionable from a Danish grammatical pedant’s point of view. My friend Paul G., who teaches the language, explained the old Danish comma rules, including “always use a comma before a conjunction.” These rules have since changed (though, said Paul, the Danes do still love their commas), but that’s how Niels’s generation would have learned them—you use punctuation to reflect a sentence’s grammatical structure. But Niels will cheerfully jettison those rules to make his words more speakable on the stage, to avoid an actor stressing the wrong word, and so on. The fixed precepts, he says, have:

nothing to do with the way the sentence is spoken, and it has always annoyed me and I always refused to follow these rules. So instead I put commas to indicate breathing, or slow down the pace, or make something an aside . . . I have often been at odds with editors of printed editions who somehow expect me to follow the rules. And if I don’t, then at least be consistent—which I’m not either, because it’s all about the musicality of it.

When he punctuates, in other words, his frame of reference is more like musical notation than grammar.

I have sometimes defended myself by saying that I use “expressive punctuation,” and though the term is purely my own invention, it may at least give me a little breathing space until the zealots discover that it does not exist. If you are familiar with the erratic spelling and pronunciation of early modern English, you would hardly raise an eyebrow over such matters, but in an age of pedagogical punctilious-ness you must fend for your faults. Or rather, your conscious transgressions . . .

As Niels reminds us, it’s not as though Shakespeare was a rigorously consistent user of commas himself—nor working in a language that enforces entirely strict rules about them. Nor do we even know what all Shakespeare’s own punctuation looked like; what we have comes from printed editions, rather than manuscripts, so the punctuation we can see today has been inherited from editors (and typesetters and others). The First Folio punctuation in some cases might be close to Shakespeare’s own—or not. But the fact that it’s even a question tells us something about English and where our flexibilities are.

We don’t and can’t know Shakespeare’s exact intentions. So we’re comparing these other languages not to them but to the requirements and possibilities that come with the English language. English doesn’t have infinite flexibility as to where it puts its commas but it has quite a lot. (In that last sentence, I could have added a comma after the word commas if I’d wanted one; I could not have added one after as to.)

Shakespeare has King Richard II begin the last scene of his life with these words (punctuated here as per the First Folio):

I haue bin studying, how to compare
This Prison where I liue, vnto the World:

And this is the First Quarto (the first time the play was printed):

I haue beene studying how I may compare
This prison where I liue, vnto the world:

We’ll leave aside the difference between “how to compare” and “how I may compare” (the first requires “studying” to occupy three syllables). Most of the Shakespeare translators I’ve spoken to tend to take the Arden edition as their starting point. The latest Arden edition of Richard II loses that sole Q1 comma, giving the lines thus:

I have been studying how I may compare
This prison where I live unto the world;

If I were writing that sentence myself, today, I’d punctuate it as the Arden does: definitely no comma after “studying”—that would be an odd choice in my English, I think.

Niels—punctuating his own translation, rather than translating Shakespeare’s punctuation—has it thus:

Jeg grubler på, hvordan man sammenligner
det fængsel, hvor jeg bor, med hele verden . . .

He has commas around “where I live”—which, he says, seems “to make the character more passive, to suggest that this is something he’s struggling with—instead of delivering it in one fell swoop as a conclusion he’s reached earlier.”

That pair of bracketing commas isn’t essential in English, but they would be an option, so if such a sentence had them there it would be by choice, and for effect—so one might perhaps pause very slightly if they were there, the actor made hesitant, working it out as he goes. (Though Jonathan Bailey, the last Richard I saw, delivered those two lines in a single breath, as if comma-less.)

One of the writers I translate avoids commas where he can in Spanish, so his translators avoid them where possible in English, simply because with his very spare and delicate style, he doesn’t like clutter on the page. Not all of his other-language translators would be able to avoid them even if they wanted to. Remind me to ask his German translator how he manages . . .

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