Punctuation in John Donne’s Poetry and Prose

This essay provides fresh evidence of John Donne’s (1572–1631) principles & practices of punctuation. It draws on surviving MS and print evidence to consider the contribution made by commas, semi-/colons, parentheses, & apostrophes to the distinctive rhythms & self-revealing, emotive charge of Donne’s poetry & prose. It examines variations in Donne’s use of punctuation in the different genres, languages, forms, & media in which Donne’s writing appears ; it also considers the degree to which conventions of pointing in these different contexts were affected by developments in Early-Modern punctuation theory & practice. It considers too Donne’s punctuation in the light of his own developing theory of language — the way in which his classically informed, humanist understanding of the role played by grammar, rhetoric, & deictics in language’s communicative function became increasingly coloured by his growing appreciation of the ways in which language signifies in a scriptural context.