The Rhetoric of the Page by Laurie Maguire (review)

Almost twenty years ago, John Lennard published a lively and entertaining study of the use of parentheses by poets. A new book annnounced as ‘a fascinating account of the practical and creative uses of blank space in early modern texts’ promised a similar experience, a live blank within a blank. ‘What’s her history?’ asks the Duke in Twelfth Night; ‘A Blank,’ Viola answers. What is a blank? A small coin, the centre of the target, an unsuccessful lottery ticket, a space to be filled in in a form or the form itself, of persons a cipher, an empty leaf in a book, verse without rhyme, a disc waiting to be made a coin by having a legend stamped on it. There are lots of potential meanings, even if some have meaning thrust upon them. Like ‘sans serif’, ‘ampersand’ is a word derived from spoken rendering, in this case of a legal formula, ‘a per se and’. ‘Indeterminacy and instability are’, the author rightly observes, ‘visible at all stages of early modern texts’. Has a speech begun but not ended, been interrupted? Love’s Labours Lost is full of interruptions: ‘The very all of all is … that the king would have me present the princess … with some delightful ostentation, or show, or pageant, or antick, or fire-work.’ So we cannot say we have not been warned. A blank is not just a meaningless cipher but a gap, needing to be filled. Venus and Adonis has 1194 lines in six-line stanzas. ‘One additional stanza would have rounded up these numbers nicely, giving the reader a poem 1200 lines in 200 stanzas.’ There are 884,647 words in Shakespeare, of which 14,376 one time only and 4343 twice, more than enough to fill all the gaps. ‘The blank is never (just) vacant: it is a mark of vacancy, … a textual IOU’, and the art of filling it in is variously called graphesis, graphicology, or (even) graphology.

The person to fill it is an interactive reader, and the first to do so is the compositor, or, in the case of Spenser Faerie Queene 1590, compositors, for under the new edict limiting impressions two different settings exist, and two compositors reacted diffferently to (we assume) the same copy. Accidents like this brought the need for ‘Errata’ lists: ‘Good authors, too, who once knew better words, Now only use four-letter words, writing / right in prose’, as Cole Porter sang. Not that those words were immune from censorship, but as Montague Summers demonstrated, the rhyme scheme of the heroic couplet effectively circumvented it. The art of filling a space created the bookseller’s advertisement, invented by Richard Royston to make up for the disruption of the trade by the Civil War. ‘Filling In’ presupposed previous ‘Leaving Out’. ‘Desunt nonnulla’ ends Marlowe Hero and Leander 1598, while Izaak Walton, editing Chalkhill Thealma and Clearchus 1683, wrote at the end ‘Here the author dyed, and I hope the reader will be sorry’. Shakespeare’s Sonnet 126 has only 12 lines, and there are two pairs of italic parentheses in their place: is a name suppressed, or is it a crescent moon and sickle, oblivion in the grave, or declining sand in an hourglass? In the famous play of Sir Thomas More were the extra authors, including Shakespeare, just filling in time for a costume change?

There follows a long consideration of ‘Et Cetera / Etcetera / &c; or, the Aposiopetic Page’, which reveals the author less sure of typographic niceties, such as the distinction between roman & and italic &, and the pleonasm ‘&-etcetera’. Much might have been made of this, not least its historic implications. Abbreviation is itself a complex subject with a long history and interesting customs. But speculation is limited to the unspoken and the unspeakable: the body, its parts and functions; by metonymy, euphemism itself; as punctuation, a substitute for the horizontal dash; and the familiar ‘continuation of properties in a list...