Note 419 — APPENDIX (continued 2)

Besides punning words, printers of poetry in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries made an effort to italicise proper names, unfamiliar words, and words deemed worthy of special emphasis. But they did not strictly adhere to these rules, and, while they often failed to italicise the words that deserved italicisation, they freely italicised others that did not merit it. Capital initial letters were employed with like irregularity. Mr. Wyndham in his careful note on the typography of the quarto of 1609 (pp. 259 seq.) suggests that Elizabethan printers were not erratic in their uses of italics or capital letters, but an examination of a very large number of Elizabethan and Jacobean books has brought me to an exactly opposite conclusion.