John Briggs wrote: Larry Swain wrote: John Briggs wrote: Well, perhaps not an invention as such, rather a consequence of printing. Depends on how you define consequence. If you've done much reading in early modern literature, in the original printed texts not the cleaned up modern copies, you'd recognize that orthography and script were still not

Larry Swain wrote: John Briggs wrote: Well, perhaps not an invention as such, rather a consequence of printing. Depends on how you define consequence. If you've done much reading in early modern literature, in the original printed texts not the cleaned up modern copies, you'd recognize that orthography and script were still not standardized well into the 19th century

<<It was Tolstoy's attack, so far as I know, that first employed the idea of mutilation in discussing the abuse of characters and events that appears in Shakespeare's "disfigured" version of the Hamlet story*. Tolstoy is particularly incensed by the way Shakespeare's characters are made to say and do "unnatural" things, but one need share neither his novelistic conception of the stage nor the