Representing speech in early English

Having lost the physical link to speakers, written language must compensate for the disembodied nature of its content and make clear its orientation, the voices behind the words. Present-day written English texts create textual coherence through quotation marks, which indicate passages of represented speech. These quotation marks are a recent convention, however, and premodern texts had different methods of marking speech. In late Middle English texts, these methods engaged both the visual organization of the page (e.g. marginalia, ink color) and the words of the text itself. Such strategies were not always precisely or consistently applied, though, and recognizing their functional differences from our present-day conventions helps the modern reader to understand the ordering of early texts and the pragmatics of the medieval manuscript.; This work presents the first full study of speech reporting methods in premodern English, employing the Corpus of Middle English Prose and Verse to search a broad range of texts. It uses the methodology of historical pragmatics to examine the techniques of speech marking, and then to put them in their cultural and interpretational context. Because medieval texts were less precise and exacting in their designation of reported speech than present-day texts, the conception of quotation which governs them does not seem to be as precise or exacting, either. Our readings of late Middle English texts are strengthened by considering these differences, and by recognizing that the modern editorial practice of adding quotation marks also adds an interpretative layer to the original text. Further, editorial punctuation of represented speech has hermeneutic implications for our readings of literary texts. This work shows that poems by Chaucer, Langland and the Gawain-poet exploit the less-determined systems of medieval speech marking for aesthetic and rhetorical purposes. By acknowledging the subtle ways in which medieval writers used their own systems of speech marking, we come to a deeper appreciation of their written and literary legacy.