Wednesday, October 09, 2013

Caps, the letter E and Shakespeare

The Dickens/Shakespeare walking tour guide, David Tucker,  had grown up on a Wisconsin farm, but had lived in England for the next several decades.

His eyes twinkled and a smile was never far from his lips as he shared his knowledge pointing out this feature or that on things I would have missed had I walked by. At any moment I expected to see Oliver Twist or Pip run by.

The best was his information on Shakespeare (see above) as he talked about how the plays were saved.

"Did you know," he asked, "Why they call it upper case and lower case?"

No one in the group did.

The typesetters in the earliest days kept capitals on top shelf cases and non capitals on the lower shelf cases. E was the most common used letter then as it is now.

The Shakespeare plays have extra Es such as shee instead of she and capitals in the middle of sentences.

David explained that when Shakespeare wanted an actor to accent a word like she he added an e or start the word with a capital (a bit like SCREAMING in emails with caps) He also demonstrated how pronunciation contributed to facial expressions and how Shakespeare's writing was so tight that he also contributed to the actor's physical presentation with his words. 

http://londonwalkblog.blogspot.ch/2011/03/david-tucker-on-tour-guides-and-tour.html

And for more photos http://lovinglifeineurope.blogspot.ch/2013/10/a-walk-back-in-time.html

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