ABSTRACT
Editors need to be much more aware of the extent to which actors are affected by their handiwork. While a literary editor will approach the business of punctuation as marking conventional grammatical units, an actor assumes that these marks are instructions for breathing and pausing. The dangerous reversal of sense that can ensue when that sense is dependent on punctuation rather than on metrical form is demonstrated by Quince's garbling of the Pyramus and Thisbe prologue in A Midsummer Night's Dream. Musical notation gives us many more – and more subtle – possibilities for intonation and phrasing than can be effected by overworked and confusing marks of punctuation. Church polyphony, like the study of Latin prosody, therefore also promotes the facility for hearing two or more rhythmic systems simultaneously. Secular music of the later sixteenth century, often written by church musicians, contains similar rhythmic effects.
