Book History

Introduction

Overwise

[M]y Ancestor was the first Inventor of Short Hand, and you see of what use it is to the world; but at first it was extremely laugh'd at, as no doubt my Project will be.… Well in short, as all the World writes Short Hand, so I wou'd teach all the World to speak Short Hand, and by an Act of Parliament have it call'd the Short Hand Tongue.

Laton

Speak Short Hand, and have it call'd the Short Hand Tongue! Iack Adams for that; ha, ha, ha.

Omnes

Ha, ha, ha, ha.¹

It is a laughable suggestion, a spoken shorthand. Shorthand, as everyone in the audience of John Lacy's comedy, Hercules Buffoon (1684), would have been aware, is a system of writing, not speech, and was designed in part so that the pen could keep pace with the already-rapid pace of the tongue. The first person in the early modern period to devise such a system, whom Overwise claims as his relative, was Timothy Bright, whose publication of Characterie in 1588 was hardly "laugh'd at," but was instead the catalyst for a growing number of shorthand systems published throughout the seventeenth century and well into the twentieth—all of which remained firmly rooted in the written medium.² As for the statement that "all the World writes Short Hand," Overwise is a bit overzealous. And yet, while not everyone knew how to write in shorthand, everyone in the London audience was expected to know of shorthand. The premise of the joke, which goes on for 78 lines and constitutes the very climax of the comedy, depends on it. [End Page 1]

Scholars have given shorthand short shrift for over a century. The study of shorthand had its heyday in the 1880s, when thorough and reliable research was published alongside poppycock claims that held, for example, that shorthand systems of antiquity were the origin of lowercase letters.³ The bulk of shorthand scholarship was conducted by practitioners and, more dangerously, shorthand inventors, and their bias against seventeenth-century systems is palpable. Given the absence of a reliable history of shorthand, along with the meager regard granted to early modern systems in the unreliable histories that have been written, it is not surprising just how little is known about shorthand among early modern scholars today.⁴ This is an oversight well worth rectifying, for as I will contend, quite a lot was known about shorthand in the early modern period itself. There is ample evidence that between 1588 and 1700, when shorthand was still considered a recent invention, it represented a thriving method of writing in England and the American colonies. Only gradually, in the second half of the seventeenth century, did it spread beyond those anglophone areas to the Continent, and then never with the same clout and competition that characterized its growth in England.⁵ This evidence, however, remains to be set forth in a comprehensive way. The following work is meant to fill this unnoticed gap by presenting a concentrated synthesis of print sources, like Hercules Buffoon, that bear mention of shorthand—mentions that shed light on its use, its prevalence, its associations, and its place in puns, jokes, and metaphors—in order to demonstrate just how commonplace shorthand was. For to miss its mention or misinterpret its significance is to turn a blind eye to a cultural experience that impacted notions of privacy, accountability, abridgement, and communication itself.

Shorthand, also known by a variety of synonyms including characterie, brachygraphy, stenography, and tachygraphy, is an overarching term for a large set of writing systems that had as their main objective the qualities of swiftness, secrecy, spatial-efficiency, and (to a lesser extent) universality. They are not mere abbreviations of longhand, but are highly developed writing systems that operate according to their own rules and require their own literacy. As a result, works written in shorthand are illegible to the untrained eye. Individual studies have been done to decipher and publish the shorthand notes of individual writers...