Punctuation marks
/ In quite early fonts this sign is used for the comma, or perhaps we should rather say to indicate any short pause in reading.... The modern comma seems to have been introduced into England about 1521 (in Roman type) and 1535 (in black-letter). It occurs in Venetian printing before 1500.
? The query mark seems to have been used in England from about 1521.
; The semicolon seems to have been first used in England about 1569, but was not common until 1580 or thereabouts.
. The full stop was commonly used before as well as after Roman, and sometimes also arabic, numerals until about 1580. Thus ".xii." It was also used before and after i (.i. = id est) and ſ (.ſ. = scilicet), and I have found it once with q = cue: "as though his .q. was then to speake."
‘ and ’ were used indifferently in such abbreviations as th’ or th‘ for ‘the.’ It may be noted that ‘t’is’ or ‘t‘is’ (instead of ‘ ’tis’) was so common in the Elizabethan period that it should perhaps be regarded as normal.
" Inverted commas were, until late in the seventeenth century, frequently used at the beginnings of lines to call attention to sententious remarks. Modern editors have occasionally regarded such passages as quotations and completed the quotes, which is generally wrong. So far as I have observed they were not especially associated with quotations until the eighteenth century, although, owing to their use for calling especial attention to a passage, they often appear in passages which are actually quoted.
Even after they become clearly used to mark quotations they generally appear at the beginning of the passage and at the beginning of every line, but not always at the end. The practice of closing the quotation with two apostrophes seems to be comparatively modern. (I have found it in the middle of the eighteenth century, but it does not seem to have been regularly observed until much later.)
Inverted commas, as well as many other signs, Greek letters (sometimes inverted) &c., were used in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century printing as reference marks directing to side- or footnotes.
( ) were often used in the sixteenth century where we now use quotation marks, and were indeed the general way of indicating a short quotation, e.g.: