"she was neuer heard to giue any the lie, nor so much as to (thou) any in anger."—STUBBES, Christal Glasse, 1591.
They also seem sometimes to be used merely for emphasis, e.g.:
"What yesterday was (Greene) now's seare and dry"—COOKE, Greene's Tu Quoque, 1614.
[ ] Square brackets are common in some Elizabethan fonts, being used as we now use round ones. They were also sometimes used instead of round ones for the purposes mentioned above; e.g.:
"which is as much as [of olde] or [in times past]."—PLUTARCH, Morals, 1603.
COMPOSED IN CASLON 337 TYPES
FOOTNOTES:
[21] NOTE: In the Birrell & Garnett catalog, Typefounders' Specimens, London 1928, pp. 39-40, it is pointed out that the short s was effectively introduced by the Martins "who worked the Apollo Press at Edinburgh, and their London publisher, John Bell. The first book of theirs that I have seen is the series of Poets, for example the Dryden of 1777...." Graham Pollard relates there the instructive and amusing history of the error, for which Hansard was responsible: J. Johnson in Typographia, London 1824, wrote "... for which we are indebted to the ingenious Mr. John Bell, who introduced them in his edition of the British Classics." In copying this, Hansard (1825) made the error in transcribing "British Theatre." He was followed by C. H. Timperley in 1842, who added the qualifying phrase "about 1795," by J. B. Nichols in his Illustrations of Literature, 1858, and by R. B. McKerrow in 1927, "where it has been given a new lease of life by correcting the obvious mistake in date to 1791."