‘ 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.:
"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.
[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."