Pardon My Accent Mark

The savants of CLIOPATRIA have had much occasion to discuss the problems of transcription of presidential recordings, and whether (and how) to render dialect and modes of speaking. I recently attended a fascinating conference at Stanford University on the poet Paul Laurence Dunbar. There were a number of papers on Dunbar's dialect poetry, for which he as the most famous in his lifetime. One paper (I am afraid they got a bit jumbled for me) spoke of the complexities of reading and teaching such poetry, since it the poet's invented language, neither a true record of speech nor directly understandable with the "naked eye" and must be translated.

A related issue is the ambiguity of writing which does not make clear where the stress or accent is in the sentence. A classic case is the line variously attributed to Dorothy Parker and George S. Kaufman, "Repartee is what you wish you'd said." The question is, is it ""Repartee is what you WISH you'd said," or "Repartee is what you wish YOU'D said"?
I came across another example of this problm in reading Ron Chernow's recent biography of Alexander Hamilton (excellent, though it really goes after Thomas Jefferson) and was intrigued by a passage I saw about Hamilton's declining influence after 1800, when Chernow says he "aqcquired the uncomfortable status of a glorified has-been." Chernow notes that, while Hamilton kept his law office in lower Manhattan, but the he "spent as much time as possible drinking in the tranquillity of [Hamilton] Grange." Is Chernow describing a contemplative Hamilton "drinking in" the surroundings, or proposing that he hit the bottle?
I think we should go back to the fine old system of italics to show where the stress goes in a sentence, and we should also not fear the application of the comma. Otherwise, we might have to wonder, on reading the title of this little essay, who Mark is and whether he will indeed pardon the accent.