Journal Article

The Embarrassments of Rhyme

Allen, Valerie

2021

Overview

Since most of the Tales end-rhyme, the term rymyng here likely embraces Thopas's whole poetic venture: meter, rhyme-scheme, plot, and narrative style. Aiming to enable such dexterity, Peter Levins compiled his Manipulus Vocabulorum [A Handful of Words] (1570), which, as its full title declares, is \"necessary not onely for Scholers that want varietie of words, but also for such as vse to write in English Meetre.\" Because these final syllables are frequently unstressed, Manipulus contains as many instances of homoioteleuton and homoioptoton as it does of rhyme proper. Because the \"rule of the Termination\" demonstrates \"the Art of Deriuing and Compounding,\" the grammatical value of word endings heightens.2 For example, the suffix - able can make an adjective out of a verb (\"teachable\") or out of a substantive (\"peaceable\"). By asserting its ornamental rather than functional nature, rhyme sets at odds sound (ornament) and sense (function) or what Giorgio Agamben calls semiotic and semantic events. 4 In similar vein, John Hollander contrasts the \"empty signaling\" of repetitions such as \"fa la la\" with the lyric's \"optimum density of reference,\" where each repetition acquires new meaning even as it sounds the same. 5 Identical rhyme, especially vulnerable to such empty signaling, forces those opposites together, simultaneously achieving hollow reiteration and referential density in its purest expression as the echo. 6 Storytelling as Theory Ovid's story of Narcissus and Echo fascinated the Middle Ages.

• Publisher: Associated University Presses
• Subject: Chaucer, Geoffrey (1340?-1400) / Criticism and interpretation / Dictionaries / English literature, 1100-1485 (Middle English period) / Exegesis & hermeneutics / Middle Ages / Middle English / Middle English period, 1100-1500 / Poetry / Rhetoric / Rhyme / Semantics / Semiotics / Shakespeare, William (1564-1616) / Storytelling / Stress / Suffixes / Syllables