Rhyme’s Crimes
This article shows how rhyme came to be devalued critically. It argues that formalist methodologies alone cannot explain why rhyme once dominated and then fell in importance. Nor can formalism save rhyme by pointing to the reasons why humans enjoy it or by showing how it adds to poetry’s value. Instead, in historicist fashion, I focus on how political factors have determined the meaning of rhyme in the last three hundred years. I link rhyme’s fall to a series of ideological disavowals that tied the technique to subject positions deemed unfree. From political conservatism and aristocracy to femininity, childishness, and popular vulgarity, rhyme was positioned in aesthetic discourse as a device not fit for liberal professors of poetry. The case of rhyme illustrates that literary form can never be abstracted from the political contests by which culture is riven.
Dryden's Dilemma, or, Racine Refashioned: The Problem of the English Dramatic Couplet
The history of the rhyming pentameter couplet as a medium for serious drama in English is not a lengthy one.1 Its beginnings are usually traced to Davenant's heroic opera of I656, The Siege of Rhodes, Part I, which uses a variety of metres but which may originally have been written as a spoken play in couplets, and altered because of Puritan opposition.2 Such disguises, however, were soon rendered unnecessary by the re-opening of the theatres at the Restoration, and it was Charles himself who, impressed by the French classical plays he had attended during his exile, recommended the use of the dramatic couplet to the most influential of its early exponents, Roger Boyle, Earl of Orrery. In compliance with the king's suggestion, Boyle wrote The General in 1661, and gave the rhymed heroic play its full form.3 Among those who were impressed by Boyle's work was Dryden, who began his career as a writer of rhymed heroic drama by collaborating with his brother-in-law Sir Robert Howard on The Indian Queen, performed in 1663, and who initiated the theoretical debate about dramatic rhyme in the dedication (to Boyle) of The Rival Ladies in I664.4 With Dryden as its leading practitioner and defender, rhymed tragedy was soon dominating the serious theatre.5 From his somewhat tentative defence of rhyme in I664, including the
Observations of nearshore infragravity waves: Seaward and shoreward propagating components
[1] The variation of seaward and shoreward infragravity energy fluxes across the shoaling and surf zones of a gently sloping sandy beach is estimated from field observations and related to forcing by groups of sea and swell, dissipation, and shoreline reflection. Data from collocated pressure and velocity sensors deployed between 1 and 6 m water depth are combined, using the assumption of cross-shore propagation, to decompose the infragravity wave field into shoreward and seaward propagating components. Seaward of the surf zone, shoreward propagating infragravity waves are amplified by nonlinear interactions with groups of sea and swell, and the shoreward infragravity energy flux increases in the onshore direction. In the surf zone, nonlinear phase coupling between infragravity waves and groups of sea and swell decreases, as does the shoreward infragravity energy flux, consistent with the cessation of nonlinear forcing and the increased importance of infragravity wave dissipation. Seaward propagating infragravity waves are not phase coupled to incident wave groups, and their energy levels suggest strong infragravity wave reflection near the shoreline. The cross-shore variation of the seaward energy flux is weaker than that of the shoreward flux, resulting in cross-shore variation of the squared infragravity reflection coefficient (ratio of seaward to shoreward energy flux) between about 0.4 and 1.5.