Rhyming

Abstract

This chapter investigates manuscript evidence for readers’ attention to one particular aspect of form, rhyme. The chapter begins by examining occasions when scribes copied Middle English verse in unusual layouts with atypical lineation, because such occasions drove scribes to punctuate the structures of poems more explicitly. The resulting punctuation reveals that scribes often read, and expected other readers to read, cycles of rhyme, not individual lines, as the basic building-blocks of rhyming verse. The chapter then turns to the evidence of rhyme braces. Manuscript case-studies show that readers were usually adept and accurate when adding rhyme braces, but did not always choose to represent the actual rhyme. Their decisions reveal an aesthetic interest in balanced and unbalanced structures in rhyme, which helps to explain the effects and pleasures offered by some unbalanced stanza forms of the period, such as rhyme royal. A systematic quantitative survey of the braces in long poems written in couplets then shows how much care and labour was spent representing rhyme accurately even in copies of poems which modern scholarship has tended to regard as essentially utilitarian texts. Readers had, it is suggested, a strong formalist interest in rhyme in all kinds of rhyming verse. The evidence also demonstrates that different readers could pursue different kinds of formalism, and that poets did not always see eye to eye with the readers who eventually absorbed and transmitted poetry.