Rhyme's Contrapuntal History in Early Dryden

Abstract:While John Milton was disavowing "the jingling sound of like endings," John Dryden was cementing a vogue for writing rhymed couplets that would dominate the English literary landscape for the next 150 years. Seeking rhyme's lost links to pleasure and sometimes to transgression, this essay looks closely at Dryden's early considerations of couplet rhyme in his Essay of Dramatick Poesie (1668) and related critical writings contemporaneous with Paradise Lost (1667), as well as in a few examples of his early couplet practice in his plays and prologues from this period. My claim is that Dryden's schooling in dramatic couplets at the start of his career shaped his broader thinking about rhyme, opening him to rhyme's residual orality and the dissident energy always nascent in rhyme's sounds. His couplets and criticism from the mid 1660s thus alert us to how rhyme's field of play, perhaps especially in closed forms like the seventeenth-century couplet, tends to be mischievously subversive of any single authority.