SOUND AND MEANING IN SHAKESPEARE'S SONNETS SOUND AND MEANING IN SHAKESPEARE'S SONNETS SOUND AND MEANING IN SHAKESPEARE'S SONNETS SOUND AND MEANING IN SHAKESPEARE'S SONNETS SOUND AND MEANING IN SHAKESPEARE'S SONNETS SOUND AND MEANING IN SHAKESPEARE'S SONNETS SOUND AND MEANING IN SHAKESPEARE'S SONNETS SOUND AND MEANING IN SHAKESPEARE'S SONNETS SOUND AND MEANING IN SHAKESPEARE'S SONNETS SOUND AND MEANING IN SHAKESPEARE'S SONNETS SOUND AND MEANING IN SHAKESPEARE'S SONNETS SOUND AND MEANING IN SHAKESPEARE'S SONNETS SOUND AND MEANING IN SHAKESPEARE'S SONNETS SOUND AND MEANING IN SHAKESPEARE'S SONNETS SOUND AND MEANING IN SHAKESPEARE'S SONNETS SOUND AND MEANING IN SHAKESPEARE'S SONNETS SOUND AND MEANING IN SHAKESPEARE'S SONNETS SOUND AND MEANING IN SHAKESPEARE'S SONNETS SOUND AND MEANING IN SHAKESPEARE'S SONNETS SOUND AND MEANING IN SHAKESPEARE'S SONNETS SOUND AND MEANING IN SHAKESPEARE'S SONNETS SOUND AND MEANING IN SHAKESPEARE'S SONNETS SOUND AND MEANING IN SHAKESPEARE'S SONNETS SOUND AND MEANING IN SHAKESPEARE'S SONNETS SOUND AND MEANING IN SHAKESPEARE'S SONNETS SOUND AND MEANING IN SHAKESPEARE'S SONNETS SOUND AND MEANING IN SHAKESPEARE'S SONNETS SOUND AND MEANING IN SHAKESPEARE'S SONNETS SOUND AND MEANING IN SHAKESPEARE'S SONNETS SOUND AND MEANING IN SHAKESPEARE'S SONNETS SOUND AND MEANING IN SHAKESPEARE'S SONNETS SOUND AND MEANING IN SHAKESPEARE'S SONNETS SOUND AND MEANING IN SHAKESPEARE'S SONNETS SOUND AND MEANING IN SHAKESPEARE'S SONNETS SOUND AND MEANING IN SHAKESPEARE'S SONNETS SOUND AND MEANING IN SHAKESPEARE'S SONNETS SOUND AND MEANING IN SHAKESPEARE'S SONNETS SOUND AND MEANING IN SHAKESPEARE'S SONNETS SOUND AND MEANING IN SHAKESPEARE'S SONNETS SOUND AND MEANING IN SHAKESPEARE'S SONNETS SOUND AND MEANING IN SHAKESPEARE'S SONNETS SOUND AND MEANING IN SHAKESPEARE'S SONNETS SOUND AND MEANING IN SHAKESPEARE'S SONNETS SOUND AND MEANING IN SHAKESPEARE'S SONNETS SOUND AND MEANING IN SHAKESPEARE'S SONNETS SOUND AND MEANING IN SHAKESPEARE'S SONNETS SOUND AND MEANING IN SHAKESPEARE'S SONNETS SOUND AND MEANING IN SHAKESPEARE'S SONNETS SOUND AND MEANING IN SHAKESPEARE'S SONNETS SOUND AND MEANING IN SHAKESPEARE'S SONNETS SOUND AND MEANING IN SHAKESPEARE'S SONNETS SOUND AND MEANING IN SHAKESPEARE'S SONNETS SOUND AND MEANING IN SHAKESPEARE'S SONNETS SOUND AND MEANING IN SHAKESPEARE'S SONNETS SOUND AND MEANING IN SHAKESPEARE'S SONNETS SOUND AND MEANING IN SHAKESPEARE'S SONNETS SOUND AND MEANING IN SHAKESPEARE'S SONNETS SOUND AND MEANING IN SHAKESPEARE'S SONNETS SOUND AND MEANING IN SHAKESPEARE'S SONNETS SOUND AND MEANING IN SHAKESPEARE'S SONNETS SOUND AND MEANING IN SHAKESPEARE'S SONNETS SOUND AND MEANING IN SHAKESPEARE'S SONNETS SOUND AND MEANING IN SHAKESPEARE'S SONNETS SOUND AND MEANING IN SHAKESPEARE'S SONNETS SOUND AND MEANING IN SHAKESPEARE'S SONNETS SOUND AND MEANING IN SHAKESPEARE'S SONNETS SOUND AND MEANING IN SHAKESPEARE'S SONNETS SOUND AND MEANING IN SHAKESPEARE'S SONNETS SOUND AND MEANING IN SHAKESPEARE'S SONNETS SOUND AND MEANING IN SHAKESPEARE'S SONNETS SOUND AND MEANING IN SHAKESPEARE'S SONNETS SOUND AND MEANING IN SHAKESPEARE'S SONNETS SOUND AND MEANING IN SHAKESPEARE'S SONNETS SOUND AND MEANING IN SHAKESPEARE'S SONNETS SOUND AND MEANING IN SHAKESPEARE'S SONNETS SOUND AND MEANING IN SHAKESPEARE'S SONNETS SOUND AND MEANING IN SHAKESPEARE'S SONNETS SOUND AND MEANING IN SHAKESPEARE'S SONNETS SOUND AND MEANING IN SHAKESPEARE'S SONNETS SOUND AND MEANING IN SHAKESPEARE'S SONNETS SOUND AND MEANING IN SHAKESPEARE'S SONNETS SOUND AND MEANING IN SHAKESPEARE'S SONNETS SOUND AND MEANING IN SHAKESPEARE'S SONNETS SOUND AND MEANING IN SHAKESPEARE'S SONNETS SOUND AND MEANING IN SHAKESPEARE'S SONNETS SOUND AND MEANING IN SHAKESPEARE'S SONNETS SOUND AND MEANING IN SHAKESPEARE'S SONNETS

MICHAEL SHAPIRO Brown University

Shakespeare's verse is studded with alliteration and paronomasia. The more fundamental ques- tion of a patterned relationship between sound and meaning in his Sonnets has not been answered, partly because no method of uncovering such correspondences was available. However, once groups of sounds, specifically sonorant and obstruent sequences, are examined as the locus of the sound-meaning nexus, it emerges that Shakespeare consistently aligns these sequences with relational meanings defined by the dyad of freedom and constraint. The coherence between sound and sense is thus shown to be iconic.*

More has been written about the Sonnets than any of Shakespeare's works except Hamlet. Surprisingly, however, practically nothing in this vast secondary literature offers a comprehensive answer to the most fundamental question of poetics, whether the sounds of the Sonnets are an echo of the sense. George T. Wright's bibliographical overview (1985:371-72) singles out two studies-Masson (1954) and Booth (1969: 66-79 et passim)-which investigate the Sonnets' phonetic structure in some detail, but neither of these authors has much of systematic purport to say beyond noting Shakespeare's obvious use of alliteration, assonance, and consonance in the service of syntactic and semantic parallelism.' Indeed, with respect to alliteration, the following might well function as an indirect characterization of the status of research on this problem:

If Roman Jakobson had analysed [Sonnet] 55, one of the things he would have noticed in its first strophe is the high incidence of alliteration on 'm,' 'p,' and 's,' which is repeated in the third strophe. That Shakespeare 'affects the letter' in these strophes, and that they are thereby linked at the phonetic level is not in question. Our question is what performative relation this purely formal linkage at the level of the signifier might bear to the sonnet's signification, its 'contents' as Shakespeare equivocally puts it. Here Jakobson can be of little help, taking as he notoriously does, meaning or content for granted or reducing it to the received ideas of other commentators. In terms of his analysis, the most the empirical fact of alliteration can be is an earnest of poetic power, alerting us that some extra-communicative intention may be at work; in itself it cannot be a source or explanation of that power. Occurring as it does within a semantic field that the alliteration does not itself generate, the function of alliteration cannot be causal or integral to signified meaning. Rather, it operates here as what Puttenham would call a figure of 'ornament' of the kind Shakespeare designates and illustrates as such in the previous sonnet ('0 how much more doth beauty beauteous seem / By that sweet ornament ...'). As ornament or decoration, alliteration bears the same superficially attractive but functionally inessential relation to the poem as 'gilt' does to the 'monuments / O princes' mentioned at the outset. Gilding is to monumental sculpture as alliteration is to the sonnet. (Felperin 1985:176-77).

If alliteration is largely irrelevant to understanding the significance of the sound pattern, what else, then, could there be of phonetic relevance in Sonnet 55? That a

* I am indebted to Paul Friedrich and Thomas L. Short for their substantive comments and suggestions, which helped improve this article, and to W. Richard Ristow for his statistical guidance.

' A curiosity of the history of scholarship on this subject are two articles by B. F. Skinner (1939, 1941). Skinner's conclusion about alliteration in the first of these, that 'Shakespeare might as well have drawn his words out of a hat' (1939: 191), was countered in detail in Goldsmith 1950. See also Pirkhofer 1963:3-14. Hymes 1960 is a good example of a more ramified approach to the problem of the sound-meaning nexus in twenty sonnets (ten each) by Wordsworth and Keats which utilizes the concept of the 'summative word', i.e. reckons the repetition of certain sounds to be anagrammatically related to a particularly significant ('dominant') word in a given poem. Tsur 1992 addresses the general problem of sound-meaning correspon- dences and includes some analysis of Shakespeare's poetry.

81

MICHAEL SHAPIRO Brown University

Shakespeare's verse is studded with alliteration and paronomasia. The more fundamental ques- tion of a patterned relationship between sound and meaning in his Sonnets has not been answered, partly because no method of uncovering such correspondences was available. However, once groups of sounds, specifically sonorant and obstruent sequences, are examined as the locus of the sound-meaning nexus, it emerges that Shakespeare consistently aligns these sequences with relational meanings defined by the dyad of freedom and constraint. The coherence between sound and sense is thus shown to be iconic.*

More has been written about the Sonnets than any of Shakespeare's works except Hamlet. Surprisingly, however, practically nothing in this vast secondary literature offers a comprehensive answer to the most fundamental question of poetics, whether the sounds of the Sonnets are an echo of the sense. George T. Wright's bibliographical overview (1985:371-72) singles out two studies-Masson (1954) and Booth (1969: 66-79 et passim)-which investigate the Sonnets' phonetic structure in some detail, but neither of these authors has much of systematic purport to say beyond noting Shakespeare's obvious use of alliteration, assonance, and consonance in the service of syntactic and semantic parallelism.' Indeed, with respect to alliteration, the following might well function as an indirect characterization of the status of research on this problem:

If Roman Jakobson had analysed [Sonnet] 55, one of the things he would have noticed in its first strophe is the high incidence of alliteration on 'm,' 'p,' and 's,' which is repeated in the third strophe. That Shakespeare 'affects the letter' in these strophes, and that they are thereby linked at the phonetic level is not in question. Our question is what performative relation this purely formal linkage at the level of the signifier might bear to the sonnet's signification, its 'contents' as Shakespeare equivocally puts it. Here Jakobson can be of little help, taking as he notoriously does, meaning or content for granted or reducing it to the received ideas of other commentators. In terms of his analysis, the most the empirical fact of alliteration can be is an earnest of poetic power, alerting us that some extra-communicative intention may be at work; in itself it cannot be a source or explanation of that power. Occurring as it does within a semantic field that the alliteration does not itself generate, the function of alliteration cannot be causal or integral to signified meaning. Rather, it operates here as what Puttenham would call a figure of 'ornament' of the kind Shakespeare designates and illustrates as such in the previous sonnet ('0 how much more doth beauty beauteous seem / By that sweet ornament ...'). As ornament or decoration, alliteration bears the same superficially attractive but functionally inessential relation to the poem as 'gilt' does to the 'monuments / O princes' mentioned at the outset. Gilding is to monumental sculpture as alliteration is to the sonnet. (Felperin 1985:176-77).

If alliteration is largely irrelevant to understanding the significance of the sound pattern, what else, then, could there be of phonetic relevance in Sonnet 55? That a

* I am indebted to Paul Friedrich and Thomas L. Short for their substantive comments and suggestions, which helped improve this article, and to W. Richard Ristow for his statistical guidance.

' A curiosity of the history of scholarship on this subject are two articles by B. F. Skinner (1939, 1941). Skinner's conclusion about alliteration in the first of these, that 'Shakespeare might as well have drawn his words out of a hat' (1939: 191), was countered in detail in Goldsmith 1950. See also Pirkhofer 1963:3-14. Hymes 1960 is a good example of a more ramified approach to the problem of the sound-meaning nexus in twenty sonnets (ten each) by Wordsworth and Keats which utilizes the concept of the 'summative word', i.e. reckons the repetition of certain sounds to be anagrammatically related to a particularly significant ('dominant') word in a given poem. Tsur 1992 addresses the general problem of sound-meaning correspon- dences and includes some analysis of Shakespeare's poetry.

81

MICHAEL SHAPIRO Brown University

Shakespeare's verse is studded with alliteration and paronomasia. The more fundamental ques- tion of a patterned relationship between sound and meaning in his Sonnets has not been answered, partly because no method of uncovering such correspondences was available. However, once groups of sounds, specifically sonorant and obstruent sequences, are examined as the locus of the sound-meaning nexus, it emerges that Shakespeare consistently aligns these sequences with relational meanings defined by the dyad of freedom and constraint. The coherence between sound and sense is thus shown to be iconic.*

More has been written about the Sonnets than any of Shakespeare's works except Hamlet. Surprisingly, however, practically nothing in this vast secondary literature offers a comprehensive answer to the most fundamental question of poetics, whether the sounds of the Sonnets are an echo of the sense. George T. Wright's bibliographical overview (1985:371-72) singles out two studies-Masson (1954) and Booth (1969: 66-79 et passim)-which investigate the Sonnets' phonetic structure in some detail, but neither of these authors has much of systematic purport to say beyond noting Shakespeare's obvious use of alliteration, assonance, and consonance in the service of syntactic and semantic parallelism.' Indeed, with respect to alliteration, the following might well function as an indirect characterization of the status of research on this problem:

If Roman Jakobson had analysed [Sonnet] 55, one of the things he would have noticed in its first strophe is the high incidence of alliteration on 'm,' 'p,' and 's,' which is repeated in the third strophe. That Shakespeare 'affects the letter' in these strophes, and that they are thereby linked at the phonetic level is not in question. Our question is what performative relation this purely formal linkage at the level of the signifier might bear to the sonnet's signification, its 'contents' as Shakespeare equivocally puts it. Here Jakobson can be of little help, taking as he notoriously does, meaning or content for granted or reducing it to the received ideas of other commentators. In terms of his analysis, the most the empirical fact of alliteration can be is an earnest of poetic power, alerting us that some extra-communicative intention may be at work; in itself it cannot be a source or explanation of that power. Occurring as it does within a semantic field that the alliteration does not itself generate, the function of alliteration cannot be causal or integral to signified meaning. Rather, it operates here as what Puttenham would call a figure of 'ornament' of the kind Shakespeare designates and illustrates as such in the previous sonnet ('0 how much more doth beauty beauteous seem / By that sweet ornament ...'). As ornament or decoration, alliteration bears the same superficially attractive but functionally inessential relation to the poem as 'gilt' does to the 'monuments / O princes' mentioned at the outset. Gilding is to monumental sculpture as alliteration is to the sonnet. (Felperin 1985:176-77).

If alliteration is largely irrelevant to understanding the significance of the sound pattern, what else, then, could there be of phonetic relevance in Sonnet 55? That a

* I am indebted to Paul Friedrich and Thomas L. Short for their substantive comments and suggestions, which helped improve this article, and to W. Richard Ristow for his statistical guidance.

' A curiosity of the history of scholarship on this subject are two articles by B. F. Skinner (1939, 1941). Skinner's conclusion about alliteration in the first of these, that 'Shakespeare might as well have drawn his words out of a hat' (1939: 191), was countered in detail in Goldsmith 1950. See also Pirkhofer 1963:3-14. Hymes 1960 is a good example of a more ramified approach to the problem of the sound-meaning nexus in twenty sonnets (ten each) by Wordsworth and Keats which utilizes the concept of the 'summative word', i.e. reckons the repetition of certain sounds to be anagrammatically related to a particularly significant ('dominant') word in a given poem. Tsur 1992 addresses the general problem of sound-meaning correspon- dences and includes some analysis of Shakespeare's poetry.

81

MICHAEL SHAPIRO Brown University

Shakespeare's verse is studded with alliteration and paronomasia. The more fundamental ques- tion of a patterned relationship between sound and meaning in his Sonnets has not been answered, partly because no method of uncovering such correspondences was available. However, once groups of sounds, specifically sonorant and obstruent sequences, are examined as the locus of the sound-meaning nexus, it emerges that Shakespeare consistently aligns these sequences with relational meanings defined by the dyad of freedom and constraint. The coherence between sound and sense is thus shown to be iconic.*

More has been written about the Sonnets than any of Shakespeare's works except Hamlet. Surprisingly, however, practically nothing in this vast secondary literature offers a comprehensive answer to the most fundamental question of poetics, whether the sounds of the Sonnets are an echo of the sense. George T. Wright's bibliographical overview (1985:371-72) singles out two studies-Masson (1954) and Booth (1969: 66-79 et passim)-which investigate the Sonnets' phonetic structure in some detail, but neither of these authors has much of systematic purport to say beyond noting Shakespeare's obvious use of alliteration, assonance, and consonance in the service of syntactic and semantic parallelism.' Indeed, with respect to alliteration, the following might well function as an indirect characterization of the status of research on this problem:

If Roman Jakobson had analysed [Sonnet] 55, one of the things he would have noticed in its first strophe is the high incidence of alliteration on 'm,' 'p,' and 's,' which is repeated in the third strophe. That Shakespeare 'affects the letter' in these strophes, and that they are thereby linked at the phonetic level is not in question. Our question is what performative relation this purely formal linkage at the level of the signifier might bear to the sonnet's signification, its 'contents' as Shakespeare equivocally puts it. Here Jakobson can be of little help, taking as he notoriously does, meaning or content for granted or reducing it to the received ideas of other commentators. In terms of his analysis, the most the empirical fact of alliteration can be is an earnest of poetic power, alerting us that some extra-communicative intention may be at work; in itself it cannot be a source or explanation of that power. Occurring as it does within a semantic field that the alliteration does not itself generate, the function of alliteration cannot be causal or integral to signified meaning. Rather, it operates here as what Puttenham would call a figure of 'ornament' of the kind Shakespeare designates and illustrates as such in the previous sonnet ('0 how much more doth beauty beauteous seem / By that sweet ornament ...'). As ornament or decoration, alliteration bears the same superficially attractive but functionally inessential relation to the poem as 'gilt' does to the 'monuments / O princes' mentioned at the outset. Gilding is to monumental sculpture as alliteration is to the sonnet. (Felperin 1985:176-77).

If alliteration is largely irrelevant to understanding the significance of the sound pattern, what else, then, could there be of phonetic relevance in Sonnet 55? That a

* I am indebted to Paul Friedrich and Thomas L. Short for their substantive comments and suggestions, which helped improve this article, and to W. Richard Ristow for his statistical guidance.

' A curiosity of the history of scholarship on this subject are two articles by B. F. Skinner (1939, 1941). Skinner's conclusion about alliteration in the first of these, that 'Shakespeare might as well have drawn his words out of a hat' (1939: 191), was countered in detail in Goldsmith 1950. See also Pirkhofer 1963:3-14. Hymes 1960 is a good example of a more ramified approach to the problem of the sound-meaning nexus in twenty sonnets (ten each) by Wordsworth and Keats which utilizes the concept of the 'summative word', i.e. reckons the repetition of certain sounds to be anagrammatically related to a particularly significant ('dominant') word in a given poem. Tsur 1992 addresses the general problem of sound-meaning correspon- dences and includes some analysis of Shakespeare's poetry.

81

MICHAEL SHAPIRO Brown University

Shakespeare's verse is studded with alliteration and paronomasia. The more fundamental ques- tion of a patterned relationship between sound and meaning in his Sonnets has not been answered, partly because no method of uncovering such correspondences was available. However, once groups of sounds, specifically sonorant and obstruent sequences, are examined as the locus of the sound-meaning nexus, it emerges that Shakespeare consistently aligns these sequences with relational meanings defined by the dyad of freedom and constraint. The coherence between sound and sense is thus shown to be iconic.*

More has been written about the Sonnets than any of Shakespeare's works except Hamlet. Surprisingly, however, practically nothing in this vast secondary literature offers a comprehensive answer to the most fundamental question of poetics, whether the sounds of the Sonnets are an echo of the sense. George T. Wright's bibliographical overview (1985:371-72) singles out two studies-Masson (1954) and Booth (1969: 66-79 et passim)-which investigate the Sonnets' phonetic structure in some detail, but neither of these authors has much of systematic purport to say beyond noting Shakespeare's obvious use of alliteration, assonance, and consonance in the service of syntactic and semantic parallelism.' Indeed, with respect to alliteration, the following might well function as an indirect characterization of the status of research on this problem:

If Roman Jakobson had analysed [Sonnet] 55, one of the things he would have noticed in its first strophe is the high incidence of alliteration on 'm,' 'p,' and 's,' which is repeated in the third strophe. That Shakespeare 'affects the letter' in these strophes, and that they are thereby linked at the phonetic level is not in question. Our question is what performative relation this purely formal linkage at the level of the signifier might bear to the sonnet's signification, its 'contents' as Shakespeare equivocally puts it. Here Jakobson can be of little help, taking as he notoriously does, meaning or content for granted or reducing it to the received ideas of other commentators. In terms of his analysis, the most the empirical fact of alliteration can be is an earnest of poetic power, alerting us that some extra-communicative intention may be at work; in itself it cannot be a source or explanation of that power. Occurring as it does within a semantic field that the alliteration does not itself generate, the function of alliteration cannot be causal or integral to signified meaning. Rather, it operates here as what Puttenham would call a figure of 'ornament' of the kind Shakespeare designates and illustrates as such in the previous sonnet ('0 how much more doth beauty beauteous seem / By that sweet ornament ...'). As ornament or decoration, alliteration bears the same superficially attractive but functionally inessential relation to the poem as 'gilt' does to the 'monuments / O princes' mentioned at the outset. Gilding is to monumental sculpture as alliteration is to the sonnet. (Felperin 1985:176-77).

If alliteration is largely irrelevant to understanding the significance of the sound pattern, what else, then, could there be of phonetic relevance in Sonnet 55? That a

* I am indebted to Paul Friedrich and Thomas L. Short for their substantive comments and suggestions, which helped improve this article, and to W. Richard Ristow for his statistical guidance.

' A curiosity of the history of scholarship on this subject are two articles by B. F. Skinner (1939, 1941). Skinner's conclusion about alliteration in the first of these, that 'Shakespeare might as well have drawn his words out of a hat' (1939: 191), was countered in detail in Goldsmith 1950. See also Pirkhofer 1963:3-14. Hymes 1960 is a good example of a more ramified approach to the problem of the sound-meaning nexus in twenty sonnets (ten each) by Wordsworth and Keats which utilizes the concept of the 'summative word', i.e. reckons the repetition of certain sounds to be anagrammatically related to a particularly significant ('dominant') word in a given poem. Tsur 1992 addresses the general problem of sound-meaning correspon- dences and includes some analysis of Shakespeare's poetry.

81

MICHAEL SHAPIRO Brown University

Shakespeare's verse is studded with alliteration and paronomasia. The more fundamental ques- tion of a patterned relationship between sound and meaning in his Sonnets has not been answered, partly because no method of uncovering such correspondences was available. However, once groups of sounds, specifically sonorant and obstruent sequences, are examined as the locus of the sound-meaning nexus, it emerges that Shakespeare consistently aligns these sequences with relational meanings defined by the dyad of freedom and constraint. The coherence between sound and sense is thus shown to be iconic.*

More has been written about the Sonnets than any of Shakespeare's works except Hamlet. Surprisingly, however, practically nothing in this vast secondary literature offers a comprehensive answer to the most fundamental question of poetics, whether the sounds of the Sonnets are an echo of the sense. George T. Wright's bibliographical overview (1985:371-72) singles out two studies-Masson (1954) and Booth (1969: 66-79 et passim)-which investigate the Sonnets' phonetic structure in some detail, but neither of these authors has much of systematic purport to say beyond noting Shakespeare's obvious use of alliteration, assonance, and consonance in the service of syntactic and semantic parallelism.' Indeed, with respect to alliteration, the following might well function as an indirect characterization of the status of research on this problem:

If Roman Jakobson had analysed [Sonnet] 55, one of the things he would have noticed in its first strophe is the high incidence of alliteration on 'm,' 'p,' and 's,' which is repeated in the third strophe. That Shakespeare 'affects the letter' in these strophes, and that they are thereby linked at the phonetic level is not in question. Our question is what performative relation this purely formal linkage at the level of the signifier might bear to the sonnet's signification, its 'contents' as Shakespeare equivocally puts it. Here Jakobson can be of little help, taking as he notoriously does, meaning or content for granted or reducing it to the received ideas of other commentators. In terms of his analysis, the most the empirical fact of alliteration can be is an earnest of poetic power, alerting us that some extra-communicative intention may be at work; in itself it cannot be a source or explanation of that power. Occurring as it does within a semantic field that the alliteration does not itself generate, the function of alliteration cannot be causal or integral to signified meaning. Rather, it operates here as what Puttenham would call a figure of 'ornament' of the kind Shakespeare designates and illustrates as such in the previous sonnet ('0 how much more doth beauty beauteous seem / By that sweet ornament ...'). As ornament or decoration, alliteration bears the same superficially attractive but functionally inessential relation to the poem as 'gilt' does to the 'monuments / O princes' mentioned at the outset. Gilding is to monumental sculpture as alliteration is to the sonnet. (Felperin 1985:176-77).

If alliteration is largely irrelevant to understanding the significance of the sound pattern, what else, then, could there be of phonetic relevance in Sonnet 55? That a

* I am indebted to Paul Friedrich and Thomas L. Short for their substantive comments and suggestions, which helped improve this article, and to W. Richard Ristow for his statistical guidance.

' A curiosity of the history of scholarship on this subject are two articles by B. F. Skinner (1939, 1941). Skinner's conclusion about alliteration in the first of these, that 'Shakespeare might as well have drawn his words out of a hat' (1939: 191), was countered in detail in Goldsmith 1950. See also Pirkhofer 1963:3-14. Hymes 1960 is a good example of a more ramified approach to the problem of the sound-meaning nexus in twenty sonnets (ten each) by Wordsworth and Keats which utilizes the concept of the 'summative word', i.e. reckons the repetition of certain sounds to be anagrammatically related to a particularly significant ('dominant') word in a given poem. Tsur 1992 addresses the general problem of sound-meaning correspon- dences and includes some analysis of Shakespeare's poetry.

81

MICHAEL SHAPIRO Brown University

Shakespeare's verse is studded with alliteration and paronomasia. The more fundamental ques- tion of a patterned relationship between sound and meaning in his Sonnets has not been answered, partly because no method of uncovering such correspondences was available. However, once groups of sounds, specifically sonorant and obstruent sequences, are examined as the locus of the sound-meaning nexus, it emerges that Shakespeare consistently aligns these sequences with relational meanings defined by the dyad of freedom and constraint. The coherence between sound and sense is thus shown to be iconic.*

More has been written about the Sonnets than any of Shakespeare's works except Hamlet. Surprisingly, however, practically nothing in this vast secondary literature offers a comprehensive answer to the most fundamental question of poetics, whether the sounds of the Sonnets are an echo of the sense. George T. Wright's bibliographical overview (1985:371-72) singles out two studies-Masson (1954) and Booth (1969: 66-79 et passim)-which investigate the Sonnets' phonetic structure in some detail, but neither of these authors has much of systematic purport to say beyond noting Shakespeare's obvious use of alliteration, assonance, and consonance in the service of syntactic and semantic parallelism.' Indeed, with respect to alliteration, the following might well function as an indirect characterization of the status of research on this problem:

If Roman Jakobson had analysed [Sonnet] 55, one of the things he would have noticed in its first strophe is the high incidence of alliteration on 'm,' 'p,' and 's,' which is repeated in the third strophe. That Shakespeare 'affects the letter' in these strophes, and that they are thereby linked at the phonetic level is not in question. Our question is what performative relation this purely formal linkage at the level of the signifier might bear to the sonnet's signification, its 'contents' as Shakespeare equivocally puts it. Here Jakobson can be of little help, taking as he notoriously does, meaning or content for granted or reducing it to the received ideas of other commentators. In terms of his analysis, the most the empirical fact of alliteration can be is an earnest of poetic power, alerting us that some extra-communicative intention may be at work; in itself it cannot be a source or explanation of that power. Occurring as it does within a semantic field that the alliteration does not itself generate, the function of alliteration cannot be causal or integral to signified meaning. Rather, it operates here as what Puttenham would call a figure of 'ornament' of the kind Shakespeare designates and illustrates as such in the previous sonnet ('0 how much more doth beauty beauteous seem / By that sweet ornament ...'). As ornament or decoration, alliteration bears the same superficially attractive but functionally inessential relation to the poem as 'gilt' does to the 'monuments / O princes' mentioned at the outset. Gilding is to monumental sculpture as alliteration is to the sonnet. (Felperin 1985:176-77).

If alliteration is largely irrelevant to understanding the significance of the sound pattern, what else, then, could there be of phonetic relevance in Sonnet 55? That a

* I am indebted to Paul Friedrich and Thomas L. Short for their substantive comments and suggestions, which helped improve this article, and to W. Richard Ristow for his statistical guidance.

' A curiosity of the history of scholarship on this subject are two articles by B. F. Skinner (1939, 1941). Skinner's conclusion about alliteration in the first of these, that 'Shakespeare might as well have drawn his words out of a hat' (1939: 191), was countered in detail in Goldsmith 1950. See also Pirkhofer 1963:3-14. Hymes 1960 is a good example of a more ramified approach to the problem of the sound-meaning nexus in twenty sonnets (ten each) by Wordsworth and Keats which utilizes the concept of the 'summative word', i.e. reckons the repetition of certain sounds to be anagrammatically related to a particularly significant ('dominant') word in a given poem. Tsur 1992 addresses the general problem of sound-meaning correspon- dences and includes some analysis of Shakespeare's poetry.

81

MICHAEL SHAPIRO Brown University

Shakespeare's verse is studded with alliteration and paronomasia. The more fundamental ques- tion of a patterned relationship between sound and meaning in his Sonnets has not been answered, partly because no method of uncovering such correspondences was available. However, once groups of sounds, specifically sonorant and obstruent sequences, are examined as the locus of the sound-meaning nexus, it emerges that Shakespeare consistently aligns these sequences with relational meanings defined by the dyad of freedom and constraint. The coherence between sound and sense is thus shown to be iconic.*

More has been written about the Sonnets than any of Shakespeare's works except Hamlet. Surprisingly, however, practically nothing in this vast secondary literature offers a comprehensive answer to the most fundamental question of poetics, whether the sounds of the Sonnets are an echo of the sense. George T. Wright's bibliographical overview (1985:371-72) singles out two studies-Masson (1954) and Booth (1969: 66-79 et passim)-which investigate the Sonnets' phonetic structure in some detail, but neither of these authors has much of systematic purport to say beyond noting Shakespeare's obvious use of alliteration, assonance, and consonance in the service of syntactic and semantic parallelism.' Indeed, with respect to alliteration, the following might well function as an indirect characterization of the status of research on this problem:

If Roman Jakobson had analysed [Sonnet] 55, one of the things he would have noticed in its first strophe is the high incidence of alliteration on 'm,' 'p,' and 's,' which is repeated in the third strophe. That Shakespeare 'affects the letter' in these strophes, and that they are thereby linked at the phonetic level is not in question. Our question is what performative relation this purely formal linkage at the level of the signifier might bear to the sonnet's signification, its 'contents' as Shakespeare equivocally puts it. Here Jakobson can be of little help, taking as he notoriously does, meaning or content for granted or reducing it to the received ideas of other commentators. In terms of his analysis, the most the empirical fact of alliteration can be is an earnest of poetic power, alerting us that some extra-communicative intention may be at work; in itself it cannot be a source or explanation of that power. Occurring as it does within a semantic field that the alliteration does not itself generate, the function of alliteration cannot be causal or integral to signified meaning. Rather, it operates here as what Puttenham would call a figure of 'ornament' of the kind Shakespeare designates and illustrates as such in the previous sonnet ('0 how much more doth beauty beauteous seem / By that sweet ornament ...'). As ornament or decoration, alliteration bears the same superficially attractive but functionally inessential relation to the poem as 'gilt' does to the 'monuments / O princes' mentioned at the outset. Gilding is to monumental sculpture as alliteration is to the sonnet. (Felperin 1985:176-77).

If alliteration is largely irrelevant to understanding the significance of the sound pattern, what else, then, could there be of phonetic relevance in Sonnet 55? That a

* I am indebted to Paul Friedrich and Thomas L. Short for their substantive comments and suggestions, which helped improve this article, and to W. Richard Ristow for his statistical guidance.

' A curiosity of the history of scholarship on this subject are two articles by B. F. Skinner (1939, 1941). Skinner's conclusion about alliteration in the first of these, that 'Shakespeare might as well have drawn his words out of a hat' (1939: 191), was countered in detail in Goldsmith 1950. See also Pirkhofer 1963:3-14. Hymes 1960 is a good example of a more ramified approach to the problem of the sound-meaning nexus in twenty sonnets (ten each) by Wordsworth and Keats which utilizes the concept of the 'summative word', i.e. reckons the repetition of certain sounds to be anagrammatically related to a particularly significant ('dominant') word in a given poem. Tsur 1992 addresses the general problem of sound-meaning correspon- dences and includes some analysis of Shakespeare's poetry.

81

MICHAEL SHAPIRO Brown University

Shakespeare's verse is studded with alliteration and paronomasia. The more fundamental ques- tion of a patterned relationship between sound and meaning in his Sonnets has not been answered, partly because no method of uncovering such correspondences was available. However, once groups of sounds, specifically sonorant and obstruent sequences, are examined as the locus of the sound-meaning nexus, it emerges that Shakespeare consistently aligns these sequences with relational meanings defined by the dyad of freedom and constraint. The coherence between sound and sense is thus shown to be iconic.*

More has been written about the Sonnets than any of Shakespeare's works except Hamlet. Surprisingly, however, practically nothing in this vast secondary literature offers a comprehensive answer to the most fundamental question of poetics, whether the sounds of the Sonnets are an echo of the sense. George T. Wright's bibliographical overview (1985:371-72) singles out two studies-Masson (1954) and Booth (1969: 66-79 et passim)-which investigate the Sonnets' phonetic structure in some detail, but neither of these authors has much of systematic purport to say beyond noting Shakespeare's obvious use of alliteration, assonance, and consonance in the service of syntactic and semantic parallelism.' Indeed, with respect to alliteration, the following might well function as an indirect characterization of the status of research on this problem:

If Roman Jakobson had analysed [Sonnet] 55, one of the things he would have noticed in its first strophe is the high incidence of alliteration on 'm,' 'p,' and 's,' which is repeated in the third strophe. That Shakespeare 'affects the letter' in these strophes, and that they are thereby linked at the phonetic level is not in question. Our question is what performative relation this purely formal linkage at the level of the signifier might bear to the sonnet's signification, its 'contents' as Shakespeare equivocally puts it. Here Jakobson can be of little help, taking as he notoriously does, meaning or content for granted or reducing it to the received ideas of other commentators. In terms of his analysis, the most the empirical fact of alliteration can be is an earnest of poetic power, alerting us that some extra-communicative intention may be at work; in itself it cannot be a source or explanation of that power. Occurring as it does within a semantic field that the alliteration does not itself generate, the function of alliteration cannot be causal or integral to signified meaning. Rather, it operates here as what Puttenham would call a figure of 'ornament' of the kind Shakespeare designates and illustrates as such in the previous sonnet ('0 how much more doth beauty beauteous seem / By that sweet ornament ...'). As ornament or decoration, alliteration bears the same superficially attractive but functionally inessential relation to the poem as 'gilt' does to the 'monuments / O princes' mentioned at the outset. Gilding is to monumental sculpture as alliteration is to the sonnet. (Felperin 1985:176-77).

If alliteration is largely irrelevant to understanding the significance of the sound pattern, what else, then, could there be of phonetic relevance in Sonnet 55? That a

* I am indebted to Paul Friedrich and Thomas L. Short for their substantive comments and suggestions, which helped improve this article, and to W. Richard Ristow for his statistical guidance.

' A curiosity of the history of scholarship on this subject are two articles by B. F. Skinner (1939, 1941). Skinner's conclusion about alliteration in the first of these, that 'Shakespeare might as well have drawn his words out of a hat' (1939: 191), was countered in detail in Goldsmith 1950. See also Pirkhofer 1963:3-14. Hymes 1960 is a good example of a more ramified approach to the problem of the sound-meaning nexus in twenty sonnets (ten each) by Wordsworth and Keats which utilizes the concept of the 'summative word', i.e. reckons the repetition of certain sounds to be anagrammatically related to a particularly significant ('dominant') word in a given poem. Tsur 1992 addresses the general problem of sound-meaning correspon- dences and includes some analysis of Shakespeare's poetry.

81

MICHAEL SHAPIRO Brown University

Shakespeare's verse is studded with alliteration and paronomasia. The more fundamental ques- tion of a patterned relationship between sound and meaning in his Sonnets has not been answered, partly because no method of uncovering such correspondences was available. However, once groups of sounds, specifically sonorant and obstruent sequences, are examined as the locus of the sound-meaning nexus, it emerges that Shakespeare consistently aligns these sequences with relational meanings defined by the dyad of freedom and constraint. The coherence between sound and sense is thus shown to be iconic.*

More has been written about the Sonnets than any of Shakespeare's works except Hamlet. Surprisingly, however, practically nothing in this vast secondary literature offers a comprehensive answer to the most fundamental question of poetics, whether the sounds of the Sonnets are an echo of the sense. George T. Wright's bibliographical overview (1985:371-72) singles out two studies-Masson (1954) and Booth (1969: 66-79 et passim)-which investigate the Sonnets' phonetic structure in some detail, but neither of these authors has much of systematic purport to say beyond noting Shakespeare's obvious use of alliteration, assonance, and consonance in the service of syntactic and semantic parallelism.' Indeed, with respect to alliteration, the following might well function as an indirect characterization of the status of research on this problem:

If Roman Jakobson had analysed [Sonnet] 55, one of the things he would have noticed in its first strophe is the high incidence of alliteration on 'm,' 'p,' and 's,' which is repeated in the third strophe. That Shakespeare 'affects the letter' in these strophes, and that they are thereby linked at the phonetic level is not in question. Our question is what performative relation this purely formal linkage at the level of the signifier might bear to the sonnet's signification, its 'contents' as Shakespeare equivocally puts it. Here Jakobson can be of little help, taking as he notoriously does, meaning or content for granted or reducing it to the received ideas of other commentators. In terms of his analysis, the most the empirical fact of alliteration can be is an earnest of poetic power, alerting us that some extra-communicative intention may be at work; in itself it cannot be a source or explanation of that power. Occurring as it does within a semantic field that the alliteration does not itself generate, the function of alliteration cannot be causal or integral to signified meaning. Rather, it operates here as what Puttenham would call a figure of 'ornament' of the kind Shakespeare designates and illustrates as such in the previous sonnet ('0 how much more doth beauty beauteous seem / By that sweet ornament ...'). As ornament or decoration, alliteration bears the same superficially attractive but functionally inessential relation to the poem as 'gilt' does to the 'monuments / O princes' mentioned at the outset. Gilding is to monumental sculpture as alliteration is to the sonnet. (Felperin 1985:176-77).

If alliteration is largely irrelevant to understanding the significance of the sound pattern, what else, then, could there be of phonetic relevance in Sonnet 55? That a

* I am indebted to Paul Friedrich and Thomas L. Short for their substantive comments and suggestions, which helped improve this article, and to W. Richard Ristow for his statistical guidance.

' A curiosity of the history of scholarship on this subject are two articles by B. F. Skinner (1939, 1941). Skinner's conclusion about alliteration in the first of these, that 'Shakespeare might as well have drawn his words out of a hat' (1939: 191), was countered in detail in Goldsmith 1950. See also Pirkhofer 1963:3-14. Hymes 1960 is a good example of a more ramified approach to the problem of the sound-meaning nexus in twenty sonnets (ten each) by Wordsworth and Keats which utilizes the concept of the 'summative word', i.e. reckons the repetition of certain sounds to be anagrammatically related to a particularly significant ('dominant') word in a given poem. Tsur 1992 addresses the general problem of sound-meaning correspon- dences and includes some analysis of Shakespeare's poetry.

81

MICHAEL SHAPIRO Brown University

Shakespeare's verse is studded with alliteration and paronomasia. The more fundamental ques- tion of a patterned relationship between sound and meaning in his Sonnets has not been answered, partly because no method of uncovering such correspondences was available. However, once groups of sounds, specifically sonorant and obstruent sequences, are examined as the locus of the sound-meaning nexus, it emerges that Shakespeare consistently aligns these sequences with relational meanings defined by the dyad of freedom and constraint. The coherence between sound and sense is thus shown to be iconic.*

More has been written about the Sonnets than any of Shakespeare's works except Hamlet. Surprisingly, however, practically nothing in this vast secondary literature offers a comprehensive answer to the most fundamental question of poetics, whether the sounds of the Sonnets are an echo of the sense. George T. Wright's bibliographical overview (1985:371-72) singles out two studies-Masson (1954) and Booth (1969: 66-79 et passim)-which investigate the Sonnets' phonetic structure in some detail, but neither of these authors has much of systematic purport to say beyond noting Shakespeare's obvious use of alliteration, assonance, and consonance in the service of syntactic and semantic parallelism.' Indeed, with respect to alliteration, the following might well function as an indirect characterization of the status of research on this problem:

If Roman Jakobson had analysed [Sonnet] 55, one of the things he would have noticed in its first strophe is the high incidence of alliteration on 'm,' 'p,' and 's,' which is repeated in the third strophe. That Shakespeare 'affects the letter' in these strophes, and that they are thereby linked at the phonetic level is not in question. Our question is what performative relation this purely formal linkage at the level of the signifier might bear to the sonnet's signification, its 'contents' as Shakespeare equivocally puts it. Here Jakobson can be of little help, taking as he notoriously does, meaning or content for granted or reducing it to the received ideas of other commentators. In terms of his analysis, the most the empirical fact of alliteration can be is an earnest of poetic power, alerting us that some extra-communicative intention may be at work; in itself it cannot be a source or explanation of that power. Occurring as it does within a semantic field that the alliteration does not itself generate, the function of alliteration cannot be causal or integral to signified meaning. Rather, it operates here as what Puttenham would call a figure of 'ornament' of the kind Shakespeare designates and illustrates as such in the previous sonnet ('0 how much more doth beauty beauteous seem / By that sweet ornament ...'). As ornament or decoration, alliteration bears the same superficially attractive but functionally inessential relation to the poem as 'gilt' does to the 'monuments / O princes' mentioned at the outset. Gilding is to monumental sculpture as alliteration is to the sonnet. (Felperin 1985:176-77).

If alliteration is largely irrelevant to understanding the significance of the sound pattern, what else, then, could there be of phonetic relevance in Sonnet 55? That a

* I am indebted to Paul Friedrich and Thomas L. Short for their substantive comments and suggestions, which helped improve this article, and to W. Richard Ristow for his statistical guidance.

' A curiosity of the history of scholarship on this subject are two articles by B. F. Skinner (1939, 1941). Skinner's conclusion about alliteration in the first of these, that 'Shakespeare might as well have drawn his words out of a hat' (1939: 191), was countered in detail in Goldsmith 1950. See also Pirkhofer 1963:3-14. Hymes 1960 is a good example of a more ramified approach to the problem of the sound-meaning nexus in twenty sonnets (ten each) by Wordsworth and Keats which utilizes the concept of the 'summative word', i.e. reckons the repetition of certain sounds to be anagrammatically related to a particularly significant ('dominant') word in a given poem. Tsur 1992 addresses the general problem of sound-meaning correspon- dences and includes some analysis of Shakespeare's poetry.

81

MICHAEL SHAPIRO Brown University

Shakespeare's verse is studded with alliteration and paronomasia. The more fundamental ques- tion of a patterned relationship between sound and meaning in his Sonnets has not been answered, partly because no method of uncovering such correspondences was available. However, once groups of sounds, specifically sonorant and obstruent sequences, are examined as the locus of the sound-meaning nexus, it emerges that Shakespeare consistently aligns these sequences with relational meanings defined by the dyad of freedom and constraint. The coherence between sound and sense is thus shown to be iconic.*

More has been written about the Sonnets than any of Shakespeare's works except Hamlet. Surprisingly, however, practically nothing in this vast secondary literature offers a comprehensive answer to the most fundamental question of poetics, whether the sounds of the Sonnets are an echo of the sense. George T. Wright's bibliographical overview (1985:371-72) singles out two studies-Masson (1954) and Booth (1969: 66-79 et passim)-which investigate the Sonnets' phonetic structure in some detail, but neither of these authors has much of systematic purport to say beyond noting Shakespeare's obvious use of alliteration, assonance, and consonance in the service of syntactic and semantic parallelism.' Indeed, with respect to alliteration, the following might well function as an indirect characterization of the status of research on this problem:

If Roman Jakobson had analysed [Sonnet] 55, one of the things he would have noticed in its first strophe is the high incidence of alliteration on 'm,' 'p,' and 's,' which is repeated in the third strophe. That Shakespeare 'affects the letter' in these strophes, and that they are thereby linked at the phonetic level is not in question. Our question is what performative relation this purely formal linkage at the level of the signifier might bear to the sonnet's signification, its 'contents' as Shakespeare equivocally puts it. Here Jakobson can be of little help, taking as he notoriously does, meaning or content for granted or reducing it to the received ideas of other commentators. In terms of his analysis, the most the empirical fact of alliteration can be is an earnest of poetic power, alerting us that some extra-communicative intention may be at work; in itself it cannot be a source or explanation of that power. Occurring as it does within a semantic field that the alliteration does not itself generate, the function of alliteration cannot be causal or integral to signified meaning. Rather, it operates here as what Puttenham would call a figure of 'ornament' of the kind Shakespeare designates and illustrates as such in the previous sonnet ('0 how much more doth beauty beauteous seem / By that sweet ornament ...'). As ornament or decoration, alliteration bears the same superficially attractive but functionally inessential relation to the poem as 'gilt' does to the 'monuments / O princes' mentioned at the outset. Gilding is to monumental sculpture as alliteration is to the sonnet. (Felperin 1985:176-77).

If alliteration is largely irrelevant to understanding the significance of the sound pattern, what else, then, could there be of phonetic relevance in Sonnet 55? That a

* I am indebted to Paul Friedrich and Thomas L. Short for their substantive comments and suggestions, which helped improve this article, and to W. Richard Ristow for his statistical guidance.

' A curiosity of the history of scholarship on this subject are two articles by B. F. Skinner (1939, 1941). Skinner's conclusion about alliteration in the first of these, that 'Shakespeare might as well have drawn his words out of a hat' (1939: 191), was countered in detail in Goldsmith 1950. See also Pirkhofer 1963:3-14. Hymes 1960 is a good example of a more ramified approach to the problem of the sound-meaning nexus in twenty sonnets (ten each) by Wordsworth and Keats which utilizes the concept of the 'summative word', i.e. reckons the repetition of certain sounds to be anagrammatically related to a particularly significant ('dominant') word in a given poem. Tsur 1992 addresses the general problem of sound-meaning correspon- dences and includes some analysis of Shakespeare's poetry.

81

MICHAEL SHAPIRO Brown University

Shakespeare's verse is studded with alliteration and paronomasia. The more fundamental ques- tion of a patterned relationship between sound and meaning in his Sonnets has not been answered, partly because no method of uncovering such correspondences was available. However, once groups of sounds, specifically sonorant and obstruent sequences, are examined as the locus of the sound-meaning nexus, it emerges that Shakespeare consistently aligns these sequences with relational meanings defined by the dyad of freedom and constraint. The coherence between sound and sense is thus shown to be iconic.*

More has been written about the Sonnets than any of Shakespeare's works except Hamlet. Surprisingly, however, practically nothing in this vast secondary literature offers a comprehensive answer to the most fundamental question of poetics, whether the sounds of the Sonnets are an echo of the sense. George T. Wright's bibliographical overview (1985:371-72) singles out two studies-Masson (1954) and Booth (1969: 66-79 et passim)-which investigate the Sonnets' phonetic structure in some detail, but neither of these authors has much of systematic purport to say beyond noting Shakespeare's obvious use of alliteration, assonance, and consonance in the service of syntactic and semantic parallelism.' Indeed, with respect to alliteration, the following might well function as an indirect characterization of the status of research on this problem:

If Roman Jakobson had analysed [Sonnet] 55, one of the things he would have noticed in its first strophe is the high incidence of alliteration on 'm,' 'p,' and 's,' which is repeated in the third strophe. That Shakespeare 'affects the letter' in these strophes, and that they are thereby linked at the phonetic level is not in question. Our question is what performative relation this purely formal linkage at the level of the signifier might bear to the sonnet's signification, its 'contents' as Shakespeare equivocally puts it. Here Jakobson can be of little help, taking as he notoriously does, meaning or content for granted or reducing it to the received ideas of other commentators. In terms of his analysis, the most the empirical fact of alliteration can be is an earnest of poetic power, alerting us that some extra-communicative intention may be at work; in itself it cannot be a source or explanation of that power. Occurring as it does within a semantic field that the alliteration does not itself generate, the function of alliteration cannot be causal or integral to signified meaning. Rather, it operates here as what Puttenham would call a figure of 'ornament' of the kind Shakespeare designates and illustrates as such in the previous sonnet ('0 how much more doth beauty beauteous seem / By that sweet ornament ...'). As ornament or decoration, alliteration bears the same superficially attractive but functionally inessential relation to the poem as 'gilt' does to the 'monuments / O princes' mentioned at the outset. Gilding is to monumental sculpture as alliteration is to the sonnet. (Felperin 1985:176-77).

If alliteration is largely irrelevant to understanding the significance of the sound pattern, what else, then, could there be of phonetic relevance in Sonnet 55? That a

* I am indebted to Paul Friedrich and Thomas L. Short for their substantive comments and suggestions, which helped improve this article, and to W. Richard Ristow for his statistical guidance.

' A curiosity of the history of scholarship on this subject are two articles by B. F. Skinner (1939, 1941). Skinner's conclusion about alliteration in the first of these, that 'Shakespeare might as well have drawn his words out of a hat' (1939: 191), was countered in detail in Goldsmith 1950. See also Pirkhofer 1963:3-14. Hymes 1960 is a good example of a more ramified approach to the problem of the sound-meaning nexus in twenty sonnets (ten each) by Wordsworth and Keats which utilizes the concept of the 'summative word', i.e. reckons the repetition of certain sounds to be anagrammatically related to a particularly significant ('dominant') word in a given poem. Tsur 1992 addresses the general problem of sound-meaning correspon- dences and includes some analysis of Shakespeare's poetry.

81

MICHAEL SHAPIRO Brown University

Shakespeare's verse is studded with alliteration and paronomasia. The more fundamental ques- tion of a patterned relationship between sound and meaning in his Sonnets has not been answered, partly because no method of uncovering such correspondences was available. However, once groups of sounds, specifically sonorant and obstruent sequences, are examined as the locus of the sound-meaning nexus, it emerges that Shakespeare consistently aligns these sequences with relational meanings defined by the dyad of freedom and constraint. The coherence between sound and sense is thus shown to be iconic.*

More has been written about the Sonnets than any of Shakespeare's works except Hamlet. Surprisingly, however, practically nothing in this vast secondary literature offers a comprehensive answer to the most fundamental question of poetics, whether the sounds of the Sonnets are an echo of the sense. George T. Wright's bibliographical overview (1985:371-72) singles out two studies-Masson (1954) and Booth (1969: 66-79 et passim)-which investigate the Sonnets' phonetic structure in some detail, but neither of these authors has much of systematic purport to say beyond noting Shakespeare's obvious use of alliteration, assonance, and consonance in the service of syntactic and semantic parallelism.' Indeed, with respect to alliteration, the following might well function as an indirect characterization of the status of research on this problem:

If Roman Jakobson had analysed [Sonnet] 55, one of the things he would have noticed in its first strophe is the high incidence of alliteration on 'm,' 'p,' and 's,' which is repeated in the third strophe. That Shakespeare 'affects the letter' in these strophes, and that they are thereby linked at the phonetic level is not in question. Our question is what performative relation this purely formal linkage at the level of the signifier might bear to the sonnet's signification, its 'contents' as Shakespeare equivocally puts it. Here Jakobson can be of little help, taking as he notoriously does, meaning or content for granted or reducing it to the received ideas of other commentators. In terms of his analysis, the most the empirical fact of alliteration can be is an earnest of poetic power, alerting us that some extra-communicative intention may be at work; in itself it cannot be a source or explanation of that power. Occurring as it does within a semantic field that the alliteration does not itself generate, the function of alliteration cannot be causal or integral to signified meaning. Rather, it operates here as what Puttenham would call a figure of 'ornament' of the kind Shakespeare designates and illustrates as such in the previous sonnet ('0 how much more doth beauty beauteous seem / By that sweet ornament ...'). As ornament or decoration, alliteration bears the same superficially attractive but functionally inessential relation to the poem as 'gilt' does to the 'monuments / O princes' mentioned at the outset. Gilding is to monumental sculpture as alliteration is to the sonnet. (Felperin 1985:176-77).

If alliteration is largely irrelevant to understanding the significance of the sound pattern, what else, then, could there be of phonetic relevance in Sonnet 55? That a

* I am indebted to Paul Friedrich and Thomas L. Short for their substantive comments and suggestions, which helped improve this article, and to W. Richard Ristow for his statistical guidance.

' A curiosity of the history of scholarship on this subject are two articles by B. F. Skinner (1939, 1941). Skinner's conclusion about alliteration in the first of these, that 'Shakespeare might as well have drawn his words out of a hat' (1939: 191), was countered in detail in Goldsmith 1950. See also Pirkhofer 1963:3-14. Hymes 1960 is a good example of a more ramified approach to the problem of the sound-meaning nexus in twenty sonnets (ten each) by Wordsworth and Keats which utilizes the concept of the 'summative word', i.e. reckons the repetition of certain sounds to be anagrammatically related to a particularly significant ('dominant') word in a given poem. Tsur 1992 addresses the general problem of sound-meaning correspon- dences and includes some analysis of Shakespeare's poetry.

81

MICHAEL SHAPIRO Brown University

Shakespeare's verse is studded with alliteration and paronomasia. The more fundamental ques- tion of a patterned relationship between sound and meaning in his Sonnets has not been answered, partly because no method of uncovering such correspondences was available. However, once groups of sounds, specifically sonorant and obstruent sequences, are examined as the locus of the sound-meaning nexus, it emerges that Shakespeare consistently aligns these sequences with relational meanings defined by the dyad of freedom and constraint. The coherence between sound and sense is thus shown to be iconic.*

More has been written about the Sonnets than any of Shakespeare's works except Hamlet. Surprisingly, however, practically nothing in this vast secondary literature offers a comprehensive answer to the most fundamental question of poetics, whether the sounds of the Sonnets are an echo of the sense. George T. Wright's bibliographical overview (1985:371-72) singles out two studies-Masson (1954) and Booth (1969: 66-79 et passim)-which investigate the Sonnets' phonetic structure in some detail, but neither of these authors has much of systematic purport to say beyond noting Shakespeare's obvious use of alliteration, assonance, and consonance in the service of syntactic and semantic parallelism.' Indeed, with respect to alliteration, the following might well function as an indirect characterization of the status of research on this problem:

If Roman Jakobson had analysed [Sonnet] 55, one of the things he would have noticed in its first strophe is the high incidence of alliteration on 'm,' 'p,' and 's,' which is repeated in the third strophe. That Shakespeare 'affects the letter' in these strophes, and that they are thereby linked at the phonetic level is not in question. Our question is what performative relation this purely formal linkage at the level of the signifier might bear to the sonnet's signification, its 'contents' as Shakespeare equivocally puts it. Here Jakobson can be of little help, taking as he notoriously does, meaning or content for granted or reducing it to the received ideas of other commentators. In terms of his analysis, the most the empirical fact of alliteration can be is an earnest of poetic power, alerting us that some extra-communicative intention may be at work; in itself it cannot be a source or explanation of that power. Occurring as it does within a semantic field that the alliteration does not itself generate, the function of alliteration cannot be causal or integral to signified meaning. Rather, it operates here as what Puttenham would call a figure of 'ornament' of the kind Shakespeare designates and illustrates as such in the previous sonnet ('0 how much more doth beauty beauteous seem / By that sweet ornament ...'). As ornament or decoration, alliteration bears the same superficially attractive but functionally inessential relation to the poem as 'gilt' does to the 'monuments / O princes' mentioned at the outset. Gilding is to monumental sculpture as alliteration is to the sonnet. (Felperin 1985:176-77).

If alliteration is largely irrelevant to understanding the significance of the sound pattern, what else, then, could there be of phonetic relevance in Sonnet 55? That a

* I am indebted to Paul Friedrich and Thomas L. Short for their substantive comments and suggestions, which helped improve this article, and to W. Richard Ristow for his statistical guidance.

' A curiosity of the history of scholarship on this subject are two articles by B. F. Skinner (1939, 1941). Skinner's conclusion about alliteration in the first of these, that 'Shakespeare might as well have drawn his words out of a hat' (1939: 191), was countered in detail in Goldsmith 1950. See also Pirkhofer 1963:3-14. Hymes 1960 is a good example of a more ramified approach to the problem of the sound-meaning nexus in twenty sonnets (ten each) by Wordsworth and Keats which utilizes the concept of the 'summative word', i.e. reckons the repetition of certain sounds to be anagrammatically related to a particularly significant ('dominant') word in a given poem. Tsur 1992 addresses the general problem of sound-meaning correspon- dences and includes some analysis of Shakespeare's poetry.

81

MICHAEL SHAPIRO Brown University

Shakespeare's verse is studded with alliteration and paronomasia. The more fundamental ques- tion of a patterned relationship between sound and meaning in his Sonnets has not been answered, partly because no method of uncovering such correspondences was available. However, once groups of sounds, specifically sonorant and obstruent sequences, are examined as the locus of the sound-meaning nexus, it emerges that Shakespeare consistently aligns these sequences with relational meanings defined by the dyad of freedom and constraint. The coherence between sound and sense is thus shown to be iconic.*

More has been written about the Sonnets than any of Shakespeare's works except Hamlet. Surprisingly, however, practically nothing in this vast secondary literature offers a comprehensive answer to the most fundamental question of poetics, whether the sounds of the Sonnets are an echo of the sense. George T. Wright's bibliographical overview (1985:371-72) singles out two studies-Masson (1954) and Booth (1969: 66-79 et passim)-which investigate the Sonnets' phonetic structure in some detail, but neither of these authors has much of systematic purport to say beyond noting Shakespeare's obvious use of alliteration, assonance, and consonance in the service of syntactic and semantic parallelism.' Indeed, with respect to alliteration, the following might well function as an indirect characterization of the status of research on this problem:

If Roman Jakobson had analysed [Sonnet] 55, one of the things he would have noticed in its first strophe is the high incidence of alliteration on 'm,' 'p,' and 's,' which is repeated in the third strophe. That Shakespeare 'affects the letter' in these strophes, and that they are thereby linked at the phonetic level is not in question. Our question is what performative relation this purely formal linkage at the level of the signifier might bear to the sonnet's signification, its 'contents' as Shakespeare equivocally puts it. Here Jakobson can be of little help, taking as he notoriously does, meaning or content for granted or reducing it to the received ideas of other commentators. In terms of his analysis, the most the empirical fact of alliteration can be is an earnest of poetic power, alerting us that some extra-communicative intention may be at work; in itself it cannot be a source or explanation of that power. Occurring as it does within a semantic field that the alliteration does not itself generate, the function of alliteration cannot be causal or integral to signified meaning. Rather, it operates here as what Puttenham would call a figure of 'ornament' of the kind Shakespeare designates and illustrates as such in the previous sonnet ('0 how much more doth beauty beauteous seem / By that sweet ornament ...'). As ornament or decoration, alliteration bears the same superficially attractive but functionally inessential relation to the poem as 'gilt' does to the 'monuments / O princes' mentioned at the outset. Gilding is to monumental sculpture as alliteration is to the sonnet. (Felperin 1985:176-77).

If alliteration is largely irrelevant to understanding the significance of the sound pattern, what else, then, could there be of phonetic relevance in Sonnet 55? That a

* I am indebted to Paul Friedrich and Thomas L. Short for their substantive comments and suggestions, which helped improve this article, and to W. Richard Ristow for his statistical guidance.

' A curiosity of the history of scholarship on this subject are two articles by B. F. Skinner (1939, 1941). Skinner's conclusion about alliteration in the first of these, that 'Shakespeare might as well have drawn his words out of a hat' (1939: 191), was countered in detail in Goldsmith 1950. See also Pirkhofer 1963:3-14. Hymes 1960 is a good example of a more ramified approach to the problem of the sound-meaning nexus in twenty sonnets (ten each) by Wordsworth and Keats which utilizes the concept of the 'summative word', i.e. reckons the repetition of certain sounds to be anagrammatically related to a particularly significant ('dominant') word in a given poem. Tsur 1992 addresses the general problem of sound-meaning correspon- dences and includes some analysis of Shakespeare's poetry.

81

MICHAEL SHAPIRO Brown University

Shakespeare's verse is studded with alliteration and paronomasia. The more fundamental ques- tion of a patterned relationship between sound and meaning in his Sonnets has not been answered, partly because no method of uncovering such correspondences was available. However, once groups of sounds, specifically sonorant and obstruent sequences, are examined as the locus of the sound-meaning nexus, it emerges that Shakespeare consistently aligns these sequences with relational meanings defined by the dyad of freedom and constraint. The coherence between sound and sense is thus shown to be iconic.*

More has been written about the Sonnets than any of Shakespeare's works except Hamlet. Surprisingly, however, practically nothing in this vast secondary literature offers a comprehensive answer to the most fundamental question of poetics, whether the sounds of the Sonnets are an echo of the sense. George T. Wright's bibliographical overview (1985:371-72) singles out two studies-Masson (1954) and Booth (1969: 66-79 et passim)-which investigate the Sonnets' phonetic structure in some detail, but neither of these authors has much of systematic purport to say beyond noting Shakespeare's obvious use of alliteration, assonance, and consonance in the service of syntactic and semantic parallelism.' Indeed, with respect to alliteration, the following might well function as an indirect characterization of the status of research on this problem:

If Roman Jakobson had analysed [Sonnet] 55, one of the things he would have noticed in its first strophe is the high incidence of alliteration on 'm,' 'p,' and 's,' which is repeated in the third strophe. That Shakespeare 'affects the letter' in these strophes, and that they are thereby linked at the phonetic level is not in question. Our question is what performative relation this purely formal linkage at the level of the signifier might bear to the sonnet's signification, its 'contents' as Shakespeare equivocally puts it. Here Jakobson can be of little help, taking as he notoriously does, meaning or content for granted or reducing it to the received ideas of other commentators. In terms of his analysis, the most the empirical fact of alliteration can be is an earnest of poetic power, alerting us that some extra-communicative intention may be at work; in itself it cannot be a source or explanation of that power. Occurring as it does within a semantic field that the alliteration does not itself generate, the function of alliteration cannot be causal or integral to signified meaning. Rather, it operates here as what Puttenham would call a figure of 'ornament' of the kind Shakespeare designates and illustrates as such in the previous sonnet ('0 how much more doth beauty beauteous seem / By that sweet ornament ...'). As ornament or decoration, alliteration bears the same superficially attractive but functionally inessential relation to the poem as 'gilt' does to the 'monuments / O princes' mentioned at the outset. Gilding is to monumental sculpture as alliteration is to the sonnet. (Felperin 1985:176-77).

If alliteration is largely irrelevant to understanding the significance of the sound pattern, what else, then, could there be of phonetic relevance in Sonnet 55? That a

* I am indebted to Paul Friedrich and Thomas L. Short for their substantive comments and suggestions, which helped improve this article, and to W. Richard Ristow for his statistical guidance.

' A curiosity of the history of scholarship on this subject are two articles by B. F. Skinner (1939, 1941). Skinner's conclusion about alliteration in the first of these, that 'Shakespeare might as well have drawn his words out of a hat' (1939: 191), was countered in detail in Goldsmith 1950. See also Pirkhofer 1963:3-14. Hymes 1960 is a good example of a more ramified approach to the problem of the sound-meaning nexus in twenty sonnets (ten each) by Wordsworth and Keats which utilizes the concept of the 'summative word', i.e. reckons the repetition of certain sounds to be anagrammatically related to a particularly significant ('dominant') word in a given poem. Tsur 1992 addresses the general problem of sound-meaning correspon- dences and includes some analysis of Shakespeare's poetry.

81

MICHAEL SHAPIRO Brown University

Shakespeare's verse is studded with alliteration and paronomasia. The more fundamental ques- tion of a patterned relationship between sound and meaning in his Sonnets has not been answered, partly because no method of uncovering such correspondences was available. However, once groups of sounds, specifically sonorant and obstruent sequences, are examined as the locus of the sound-meaning nexus, it emerges that Shakespeare consistently aligns these sequences with relational meanings defined by the dyad of freedom and constraint. The coherence between sound and sense is thus shown to be iconic.*

More has been written about the Sonnets than any of Shakespeare's works except Hamlet. Surprisingly, however, practically nothing in this vast secondary literature offers a comprehensive answer to the most fundamental question of poetics, whether the sounds of the Sonnets are an echo of the sense. George T. Wright's bibliographical overview (1985:371-72) singles out two studies-Masson (1954) and Booth (1969: 66-79 et passim)-which investigate the Sonnets' phonetic structure in some detail, but neither of these authors has much of systematic purport to say beyond noting Shakespeare's obvious use of alliteration, assonance, and consonance in the service of syntactic and semantic parallelism.' Indeed, with respect to alliteration, the following might well function as an indirect characterization of the status of research on this problem:

If Roman Jakobson had analysed [Sonnet] 55, one of the things he would have noticed in its first strophe is the high incidence of alliteration on 'm,' 'p,' and 's,' which is repeated in the third strophe. That Shakespeare 'affects the letter' in these strophes, and that they are thereby linked at the phonetic level is not in question. Our question is what performative relation this purely formal linkage at the level of the signifier might bear to the sonnet's signification, its 'contents' as Shakespeare equivocally puts it. Here Jakobson can be of little help, taking as he notoriously does, meaning or content for granted or reducing it to the received ideas of other commentators. In terms of his analysis, the most the empirical fact of alliteration can be is an earnest of poetic power, alerting us that some extra-communicative intention may be at work; in itself it cannot be a source or explanation of that power. Occurring as it does within a semantic field that the alliteration does not itself generate, the function of alliteration cannot be causal or integral to signified meaning. Rather, it operates here as what Puttenham would call a figure of 'ornament' of the kind Shakespeare designates and illustrates as such in the previous sonnet ('0 how much more doth beauty beauteous seem / By that sweet ornament ...'). As ornament or decoration, alliteration bears the same superficially attractive but functionally inessential relation to the poem as 'gilt' does to the 'monuments / O princes' mentioned at the outset. Gilding is to monumental sculpture as alliteration is to the sonnet. (Felperin 1985:176-77).

If alliteration is largely irrelevant to understanding the significance of the sound pattern, what else, then, could there be of phonetic relevance in Sonnet 55? That a

* I am indebted to Paul Friedrich and Thomas L. Short for their substantive comments and suggestions, which helped improve this article, and to W. Richard Ristow for his statistical guidance.

' A curiosity of the history of scholarship on this subject are two articles by B. F. Skinner (1939, 1941). Skinner's conclusion about alliteration in the first of these, that 'Shakespeare might as well have drawn his words out of a hat' (1939: 191), was countered in detail in Goldsmith 1950. See also Pirkhofer 1963:3-14. Hymes 1960 is a good example of a more ramified approach to the problem of the sound-meaning nexus in twenty sonnets (ten each) by Wordsworth and Keats which utilizes the concept of the 'summative word', i.e. reckons the repetition of certain sounds to be anagrammatically related to a particularly significant ('dominant') word in a given poem. Tsur 1992 addresses the general problem of sound-meaning correspon- dences and includes some analysis of Shakespeare's poetry.

81

MICHAEL SHAPIRO Brown University

Shakespeare's verse is studded with alliteration and paronomasia. The more fundamental ques- tion of a patterned relationship between sound and meaning in his Sonnets has not been answered, partly because no method of uncovering such correspondences was available. However, once groups of sounds, specifically sonorant and obstruent sequences, are examined as the locus of the sound-meaning nexus, it emerges that Shakespeare consistently aligns these sequences with relational meanings defined by the dyad of freedom and constraint. The coherence between sound and sense is thus shown to be iconic.*

More has been written about the Sonnets than any of Shakespeare's works except Hamlet. Surprisingly, however, practically nothing in this vast secondary literature offers a comprehensive answer to the most fundamental question of poetics, whether the sounds of the Sonnets are an echo of the sense. George T. Wright's bibliographical overview (1985:371-72) singles out two studies-Masson (1954) and Booth (1969: 66-79 et passim)-which investigate the Sonnets' phonetic structure in some detail, but neither of these authors has much of systematic purport to say beyond noting Shakespeare's obvious use of alliteration, assonance, and consonance in the service of syntactic and semantic parallelism.' Indeed, with respect to alliteration, the following might well function as an indirect characterization of the status of research on this problem:

If Roman Jakobson had analysed [Sonnet] 55, one of the things he would have noticed in its first strophe is the high incidence of alliteration on 'm,' 'p,' and 's,' which is repeated in the third strophe. That Shakespeare 'affects the letter' in these strophes, and that they are thereby linked at the phonetic level is not in question. Our question is what performative relation this purely formal linkage at the level of the signifier might bear to the sonnet's signification, its 'contents' as Shakespeare equivocally puts it. Here Jakobson can be of little help, taking as he notoriously does, meaning or content for granted or reducing it to the received ideas of other commentators. In terms of his analysis, the most the empirical fact of alliteration can be is an earnest of poetic power, alerting us that some extra-communicative intention may be at work; in itself it cannot be a source or explanation of that power. Occurring as it does within a semantic field that the alliteration does not itself generate, the function of alliteration cannot be causal or integral to signified meaning. Rather, it operates here as what Puttenham would call a figure of 'ornament' of the kind Shakespeare designates and illustrates as such in the previous sonnet ('0 how much more doth beauty beauteous seem / By that sweet ornament ...'). As ornament or decoration, alliteration bears the same superficially attractive but functionally inessential relation to the poem as 'gilt' does to the 'monuments / O princes' mentioned at the outset. Gilding is to monumental sculpture as alliteration is to the sonnet. (Felperin 1985:176-77).

If alliteration is largely irrelevant to understanding the significance of the sound pattern, what else, then, could there be of phonetic relevance in Sonnet 55? That a

* I am indebted to Paul Friedrich and Thomas L. Short for their substantive comments and suggestions, which helped improve this article, and to W. Richard Ristow for his statistical guidance.

' A curiosity of the history of scholarship on this subject are two articles by B. F. Skinner (1939, 1941). Skinner's conclusion about alliteration in the first of these, that 'Shakespeare might as well have drawn his words out of a hat' (1939: 191), was countered in detail in Goldsmith 1950. See also Pirkhofer 1963:3-14. Hymes 1960 is a good example of a more ramified approach to the problem of the sound-meaning nexus in twenty sonnets (ten each) by Wordsworth and Keats which utilizes the concept of the 'summative word', i.e. reckons the repetition of certain sounds to be anagrammatically related to a particularly significant ('dominant') word in a given poem. Tsur 1992 addresses the general problem of sound-meaning correspon- dences and includes some analysis of Shakespeare's poetry.

81

MICHAEL SHAPIRO Brown University

Shakespeare's verse is studded with alliteration and paronomasia. The more fundamental ques- tion of a patterned relationship between sound and meaning in his Sonnets has not been answered, partly because no method of uncovering such correspondences was available. However, once groups of sounds, specifically sonorant and obstruent sequences, are examined as the locus of the sound-meaning nexus, it emerges that Shakespeare consistently aligns these sequences with relational meanings defined by the dyad of freedom and constraint. The coherence between sound and sense is thus shown to be iconic.*

More has been written about the Sonnets than any of Shakespeare's works except Hamlet. Surprisingly, however, practically nothing in this vast secondary literature offers a comprehensive answer to the most fundamental question of poetics, whether the sounds of the Sonnets are an echo of the sense. George T. Wright's bibliographical overview (1985:371-72) singles out two studies-Masson (1954) and Booth (1969: 66-79 et passim)-which investigate the Sonnets' phonetic structure in some detail, but neither of these authors has much of systematic purport to say beyond noting Shakespeare's obvious use of alliteration, assonance, and consonance in the service of syntactic and semantic parallelism.' Indeed, with respect to alliteration, the following might well function as an indirect characterization of the status of research on this problem:

If Roman Jakobson had analysed [Sonnet] 55, one of the things he would have noticed in its first strophe is the high incidence of alliteration on 'm,' 'p,' and 's,' which is repeated in the third strophe. That Shakespeare 'affects the letter' in these strophes, and that they are thereby linked at the phonetic level is not in question. Our question is what performative relation this purely formal linkage at the level of the signifier might bear to the sonnet's signification, its 'contents' as Shakespeare equivocally puts it. Here Jakobson can be of little help, taking as he notoriously does, meaning or content for granted or reducing it to the received ideas of other commentators. In terms of his analysis, the most the empirical fact of alliteration can be is an earnest of poetic power, alerting us that some extra-communicative intention may be at work; in itself it cannot be a source or explanation of that power. Occurring as it does within a semantic field that the alliteration does not itself generate, the function of alliteration cannot be causal or integral to signified meaning. Rather, it operates here as what Puttenham would call a figure of 'ornament' of the kind Shakespeare designates and illustrates as such in the previous sonnet ('0 how much more doth beauty beauteous seem / By that sweet ornament ...'). As ornament or decoration, alliteration bears the same superficially attractive but functionally inessential relation to the poem as 'gilt' does to the 'monuments / O princes' mentioned at the outset. Gilding is to monumental sculpture as alliteration is to the sonnet. (Felperin 1985:176-77).

If alliteration is largely irrelevant to understanding the significance of the sound pattern, what else, then, could there be of phonetic relevance in Sonnet 55? That a

* I am indebted to Paul Friedrich and Thomas L. Short for their substantive comments and suggestions, which helped improve this article, and to W. Richard Ristow for his statistical guidance.

' A curiosity of the history of scholarship on this subject are two articles by B. F. Skinner (1939, 1941). Skinner's conclusion about alliteration in the first of these, that 'Shakespeare might as well have drawn his words out of a hat' (1939: 191), was countered in detail in Goldsmith 1950. See also Pirkhofer 1963:3-14. Hymes 1960 is a good example of a more ramified approach to the problem of the sound-meaning nexus in twenty sonnets (ten each) by Wordsworth and Keats which utilizes the