The Rhetoric in Shakespeare’s poems
In 1947, Sister Miriam Joseph explored Shakespeare’s extended use of rhetoric, cataloging his treatment of over 200 rhetorical tropes and figures and prompting a deluge of rhetorical analyses of Shakespeare’s work. This, in turn, may be what first led teachers to place a focus on Shakespeare’s rhetorical tropes and figures, having students identify anaphora or epistrophe or ployptoton (to name a few) or instructing students to scan lines or identify rhyming patterns. These can all be valuable lessons, as long as students understand how the rhetorical devices work within the context of any play.
Sister Joseph, in her survey of rhetoric in Shakespeare, was one of the first scholars to clearly describe the connection between form and content in Shakespeare’s plays: “Equipped as every educated man of his time was with a thorough knowledge of the terms, the forms, and the processes of argumentation, Shakespeare skillfully adapts these devices to every conceivable dramatic purpose. . . . He so fuses character and plot, thought and feeling, that they become almost indistinguishable and thereby more intense, more convincing, moving both mind and heart”. Joseph explores a vast array of rhetorical strategies in Shakespeare’s work and shows how these rhetorical cues manipulate what audiences experience when watching a performance onstage. In her detailed study, however, she fails to cite any relevance between the rhetorical strategy of rhyme and content in the plays. Not until several decades later did any scholarship pertaining to the connection between rhyme and plot surface, most notably in Lorna Flint’s Shakespeare’s Third Key board: The Significance of Rime in Shakespeare’s Plays. In this book, Flint discusses how rhyme can mark a change in plot within a scene by showing how “the special use that Shakespeare sometimes makes of … riming episodes . . . without preparing an audience for the change, [can] suddenly sharpen the focus on a situation and the characters within it”.
Yet even in Flint’s observations, the significance between the rhyme and content in the plays was largely overlooked. This oversight may be attributable to the fact that so many scholars believe that Shakespeare’s use of rhyme in the early plays signals an embryonic stage in his treatment of language and verse.
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