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The Case of the Rhyming Couplets: the Sonances of ‘Richard II’

Among the infinite variety of critical approaches to Shakespeare, relatively little attention has been paid, even by scholars professedly concerned with Shakespeare's language, to the quality and nature of the sound of his words – despite the commonplace assumption that the young Shakespeare, in particular, was in love with language. One consequence is that such a major element of Richard II as its high proportion of rhyming couplets is either briefly (and negatively) dismissed, or ignored. Here, Kenneth C. Bennett, who teaches in the Department of English at Lake Forest College, lllinois, considers in detail the distinctive qualities and ‘sonances’ of language in the play, looking in particular at the couplets, whose use and significance he analyzes and defends.