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 andparonomasia. The more fundamental ques- tion of a patterned relationship between soundand meaningin his Sonnetshas not been answered, partly because no method of uncovering such correspondences was available. However, once groups of sounds, specifically sonorantand obstruentsequences, are examined as the locus of the sound-meaning nexus, it emerges that Shakespeare consistently aligns these sequences with relational meaningsdefined by the dyad of freedomand constraint. The coherencebetween 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 comprehensiveanswer to the most fundamental question of poetics, whether the sounds of the Sonnets are an echo of the sense. George T. Wright'sbibliographical 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 purportto say beyond noting Shakespeare's obvious use of alliteration, assonance, and consonancein 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 RomanJakobson 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 repeatedin the third strophe.That Shakespeare'affects the letter' in these strophes,and that they are therebylinked at the phonetic level is not in question. Our questionis what performative relationthis purely formallinkage at the level of the signifier might bear to the sonnet's signification,its 'contents' as Shakespeare equivocally puts it. Here Jakobsoncan be of little help, taking as he notoriouslydoes, meaning or content for grantedor reducingit to the received ideas of othercommentators. In termsof his analysis, the most the empirical fact of alliterationcan 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 illustratesas such in the previous sonnet ('0 how much more doth beautybeauteousseem / By that sweet ornament ...'). As ornament or decoration, alliteration bears the same superficially attractive but functionallyinessentialrelationto the poem as 'gilt' does to the 'monuments / O princes' mentioned at the outset.Gilding is to monumental sculptureas alliteration is to the sonnet. (Felperin 1985:176-77). If alliterationis largely irrelevantto understanding the significance of the sound pattern,what else, then, could there be of phonetic relevance in Sonnet 55? That a * I am indebtedto Paul Friedrich and Thomas L. Short for their substantive comments and suggestions, which helped improve this article, and to W. RichardRistow for his statisticalguidance. ' A curiosity of the history of scholarship on this subject are two articlesby B. F. Skinner(1939, 1941). Skinner's conclusion about alliteration in the first of these, that 'Shakespeare might as well have drawnhis words out of a hat' (1939: 191), was countered in detail in Goldsmith 1950. See also Pirkhofer1963:3-14. 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 addressesthe generalproblemof sound-meaning correspon- dences and includes some analysis of Shakespeare's poetry. 81 MICHAEL SHAPIRO Brown University Shakespeare's verse is studded with alliteration andparonomasia. The more fundamental ques- tion of a patterned relationship between soundand meaningin his Sonnetshas not been answered, partly because no method of uncovering such correspondences was available. However, once groups of sounds, specifically sonorantand obstruentsequences, are examined as the locus of the sound-meaning nexus, it emerges that Shakespeare consistently aligns these sequences with relational meaningsdefined by the dyad of freedomand constraint. The coherencebetween 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 comprehensiveanswer to the most fundamental question of poetics, whether the sounds of the Sonnets are an echo of the sense. George T. Wright'sbibliographical 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 purportto say beyond noting Shakespeare's obvious use of alliteration, assonance, and consonancein 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 RomanJakobson 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 repeatedin the third strophe.That Shakespeare'affects the letter' in these strophes,and that they are therebylinked at the phonetic level is not in question. Our questionis what performative relationthis purely formallinkage at the level of the signifier might bear to the sonnet's signification,its 'contents' as Shakespeare equivocally puts it. Here Jakobsoncan be of little help, taking as he notoriouslydoes, meaning or content for grantedor reducingit to the received ideas of othercommentators. In termsof his analysis, the most the empirical fact of alliterationcan 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 illustratesas such in the previous sonnet ('0 how much more doth beautybeauteousseem / By that sweet ornament ...'). As ornament or decoration, alliteration bears the same superficially attractive but functionallyinessentialrelationto the poem as 'gilt' does to the 'monuments / O princes' mentioned at the outset.Gilding is to monumental sculptureas alliteration is to the sonnet. (Felperin 1985:176-77). If alliterationis largely irrelevantto understanding the significance of the sound pattern,what else, then, could there be of phonetic relevance in Sonnet 55? That a * I am indebtedto Paul Friedrich and Thomas L. Short for their substantive comments and suggestions, which helped improve this article, and to W. RichardRistow for his statisticalguidance. ' A curiosity of the history of scholarship on this subject are two articlesby B. F. Skinner(1939, 1941). Skinner's conclusion about alliteration in the first of these, that 'Shakespeare might as well have drawnhis words out of a hat' (1939: 191), was countered in detail in Goldsmith 1950. See also Pirkhofer1963:3-14. 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 addressesthe generalproblemof sound-meaning correspon- dences and includes some analysis of Shakespeare's poetry. 81 MICHAEL SHAPIRO Brown University Shakespeare's verse is studded with alliteration andparonomasia. The more fundamental ques- tion of a patterned relationship between soundand meaningin his Sonnetshas not been answered, partly because no method of uncovering such correspondences was available. However, once groups of sounds, specifically sonorantand obstruentsequences, are examined as the locus of the sound-meaning nexus, it emerges that Shakespeare consistently aligns these sequences with relational meaningsdefined by the dyad of freedomand constraint. The coherencebetween 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 comprehensiveanswer to the most fundamental question of poetics, whether the sounds of the Sonnets are an echo of the sense. George T. Wright'sbibliographical 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 purportto say beyond noting Shakespeare's obvious use of alliteration, assonance, and consonancein 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 RomanJakobson 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 repeatedin the third strophe.That Shakespeare'affects the letter' in these strophes,and that they are therebylinked at the phonetic level is not in question. Our questionis what performative relationthis purely formallinkage at the level of the signifier might bear to the sonnet's signification,its 'contents' as Shakespeare equivocally puts it. Here Jakobsoncan be of little help, taking as he notoriouslydoes, meaning or content for grantedor reducingit to the received ideas of othercommentators. In termsof his analysis, the most the empirical fact of alliterationcan 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 illustratesas such in the previous sonnet ('0 how much more doth beautybeauteousseem / By that sweet ornament ...'). As ornament or decoration, alliteration bears the same superficially attractive but functionallyinessentialrelationto the poem as 'gilt' does to the 'monuments / O princes' mentioned at the outset.Gilding is to monumental sculptureas alliteration is to the sonnet. (Felperin 1985:176-77). If alliterationis largely irrelevantto understanding the significance of the sound pattern,what else, then, could there be of phonetic relevance in Sonnet 55? That a * I am indebtedto Paul Friedrich and Thomas L. Short for their substantive comments and suggestions, which helped improve this article, and to W. RichardRistow for his statisticalguidance. ' A curiosity of the history of scholarship on this subject are two articlesby B. F. Skinner(1939, 1941). Skinner's conclusion about alliteration in the first of these, that 'Shakespeare might as well have drawnhis words out of a hat' (1939: 191), was countered in detail in Goldsmith 1950. See also Pirkhofer1963:3-14. 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 addressesthe generalproblemof sound-meaning correspon- dences and includes some analysis of Shakespeare's poetry. 81 MICHAEL SHAPIRO Brown University Shakespeare's verse is studded with alliteration andparonomasia. The more fundamental ques- tion of a patterned relationship between soundand meaningin his Sonnetshas not been answered, partly because no method of uncovering such correspondences was available. However, once groups of sounds, specifically sonorantand obstruentsequences, are examined as the locus of the sound-meaning nexus, it emerges that Shakespeare consistently aligns these sequences with relational meaningsdefined by the dyad of freedomand constraint. The coherencebetween 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 comprehensiveanswer to the most fundamental question of poetics, whether the sounds of the Sonnets are an echo of the sense. George T. Wright'sbibliographical 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 purportto say beyond noting Shakespeare's obvious use of alliteration, assonance, and consonancein 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 RomanJakobson 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 repeatedin the third strophe.That Shakespeare'affects the letter' in these strophes,and that they are therebylinked at the phonetic level is not in question. Our questionis what performative relationthis purely formallinkage at the level of the signifier might bear to the sonnet's signification,its 'contents' as Shakespeare equivocally puts it. Here Jakobsoncan be of little help, taking as he notoriouslydoes, meaning or content for grantedor reducingit to the received ideas of othercommentators. In termsof his analysis, the most the empirical fact of alliterationcan 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 illustratesas such in the previous sonnet ('0 how much more doth beautybeauteousseem / By that sweet ornament ...'). As ornament or decoration, alliteration bears the same superficially attractive but functionallyinessentialrelationto the poem as 'gilt' does to the 'monuments / O princes' mentioned at the outset.Gilding is to monumental sculptureas alliteration is to the sonnet. (Felperin 1985:176-77). If alliterationis largely irrelevantto understanding the significance of the sound pattern,what else, then, could there be of phonetic relevance in Sonnet 55? That a * I am indebtedto Paul Friedrich and Thomas L. Short for their substantive comments and suggestions, which helped improve this article, and to W. RichardRistow for his statisticalguidance. ' A curiosity of the history of scholarship on this subject are two articlesby B. F. Skinner(1939, 1941). Skinner's conclusion about alliteration in the first of these, that 'Shakespeare might as well have drawnhis words out of a hat' (1939: 191), was countered in detail in Goldsmith 1950. See also Pirkhofer1963:3-14. 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 addressesthe generalproblemof sound-meaning correspon- dences and includes some analysis of Shakespeare's poetry. 81 MICHAEL SHAPIRO Brown University Shakespeare's verse is studded with alliteration andparonomasia. The more fundamental ques- tion of a patterned relationship between soundand meaningin his Sonnetshas not been answered, partly because no method of uncovering such correspondences was available. However, once groups of sounds, specifically sonorantand obstruentsequences, are examined as the locus of the sound-meaning nexus, it emerges that Shakespeare consistently aligns these sequences with relational meaningsdefined by the dyad of freedomand constraint. The coherencebetween 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 comprehensiveanswer to the most fundamental question of poetics, whether the sounds of the Sonnets are an echo of the sense. George T. Wright'sbibliographical 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 purportto say beyond noting Shakespeare's obvious use of alliteration, assonance, and consonancein 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 RomanJakobson 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 repeatedin the third strophe.That Shakespeare'affects the letter' in these strophes,and that they are therebylinked at the phonetic level is not in question. Our questionis what performative relationthis purely formallinkage at the level of the signifier might bear to the sonnet's signification,its 'contents' as Shakespeare equivocally puts it. Here Jakobsoncan be of little help, taking as he notoriouslydoes, meaning or content for grantedor reducingit to the received ideas of othercommentators. In termsof his analysis, the most the empirical fact of alliterationcan 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 illustratesas such in the previous sonnet ('0 how much more doth beautybeauteousseem / By that sweet ornament ...'). As ornament or decoration, alliteration bears the same superficially attractive but functionallyinessentialrelationto the poem as 'gilt' does to the 'monuments / O princes' mentioned at the outset.Gilding is to monumental sculptureas alliteration is to the sonnet. (Felperin 1985:176-77). If alliterationis largely irrelevantto understanding the significance of the sound pattern,what else, then, could there be of phonetic relevance in Sonnet 55? That a * I am indebtedto Paul Friedrich and Thomas L. Short for their substantive comments and suggestions, which helped improve this article, and to W. RichardRistow for his statisticalguidance. ' A curiosity of the history of scholarship on this subject are two articlesby B. F. Skinner(1939, 1941). Skinner's conclusion about alliteration in the first of these, that 'Shakespeare might as well have drawnhis words out of a hat' (1939: 191), was countered in detail in Goldsmith 1950. See also Pirkhofer1963:3-14. 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 addressesthe generalproblemof sound-meaning correspon- dences and includes some analysis of Shakespeare's poetry. 81 MICHAEL SHAPIRO Brown University Shakespeare's verse is studded with alliteration andparonomasia. The more fundamental ques- tion of a patterned relationship between soundand meaningin his Sonnetshas not been answered, partly because no method of uncovering such correspondences was available. However, once groups of sounds, specifically sonorantand obstruentsequences, are examined as the locus of the sound-meaning nexus, it emerges that Shakespeare consistently aligns these sequences with relational meaningsdefined by the dyad of freedomand constraint. The coherencebetween 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 comprehensiveanswer to the most fundamental question of poetics, whether the sounds of the Sonnets are an echo of the sense. George T. Wright'sbibliographical 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 purportto say beyond noting Shakespeare's obvious use of alliteration, assonance, and consonancein 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 RomanJakobson 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 repeatedin the third strophe.That Shakespeare'affects the letter' in these strophes,and that they are therebylinked at the phonetic level is not in question. Our questionis what performative relationthis purely formallinkage at the level of the signifier might bear to the sonnet's signification,its 'contents' as Shakespeare equivocally puts it. Here Jakobsoncan be of little help, taking as he notoriouslydoes, meaning or content for grantedor reducingit to the received ideas of othercommentators. In termsof his analysis, the most the empirical fact of alliterationcan 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 illustratesas such in the previous sonnet ('0 how much more doth beautybeauteousseem / By that sweet ornament ...'). As ornament or decoration, alliteration bears the same superficially attractive but functionallyinessentialrelationto the poem as 'gilt' does to the 'monuments / O princes' mentioned at the outset.Gilding is to monumental sculptureas alliteration is to the sonnet. (Felperin 1985:176-77). If alliterationis largely irrelevantto understanding the significance of the sound pattern,what else, then, could there be of phonetic relevance in Sonnet 55? That a * I am indebtedto Paul Friedrich and Thomas L. Short for their substantive comments and suggestions, which helped improve this article, and to W. RichardRistow for his statisticalguidance. ' A curiosity of the history of scholarship on this subject are two articlesby B. F. Skinner(1939, 1941). Skinner's conclusion about alliteration in the first of these, that 'Shakespeare might as well have drawnhis words out of a hat' (1939: 191), was countered in detail in Goldsmith 1950. See also Pirkhofer1963:3-14. 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 addressesthe generalproblemof sound-meaning correspon- dences and includes some analysis of Shakespeare's poetry. 81 MICHAEL SHAPIRO Brown University Shakespeare's verse is studded with alliteration andparonomasia. The more fundamental ques- tion of a patterned relationship between soundand meaningin his Sonnetshas not been answered, partly because no method of uncovering such correspondences was available. However, once groups of sounds, specifically sonorantand obstruentsequences, are examined as the locus of the sound-meaning nexus, it emerges that Shakespeare consistently aligns these sequences with relational meaningsdefined by the dyad of freedomand constraint. The coherencebetween 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 comprehensiveanswer to the most fundamental question of poetics, whether the sounds of the Sonnets are an echo of the sense. George T. Wright'sbibliographical 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 purportto say beyond noting Shakespeare's obvious use of alliteration, assonance, and consonancein 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 RomanJakobson 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 repeatedin the third strophe.That Shakespeare'affects the letter' in these strophes,and that they are therebylinked at the phonetic level is not in question. Our questionis what performative relationthis purely formallinkage at the level of the signifier might bear to the sonnet's signification,its 'contents' as Shakespeare equivocally puts it. Here Jakobsoncan be of little help, taking as he notoriouslydoes, meaning or content for grantedor reducingit to the received ideas of othercommentators. In termsof his analysis, the most the empirical fact of alliterationcan 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 illustratesas such in the previous sonnet ('0 how much more doth beautybeauteousseem / By that sweet ornament ...'). As ornament or decoration, alliteration bears the same superficially attractive but functionallyinessentialrelationto the poem as 'gilt' does to the 'monuments / O princes' mentioned at the outset.Gilding is to monumental sculptureas alliteration is to the sonnet. (Felperin 1985:176-77). If alliterationis largely irrelevantto understanding the significance of the sound pattern,what else, then, could there be of phonetic relevance in Sonnet 55? That a * I am indebtedto Paul Friedrich and Thomas L. Short for their substantive comments and suggestions, which helped improve this article, and to W. RichardRistow for his statisticalguidance. ' A curiosity of the history of scholarship on this subject are two articlesby B. F. Skinner(1939, 1941). Skinner's conclusion about alliteration in the first of these, that 'Shakespeare might as well have drawnhis words out of a hat' (1939: 191), was countered in detail in Goldsmith 1950. See also Pirkhofer1963:3-14. 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 addressesthe generalproblemof sound-meaning correspon- dences and includes some analysis of Shakespeare's poetry. 81 MICHAEL SHAPIRO Brown University Shakespeare's verse is studded with alliteration andparonomasia. The more fundamental ques- tion of a patterned relationship between soundand meaningin his Sonnetshas not been answered, partly because no method of uncovering such correspondences was available. However, once groups of sounds, specifically sonorantand obstruentsequences, are examined as the locus of the sound-meaning nexus, it emerges that Shakespeare consistently aligns these sequences with relational meaningsdefined by the dyad of freedomand constraint. The coherencebetween 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 comprehensiveanswer to the most fundamental question of poetics, whether the sounds of the Sonnets are an echo of the sense. George T. Wright'sbibliographical 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 purportto say beyond noting Shakespeare's obvious use of alliteration, assonance, and consonancein 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 RomanJakobson 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 repeatedin the third strophe.That Shakespeare'affects the letter' in these strophes,and that they are therebylinked at the phonetic level is not in question. Our questionis what performative relationthis purely formallinkage at the level of the signifier might bear to the sonnet's signification,its 'contents' as Shakespeare equivocally puts it. Here Jakobsoncan be of little help, taking as he notoriouslydoes, meaning or content for grantedor reducingit to the received ideas of othercommentators. In termsof his analysis, the most the empirical fact of alliterationcan 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 illustratesas such in the previous sonnet ('0 how much more doth beautybeauteousseem / By that sweet ornament ...'). As ornament or decoration, alliteration bears the same superficially attractive but functionallyinessentialrelationto the poem as 'gilt' does to the 'monuments / O princes' mentioned at the outset.Gilding is to monumental sculptureas alliteration is to the sonnet. (Felperin 1985:176-77). If alliterationis largely irrelevantto understanding the significance of the sound pattern,what else, then, could there be of phonetic relevance in Sonnet 55? That a * I am indebtedto Paul Friedrich and Thomas L. Short for their substantive comments and suggestions, which helped improve this article, and to W. RichardRistow for his statisticalguidance. ' A curiosity of the history of scholarship on this subject are two articlesby B. F. Skinner(1939, 1941). Skinner's conclusion about alliteration in the first of these, that 'Shakespeare might as well have drawnhis words out of a hat' (1939: 191), was countered in detail in Goldsmith 1950. See also Pirkhofer1963:3-14. 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 addressesthe generalproblemof sound-meaning correspon- dences and includes some analysis of Shakespeare's poetry. 81 MICHAEL SHAPIRO Brown University Shakespeare's verse is studded with alliteration andparonomasia. The more fundamental ques- tion of a patterned relationship between soundand meaningin his Sonnetshas not been answered, partly because no method of uncovering such correspondences was available. However, once groups of sounds, specifically sonorantand obstruentsequences, are examined as the locus of the sound-meaning nexus, it emerges that Shakespeare consistently aligns these sequences with relational meaningsdefined by the dyad of freedomand constraint. The coherencebetween 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 comprehensiveanswer to the most fundamental question of poetics, whether the sounds of the Sonnets are an echo of the sense. George T. Wright'sbibliographical 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 purportto say beyond noting Shakespeare's obvious use of alliteration, assonance, and consonancein 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 RomanJakobson 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 repeatedin the third strophe.That Shakespeare'affects the letter' in these strophes,and that they are therebylinked at the phonetic level is not in question. Our questionis what performative relationthis purely formallinkage at the level of the signifier might bear to the sonnet's signification,its 'contents' as Shakespeare equivocally puts it. Here Jakobsoncan be of little help, taking as he notoriouslydoes, meaning or content for grantedor reducingit to the received ideas of othercommentators. In termsof his analysis, the most the empirical fact of alliterationcan 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 illustratesas such in the previous sonnet ('0 how much more doth beautybeauteousseem / By that sweet ornament ...'). As ornament or decoration, alliteration bears the same superficially attractive but functionallyinessentialrelationto the poem as 'gilt' does to the 'monuments / O princes' mentioned at the outset.Gilding is to monumental sculptureas alliteration is to the sonnet. (Felperin 1985:176-77). If alliterationis largely irrelevantto understanding the significance of the sound pattern,what else, then, could there be of phonetic relevance in Sonnet 55? That a * I am indebtedto Paul Friedrich and Thomas L. Short for their substantive comments and suggestions, which helped improve this article, and to W. RichardRistow for his statisticalguidance. ' A curiosity of the history of scholarship on this subject are two articlesby B. F. Skinner(1939, 1941). Skinner's conclusion about alliteration in the first of these, that 'Shakespeare might as well have drawnhis words out of a hat' (1939: 191), was countered in detail in Goldsmith 1950. See also Pirkhofer1963:3-14. 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 addressesthe generalproblemof sound-meaning correspon- dences and includes some analysis of Shakespeare's poetry. 81 MICHAEL SHAPIRO Brown University Shakespeare's verse is studded with alliteration andparonomasia. The more fundamental ques- tion of a patterned relationship between soundand meaningin his Sonnetshas not been answered, partly because no method of uncovering such correspondences was available. However, once groups of sounds, specifically sonorantand obstruentsequences, are examined as the locus of the sound-meaning nexus, it emerges that Shakespeare consistently aligns these sequences with relational meaningsdefined by the dyad of freedomand constraint. The coherencebetween 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 comprehensiveanswer to the most fundamental question of poetics, whether the sounds of the Sonnets are an echo of the sense. George T. Wright'sbibliographical 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 purportto say beyond noting Shakespeare's obvious use of alliteration, assonance, and consonancein 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 RomanJakobson 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 repeatedin the third strophe.That Shakespeare'affects the letter' in these strophes,and that they are therebylinked at the phonetic level is not in question. Our questionis what performative relationthis purely formallinkage at the level of the signifier might bear to the sonnet's signification,its 'contents' as Shakespeare equivocally puts it. Here Jakobsoncan be of little help, taking as he notoriouslydoes, meaning or content for grantedor reducingit to the received ideas of othercommentators. In termsof his analysis, the most the empirical fact of alliterationcan 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 illustratesas such in the previous sonnet ('0 how much more doth beautybeauteousseem / By that sweet ornament ...'). As ornament or decoration, alliteration bears the same superficially attractive but functionallyinessentialrelationto the poem as 'gilt' does to the 'monuments / O princes' mentioned at the outset.Gilding is to monumental sculptureas alliteration is to the sonnet. (Felperin 1985:176-77). If alliterationis largely irrelevantto understanding the significance of the sound pattern,what else, then, could there be of phonetic relevance in Sonnet 55? That a * I am indebtedto Paul Friedrich and Thomas L. Short for their substantive comments and suggestions, which helped improve this article, and to W. RichardRistow for his statisticalguidance. ' A curiosity of the history of scholarship on this subject are two articlesby B. F. Skinner(1939, 1941). Skinner's conclusion about alliteration in the first of these, that 'Shakespeare might as well have drawnhis words out of a hat' (1939: 191), was countered in detail in Goldsmith 1950. See also Pirkhofer1963:3-14. 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 addressesthe generalproblemof sound-meaning correspon- dences and includes some analysis of Shakespeare's poetry. 81 MICHAEL SHAPIRO Brown University Shakespeare's verse is studded with alliteration andparonomasia. The more fundamental ques- tion of a patterned relationship between soundand meaningin his Sonnetshas not been answered, partly because no method of uncovering such correspondences was available. However, once groups of sounds, specifically sonorantand obstruentsequences, are examined as the locus of the sound-meaning nexus, it emerges that Shakespeare consistently aligns these sequences with relational meaningsdefined by the dyad of freedomand constraint. The coherencebetween 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 comprehensiveanswer to the most fundamental question of poetics, whether the sounds of the Sonnets are an echo of the sense. George T. Wright'sbibliographical 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 purportto say beyond noting Shakespeare's obvious use of alliteration, assonance, and consonancein 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 RomanJakobson 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 repeatedin the third strophe.That Shakespeare'affects the letter' in these strophes,and that they are therebylinked at the phonetic level is not in question. Our questionis what performative relationthis purely formallinkage at the level of the signifier might bear to the sonnet's signification,its 'contents' as Shakespeare equivocally puts it. Here Jakobsoncan be of little help, taking as he notoriouslydoes, meaning or content for grantedor reducingit to the received ideas of othercommentators. In termsof his analysis, the most the empirical fact of alliterationcan 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 illustratesas such in the previous sonnet ('0 how much more doth beautybeauteousseem / By that sweet ornament ...'). As ornament or decoration, alliteration bears the same superficially attractive but functionallyinessentialrelationto the poem as 'gilt' does to the 'monuments / O princes' mentioned at the outset.Gilding is to monumental sculptureas alliteration is to the sonnet. (Felperin 1985:176-77). If alliterationis largely irrelevantto understanding the significance of the sound pattern,what else, then, could there be of phonetic relevance in Sonnet 55? That a * I am indebtedto Paul Friedrich and Thomas L. Short for their substantive comments and suggestions, which helped improve this article, and to W. RichardRistow for his statisticalguidance. ' A curiosity of the history of scholarship on this subject are two articlesby B. F. Skinner(1939, 1941). Skinner's conclusion about alliteration in the first of these, that 'Shakespeare might as well have drawnhis words out of a hat' (1939: 191), was countered in detail in Goldsmith 1950. See also Pirkhofer1963:3-14. 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 addressesthe generalproblemof sound-meaning correspon- dences and includes some analysis of Shakespeare's poetry. 81 MICHAEL SHAPIRO Brown University Shakespeare's verse is studded with alliteration andparonomasia. The more fundamental ques- tion of a patterned relationship between soundand meaningin his Sonnetshas not been answered, partly because no method of uncovering such correspondences was available. However, once groups of sounds, specifically sonorantand obstruentsequences, are examined as the locus of the sound-meaning nexus, it emerges that Shakespeare consistently aligns these sequences with relational meaningsdefined by the dyad of freedomand constraint. The coherencebetween 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 comprehensiveanswer to the most fundamental question of poetics, whether the sounds of the Sonnets are an echo of the sense. George T. Wright'sbibliographical 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 purportto say beyond noting Shakespeare's obvious use of alliteration, assonance, and consonancein 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 RomanJakobson 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 repeatedin the third strophe.That Shakespeare'affects the letter' in these strophes,and that they are therebylinked at the phonetic level is not in question. Our questionis what performative relationthis purely formallinkage at the level of the signifier might bear to the sonnet's signification,its 'contents' as Shakespeare equivocally puts it. Here Jakobsoncan be of little help, taking as he notoriouslydoes, meaning or content for grantedor reducingit to the received ideas of othercommentators. In termsof his analysis, the most the empirical fact of alliterationcan 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 illustratesas such in the previous sonnet ('0 how much more doth beautybeauteousseem / By that sweet ornament ...'). As ornament or decoration, alliteration bears the same superficially attractive but functionallyinessentialrelationto the poem as 'gilt' does to the 'monuments / O princes' mentioned at the outset.Gilding is to monumental sculptureas alliteration is to the sonnet. (Felperin 1985:176-77). If alliterationis largely irrelevantto understanding the significance of the sound pattern,what else, then, could there be of phonetic relevance in Sonnet 55? That a * I am indebtedto Paul Friedrich and Thomas L. Short for their substantive comments and suggestions, which helped improve this article, and to W. RichardRistow for his statisticalguidance. ' A curiosity of the history of scholarship on this subject are two articlesby B. F. Skinner(1939, 1941). Skinner's conclusion about alliteration in the first of these, that 'Shakespeare might as well have drawnhis words out of a hat' (1939: 191), was countered in detail in Goldsmith 1950. See also Pirkhofer1963:3-14. 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 addressesthe generalproblemof sound-meaning correspon- dences and includes some analysis of Shakespeare's poetry. 81 MICHAEL SHAPIRO Brown University Shakespeare's verse is studded with alliteration andparonomasia. The more fundamental ques- tion of a patterned relationship between soundand meaningin his Sonnetshas not been answered, partly because no method of uncovering such correspondences was available. However, once groups of sounds, specifically sonorantand obstruentsequences, are examined as the locus of the sound-meaning nexus, it emerges that Shakespeare consistently aligns these sequences with relational meaningsdefined by the dyad of freedomand constraint. The coherencebetween 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 comprehensiveanswer to the most fundamental question of poetics, whether the sounds of the Sonnets are an echo of the sense. George T. Wright'sbibliographical 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 purportto say beyond noting Shakespeare's obvious use of alliteration, assonance, and consonancein 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 RomanJakobson 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 repeatedin the third strophe.That Shakespeare'affects the letter' in these strophes,and that they are therebylinked at the phonetic level is not in question. Our questionis what performative relationthis purely formallinkage at the level of the signifier might bear to the sonnet's signification,its 'contents' as Shakespeare equivocally puts it. Here Jakobsoncan be of little help, taking as he notoriouslydoes, meaning or content for grantedor reducingit to the received ideas of othercommentators. In termsof his analysis, the most the empirical fact of alliterationcan 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 illustratesas such in the previous sonnet ('0 how much more doth beautybeauteousseem / By that sweet ornament ...'). As ornament or decoration, alliteration bears the same superficially attractive but functionallyinessentialrelationto the poem as 'gilt' does to the 'monuments / O princes' mentioned at the outset.Gilding is to monumental sculptureas alliteration is to the sonnet. (Felperin 1985:176-77). If alliterationis largely irrelevantto understanding the significance of the sound pattern,what else, then, could there be of phonetic relevance in Sonnet 55? That a * I am indebtedto Paul Friedrich and Thomas L. Short for their substantive comments and suggestions, which helped improve this article, and to W. RichardRistow for his statisticalguidance. ' A curiosity of the history of scholarship on this subject are two articlesby B. F. Skinner(1939, 1941). Skinner's conclusion about alliteration in the first of these, that 'Shakespeare might as well have drawnhis words out of a hat' (1939: 191), was countered in detail in Goldsmith 1950. See also Pirkhofer1963:3-14. 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 addressesthe generalproblemof sound-meaning correspon- dences and includes some analysis of Shakespeare's poetry. 81 MICHAEL SHAPIRO Brown University Shakespeare's verse is studded with alliteration andparonomasia. The more fundamental ques- tion of a patterned relationship between soundand meaningin his Sonnetshas not been answered, partly because no method of uncovering such correspondences was available. However, once groups of sounds, specifically sonorantand obstruentsequences, are examined as the locus of the sound-meaning nexus, it emerges that Shakespeare consistently aligns these sequences with relational meaningsdefined by the dyad of freedomand constraint. The coherencebetween 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 comprehensiveanswer to the most fundamental question of poetics, whether the sounds of the Sonnets are an echo of the sense. George T. Wright'sbibliographical 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 purportto say beyond noting Shakespeare's obvious use of alliteration, assonance, and consonancein 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 RomanJakobson 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 repeatedin the third strophe.That Shakespeare'affects the letter' in these strophes,and that they are therebylinked at the phonetic level is not in question. Our questionis what performative relationthis purely formallinkage at the level of the signifier might bear to the sonnet's signification,its 'contents' as Shakespeare equivocally puts it. Here Jakobsoncan be of little help, taking as he notoriouslydoes, meaning or content for grantedor reducingit to the received ideas of othercommentators. In termsof his analysis, the most the empirical fact of alliterationcan 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 illustratesas such in the previous sonnet ('0 how much more doth beautybeauteousseem / By that sweet ornament ...'). As ornament or decoration, alliteration bears the same superficially attractive but functionallyinessentialrelationto the poem as 'gilt' does to the 'monuments / O princes' mentioned at the outset.Gilding is to monumental sculptureas alliteration is to the sonnet. (Felperin 1985:176-77). If alliterationis largely irrelevantto understanding the significance of the sound pattern,what else, then, could there be of phonetic relevance in Sonnet 55? That a * I am indebtedto Paul Friedrich and Thomas L. Short for their substantive comments and suggestions, which helped improve this article, and to W. RichardRistow for his statisticalguidance. ' A curiosity of the history of scholarship on this subject are two articlesby B. F. Skinner(1939, 1941). Skinner's conclusion about alliteration in the first of these, that 'Shakespeare might as well have drawnhis words out of a hat' (1939: 191), was countered in detail in Goldsmith 1950. See also Pirkhofer1963:3-14. 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 addressesthe generalproblemof sound-meaning correspon- dences and includes some analysis of Shakespeare's poetry. 81 MICHAEL SHAPIRO Brown University Shakespeare's verse is studded with alliteration andparonomasia. The more fundamental ques- tion of a patterned relationship between soundand meaningin his Sonnetshas not been answered, partly because no method of uncovering such correspondences was available. However, once groups of sounds, specifically sonorantand obstruentsequences, are examined as the locus of the sound-meaning nexus, it emerges that Shakespeare consistently aligns these sequences with relational meaningsdefined by the dyad of freedomand constraint. The coherencebetween 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 comprehensiveanswer to the most fundamental question of poetics, whether the sounds of the Sonnets are an echo of the sense. George T. Wright'sbibliographical 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 purportto say beyond noting Shakespeare's obvious use of alliteration, assonance, and consonancein 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 RomanJakobson 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 repeatedin the third strophe.That Shakespeare'affects the letter' in these strophes,and that they are therebylinked at the phonetic level is not in question. Our questionis what performative relationthis purely formallinkage at the level of the signifier might bear to the sonnet's signification,its 'contents' as Shakespeare equivocally puts it. Here Jakobsoncan be of little help, taking as he notoriouslydoes, meaning or content for grantedor reducingit to the received ideas of othercommentators. In termsof his analysis, the most the empirical fact of alliterationcan 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 illustratesas such in the previous sonnet ('0 how much more doth beautybeauteousseem / By that sweet ornament ...'). As ornament or decoration, alliteration bears the same superficially attractive but functionallyinessentialrelationto the poem as 'gilt' does to the 'monuments / O princes' mentioned at the outset.Gilding is to monumental sculptureas alliteration is to the sonnet. (Felperin 1985:176-77). If alliterationis largely irrelevantto understanding the significance of the sound pattern,what else, then, could there be of phonetic relevance in Sonnet 55? That a * I am indebtedto Paul Friedrich and Thomas L. Short for their substantive comments and suggestions, which helped improve this article, and to W. RichardRistow for his statisticalguidance. ' A curiosity of the history of scholarship on this subject are two articlesby B. F. Skinner(1939, 1941). Skinner's conclusion about alliteration in the first of these, that 'Shakespeare might as well have drawnhis words out of a hat' (1939: 191), was countered in detail in Goldsmith 1950. See also Pirkhofer1963:3-14. 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 addressesthe generalproblemof sound-meaning correspon- dences and includes some analysis of Shakespeare's poetry. 81 MICHAEL SHAPIRO Brown University Shakespeare's verse is studded with alliteration andparonomasia. The more fundamental ques- tion of a patterned relationship between soundand meaningin his Sonnetshas not been answered, partly because no method of uncovering such correspondences was available. However, once groups of sounds, specifically sonorantand obstruentsequences, are examined as the locus of the sound-meaning nexus, it emerges that Shakespeare consistently aligns these sequences with relational meaningsdefined by the dyad of freedomand constraint. The coherencebetween 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 comprehensiveanswer to the most fundamental question of poetics, whether the sounds of the Sonnets are an echo of the sense. George T. Wright'sbibliographical 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 purportto say beyond noting Shakespeare's obvious use of alliteration, assonance, and consonancein 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 RomanJakobson 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 repeatedin the third strophe.That Shakespeare'affects the letter' in these strophes,and that they are therebylinked at the phonetic level is not in question. Our questionis what performative relationthis purely formallinkage at the level of the signifier might bear to the sonnet's signification,its 'contents' as Shakespeare equivocally puts it. Here Jakobsoncan be of little help, taking as he notoriouslydoes, meaning or content for grantedor reducingit to the received ideas of othercommentators. In termsof his analysis, the most the empirical fact of alliterationcan 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 illustratesas such in the previous sonnet ('0 how much more doth beautybeauteousseem / By that sweet ornament ...'). As ornament or decoration, alliteration bears the same superficially attractive but functionallyinessentialrelationto the poem as 'gilt' does to the 'monuments / O princes' mentioned at the outset.Gilding is to monumental sculptureas alliteration is to the sonnet. (Felperin 1985:176-77). If alliterationis largely irrelevantto understanding the significance of the sound pattern,what else, then, could there be of phonetic relevance in Sonnet 55? That a * I am indebtedto Paul Friedrich and Thomas L. Short for their substantive comments and suggestions, which helped improve this article, and to W. RichardRistow for his statisticalguidance. ' A curiosity of the history of scholarship on this subject are two articlesby B. F. Skinner(1939, 1941). Skinner's conclusion about alliteration in the first of these, that 'Shakespeare might as well have drawnhis words out of a hat' (1939: 191), was countered in detail in Goldsmith 1950. See also Pirkhofer1963:3-14. 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 addressesthe generalproblemof sound-meaning correspon- dences and includes some analysis of Shakespeare's poetry. 81 MICHAEL SHAPIRO Brown University Shakespeare's verse is studded with alliteration andparonomasia. The more fundamental ques- tion of a patterned relationship between soundand meaningin his Sonnetshas not been answered, partly because no method of uncovering such correspondences was available. However, once groups of sounds, specifically sonorantand obstruentsequences, are examined as the locus of the sound-meaning nexus, it emerges that Shakespeare consistently aligns these sequences with relational meaningsdefined by the dyad of freedomand constraint. The coherencebetween 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 comprehensiveanswer to the most fundamental question of poetics, whether the sounds of the Sonnets are an echo of the sense. George T. Wright'sbibliographical 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 purportto say beyond noting Shakespeare's obvious use of alliteration, assonance, and consonancein 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 RomanJakobson 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 repeatedin the third strophe.That Shakespeare'affects the letter' in these strophes,and that they are therebylinked at the phonetic level is not in question. Our questionis what performative relationthis purely formallinkage at the level of the signifier might bear to the sonnet's signification,its 'contents' as Shakespeare equivocally puts it. Here Jakobsoncan be of little help, taking as he notoriouslydoes, meaning or content for grantedor reducingit to the received ideas of othercommentators. In termsof his analysis, the most the empirical fact of alliterationcan 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 illustratesas such in the previous sonnet ('0 how much more doth beautybeauteousseem / By that sweet ornament ...'). As ornament or decoration, alliteration bears the same superficially attractive but functionallyinessentialrelationto the poem as 'gilt' does to the 'monuments / O princes' mentioned at the outset.Gilding is to monumental sculptureas alliteration is to the sonnet. (Felperin 1985:176-77). If alliterationis largely irrelevantto understanding the significance of the sound pattern,what else, then, could there be of phonetic relevance in Sonnet 55? That a * I am indebtedto Paul Friedrich and Thomas L. Short for their substantive comments and suggestions, which helped improve this article, and to W. RichardRistow for his statisticalguidance. ' A curiosity of the history of scholarship on this subject are two articlesby B. F. Skinner(1939, 1941). Skinner's conclusion about alliteration in the first of these, that 'Shakespeare might as well have drawnhis words out of a hat' (1939: 191), was countered in detail in Goldsmith 1950. See also Pirkhofer1963:3-14. 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 addressesthe generalproblemof sound-meaning correspon- dences and includes some analysis of Shakespeare's poetry. 81 MICHAEL SHAPIRO Brown University Shakespeare's verse is studded with alliteration andparonomasia. The more fundamental ques- tion of a patterned relationship between soundand meaningin his Sonnetshas not been answered, partly because no method of uncovering such correspondences was available. However, once groups of sounds, specifically sonorantand obstruentsequences, are examined as the locus of the sound-meaning nexus, it emerges that Shakespeare consistently aligns these sequences with relational meaningsdefined by the dyad of freedomand constraint. The coherencebetween 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 comprehensiveanswer to the most fundamental question of poetics, whether the sounds of the Sonnets are an echo of the sense. George T. Wright'sbibliographical 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 purportto say beyond noting Shakespeare's obvious use of alliteration, assonance, and consonancein 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 RomanJakobson 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 repeatedin the third strophe.That Shakespeare'affects the letter' in these strophes,and that they are therebylinked at the phonetic level is not in question. Our questionis what performative relationthis purely formallinkage at the level of the signifier might bear to the sonnet's signification,its 'contents' as Shakespeare equivocally puts it. Here Jakobsoncan be of little help, taking as he notoriouslydoes, meaning or content for grantedor reducingit to the received ideas of othercommentators. In termsof his analysis, the most the empirical fact of alliterationcan 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 illustratesas such in the previous sonnet ('0 how much more doth beautybeauteousseem / By that sweet ornament ...'). As ornament or decoration, alliteration bears the same superficially attractive but functionallyinessentialrelationto the poem as 'gilt' does to the 'monuments / O princes' mentioned at the outset.Gilding is to monumental sculptureas alliteration is to the sonnet. (Felperin 1985:176-77). If alliterationis largely irrelevantto understanding the significance of the sound pattern,what else, then, could there be of phonetic relevance in Sonnet 55? That a * I am indebtedto Paul Friedrich and Thomas L. Short for their substantive comments and suggestions, which helped improve this article, and to W. RichardRistow for his statisticalguidance. ' A curiosity of the history of scholarship on this subject are two articlesby B. F. Skinner(1939, 1941). Skinner's conclusion about alliteration in the first of these, that 'Shakespeare might as well have drawnhis words out of a hat' (1939: 191), was countered in detail in Goldsmith 1950. See also Pirkhofer1963:3-14. 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 addressesthe generalproblemof sound-meaning correspon- dences and includes some analysis of Shakespeare's poetry. 81 MICHAEL SHAPIRO Brown University Shakespeare's verse is studded with alliteration andparonomasia. The more fundamental ques- tion of a patterned relationship between soundand meaningin his Sonnetshas not been answered, partly because no method of uncovering such correspondences was available. However, once groups of sounds, specifically sonorantand obstruentsequences, are examined as the locus of the sound-meaning nexus, it emerges that Shakespeare consistently aligns these sequences with relational meaningsdefined by the dyad of freedomand constraint. The coherencebetween 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 comprehensiveanswer to the most fundamental question of poetics, whether the sounds of the Sonnets are an echo of the sense. George T. Wright'sbibliographical 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 purportto say beyond noting Shakespeare's obvious use of alliteration, assonance, and consonancein 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 RomanJakobson 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 repeatedin the third strophe.That Shakespeare'affects the letter' in these strophes,and that they are therebylinked at the phonetic level is not in question. Our questionis what performative relationthis purely formallinkage at the level of the signifier might bear to the sonnet's signification,its 'contents' as Shakespeare equivocally puts it. Here Jakobsoncan be of little help, taking as he notoriouslydoes, meaning or content for grantedor reducingit to the received ideas of othercommentators. In termsof his analysis, the most the empirical fact of alliterationcan 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 illustratesas such in the previous sonnet ('0 how much more doth beautybeauteousseem / By that sweet ornament ...'). As ornament or decoration, alliteration bears the same superficially attractive but functionallyinessentialrelationto the poem as 'gilt' does to the 'monuments / O princes' mentioned at the outset.Gilding is to monumental sculptureas alliteration is to the sonnet. (Felperin 1985:176-77). If alliterationis largely irrelevantto understanding the significance of the sound pattern,what else, then, could there be of phonetic relevance in Sonnet 55? That a * I am indebtedto Paul Friedrich and Thomas L. Short for their substantive comments and suggestions, which helped improve this article, and to W. RichardRistow for his statisticalguidance. ' A curiosity of the history of scholarship on this subject are two articlesby B. F. Skinner(1939, 1941). Skinner's conclusion about alliteration in the first of these, that 'Shakespeare might as well have drawnhis words out of a hat' (1939: 191), was countered in detail in Goldsmith 1950. See also Pirkhofer1963:3-14. 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 addressesthe generalproblemof sound-meaning correspon- dences and includes some analysis of Shakespeare's poetry. 81 MICHAEL SHAPIRO Brown University Shakespeare's verse is studded with alliteration andparonomasia. The more fundamental ques- tion of a patterned relationship between soundand meaningin his Sonnetshas not been answered, partly because no method of uncovering such correspondences was available. However, once groups of sounds, specifically sonorantand obstruentsequences, are examined as the locus of the sound-meaning nexus, it emerges that Shakespeare consistently aligns these sequences with relational meaningsdefined by the dyad of freedomand constraint. The coherencebetween 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 comprehensiveanswer to the most fundamental question of poetics, whether the sounds of the Sonnets are an echo of the sense. George T. Wright'sbibliographical 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 purportto say beyond noting Shakespeare's obvious use of alliteration, assonance, and consonancein 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 RomanJakobson 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 repeatedin the third strophe.That Shakespeare'affects the letter' in these strophes,and that they are therebylinked at the phonetic level is not in question. Our questionis what performative relationthis purely formallinkage at the level of the signifier might bear to the sonnet's signification,its 'contents' as Shakespeare equivocally puts it. Here Jakobsoncan be of little help, taking as he notoriouslydoes, meaning or content for grantedor reducingit to the received ideas of othercommentators. In termsof his analysis, the most the empirical fact of alliterationcan 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 illustratesas such in the previous sonnet ('0 how much more doth beautybeauteousseem / By that sweet ornament ...'). As ornament or decoration, alliteration bears the same superficially attractive but functionallyinessentialrelationto the poem as 'gilt' does to the 'monuments / O princes' mentioned at the outset.Gilding is to monumental sculptureas alliteration is to the sonnet. (Felperin 1985:176-77). If alliterationis largely irrelevantto understanding the significance of the sound pattern,what else, then, could there be of phonetic relevance in Sonnet 55? That a * I am indebtedto Paul Friedrich and Thomas L. Short for their substantive comments and suggestions, which helped improve this article, and to W. RichardRistow for his statisticalguidance. ' A curiosity of the history of scholarship on this subject are two articlesby B. F. Skinner(1939, 1941). Skinner's conclusion about alliteration in the first of these, that 'Shakespeare might as well have drawnhis words out of a hat' (1939: 191), was countered in detail in Goldsmith 1950. See also Pirkhofer1963:3-14. 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 addressesthe generalproblemof sound-meaning correspon- dences and includes some analysis of Shakespeare's poetry. 81 MICHAEL SHAPIRO Brown University Shakespeare's verse is studded with alliteration andparonomasia. The more fundamental ques- tion of a patterned relationship between soundand meaningin his Sonnetshas not been answered, partly because no method of uncovering such correspondences was available. However, once groups of sounds, specifically sonorantand obstruentsequences, are examined as the locus of the sound-meaning nexus, it emerges that Shakespeare consistently aligns these sequences with relational meaningsdefined by the dyad of freedomand constraint. The coherencebetween 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 comprehensiveanswer to the most fundamental question of poetics, whether the sounds of the Sonnets are an echo of the sense. George T. Wright'sbibliographical 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 purportto say beyond noting Shakespeare's obvious use of alliteration, assonance, and consonancein 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 RomanJakobson 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 repeatedin the third strophe.That Shakespeare'affects the letter' in these strophes,and that they are therebylinked at the phonetic level is not in question. Our questionis what performative relationthis purely formallinkage at the level of the signifier might bear to the sonnet's signification,its 'contents' as Shakespeare equivocally puts it. Here Jakobsoncan be of little help, taking as he notoriouslydoes, meaning or content for grantedor reducingit to the received ideas of othercommentators. In termsof his analysis, the most the empirical fact of alliterationcan 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 illustratesas such in the previous sonnet ('0 how much more doth beautybeauteousseem / By that sweet ornament ...'). As ornament or decoration, alliteration bears the same superficially attractive but functionallyinessentialrelationto the poem as 'gilt' does to the 'monuments / O princes' mentioned at the outset.Gilding is to monumental sculptureas alliteration is to the sonnet. (Felperin 1985:176-77). If alliterationis largely irrelevantto understanding the significance of the sound pattern,what else, then, could there be of phonetic relevance in Sonnet 55? That a * I am indebtedto Paul Friedrich and Thomas L. Short for their substantive comments and suggestions, which helped improve this article, and to W. RichardRistow for his statisticalguidance. ' A curiosity of the history of scholarship on this subject are two articlesby B. F. Skinner(1939, 1941). Skinner's conclusion about alliteration in the first of these, that 'Shakespeare might as well have drawnhis words out of a hat' (1939: 191), was countered in detail in Goldsmith 1950. See also Pirkhofer1963:3-14. 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 addressesthe generalproblemof sound-meaning correspon- dences and includes some analysis of Shakespeare's poetry. 81 MICHAEL SHAPIRO Brown University Shakespeare's verse is studded with alliteration andparonomasia. The more fundamental ques- tion of a patterned relationship between soundand meaningin his Sonnetshas not been answered, partly because no method of uncovering such correspondences was available. However, once groups of sounds, specifically sonorantand obstruentsequences, are examined as the locus of the sound-meaning nexus, it emerges that Shakespeare consistently aligns these sequences with relational meaningsdefined by the dyad of freedomand constraint. The coherencebetween 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 comprehensiveanswer to the most fundamental question of poetics, whether the sounds of the Sonnets are an echo of the sense. George T. Wright'sbibliographical 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 purportto say beyond noting Shakespeare's obvious use of alliteration, assonance, and consonancein 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 RomanJakobson 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 repeatedin the third strophe.That Shakespeare'affects the letter' in these strophes,and that they are therebylinked at the phonetic level is not in question. Our questionis what performative relationthis purely formallinkage at the level of the signifier might bear to the sonnet's signification,its 'contents' as Shakespeare equivocally puts it. Here Jakobsoncan be of little help, taking as he notoriouslydoes, meaning or content for grantedor reducingit to the received ideas of othercommentators. In termsof his analysis, the most the empirical fact of alliterationcan 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 illustratesas such in the previous sonnet ('0 how much more doth beautybeauteousseem / By that sweet ornament ...'). As ornament or decoration, alliteration bears the same superficially attractive but functionallyinessentialrelationto the poem as 'gilt' does to the 'monuments / O princes' mentioned at the outset.Gilding is to monumental sculptureas alliteration is to the sonnet. (Felperin 1985:176-77). If alliterationis largely irrelevantto understanding the significance of the sound pattern,what else, then, could there be of phonetic relevance in Sonnet 55? That a * I am indebtedto Paul Friedrich and Thomas L. Short for their substantive comments and suggestions, which helped improve this article, and to W. RichardRistow for his statisticalguidance. ' A curiosity of the history of scholarship on this subject are two articlesby B. F. Skinner(1939, 1941). Skinner's conclusion about alliteration in the first of these, that 'Shakespeare might as well have drawnhis words out of a hat' (1939: 191), was countered in detail in Goldsmith 1950. See also Pirkhofer1963:3-14. 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 addressesthe generalproblemof sound-meaning correspon- dences and includes some analysis of Shakespeare's poetry. 81 MICHAEL SHAPIRO Brown University Shakespeare's verse is studded with alliteration andparonomasia. The more fundamental ques- tion of a patterned relationship between soundand meaningin his Sonnetshas not been answered, partly because no method of uncovering such correspondences was available. However, once groups of sounds, specifically sonorantand obstruentsequences, are examined as the locus of the sound-meaning nexus, it emerges that Shakespeare consistently aligns these sequences with relational meaningsdefined by the dyad of freedomand constraint. The coherencebetween 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 comprehensiveanswer to the most fundamental question of poetics, whether the sounds of the Sonnets are an echo of the sense. George T. Wright'sbibliographical 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 purportto say beyond noting Shakespeare's obvious use of alliteration, assonance, and consonancein 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 RomanJakobson 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 repeatedin the third strophe.That Shakespeare'affects the letter' in these strophes,and that they are therebylinked at the phonetic level is not in question. Our questionis what performative relationthis purely formallinkage at the level of the signifier might bear to the sonnet's signification,its 'contents' as Shakespeare equivocally puts it. Here Jakobsoncan be of little help, taking as he notoriouslydoes, meaning or content for grantedor reducingit to the received ideas of othercommentators. In termsof his analysis, the most the empirical fact of alliterationcan 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 illustratesas such in the previous sonnet ('0 how much more doth beautybeauteousseem / By that sweet ornament ...'). As ornament or decoration, alliteration bears the same superficially attractive but functionallyinessentialrelationto the poem as 'gilt' does to the 'monuments / O princes' mentioned at the outset.Gilding is to monumental sculptureas alliteration is to the sonnet. (Felperin 1985:176-77). If alliterationis largely irrelevantto understanding the significance of the sound pattern,what else, then, could there be of phonetic relevance in Sonnet 55? That a * I am indebtedto Paul Friedrich and Thomas L. Short for their substantive comments and suggestions, which helped improve this article, and to W. RichardRistow for his statisticalguidance. ' A curiosity of the history of scholarship on this subject are two articlesby B. F. Skinner(1939, 1941). Skinner's conclusion about alliteration in the first of these, that 'Shakespeare might as well have drawnhis words out of a hat' (1939: 191), was countered in detail in Goldsmith 1950. See also Pirkhofer1963:3-14. 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 addressesthe generalproblemof sound-meaning correspon- dences and includes some analysis of Shakespeare's poetry. 81 MICHAEL SHAPIRO Brown University Shakespeare's verse is studded with alliteration andparonomasia. The more fundamental ques- tion of a patterned relationship between soundand meaningin his Sonnetshas not been answered, partly because no method of uncovering such correspondences was available. However, once groups of sounds, specifically sonorantand obstruentsequences, are examined as the locus of the sound-meaning nexus, it emerges that Shakespeare consistently aligns these sequences with relational meaningsdefined by the dyad of freedomand constraint. The coherencebetween 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 comprehensiveanswer to the most fundamental question of poetics, whether the sounds of the Sonnets are an echo of the sense. George T. Wright'sbibliographical 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 purportto say beyond noting Shakespeare's obvious use of alliteration, assonance, and consonancein 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 RomanJakobson 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 repeatedin the third strophe.That Shakespeare'affects the letter' in these strophes,and that they are therebylinked at the phonetic level is not in question. Our questionis what performative relationthis purely formallinkage at the level of the signifier might bear to the sonnet's signification,its 'contents' as Shakespeare equivocally puts it. Here Jakobsoncan be of little help, taking as he notoriouslydoes, meaning or content for grantedor reducingit to the received ideas of othercommentators. In termsof his analysis, the most the empirical fact of alliterationcan 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 illustratesas such in the previous sonnet ('0 how much more doth beautybeauteousseem / By that sweet ornament ...'). As ornament or decoration, alliteration bears the same superficially attractive but functionallyinessentialrelationto the poem as 'gilt' does to the 'monuments / O princes' mentioned at the outset.Gilding is to monumental sculptureas alliteration is to the sonnet. (Felperin 1985:176-77). If alliterationis largely irrelevantto understanding the significance of the sound pattern,what else, then, could there be of phonetic relevance in Sonnet 55? That a * I am indebtedto Paul Friedrich and Thomas L. Short for their substantive comments and suggestions, which helped improve this article, and to W. RichardRistow for his statisticalguidance. ' A curiosity of the history of scholarship on this subject are two articlesby B. F. Skinner(1939, 1941). Skinner's conclusion about alliteration in the first of these, that 'Shakespeare might as well have drawnhis words out of a hat' (1939: 191), was countered in detail in Goldsmith 1950. See also Pirkhofer1963:3-14. 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 addressesthe generalproblemof sound-meaning correspon- dences and includes some analysis of Shakespeare's poetry. 81 MICHAEL SHAPIRO Brown University Shakespeare's verse is studded with alliteration andparonomasia. The more fundamental ques- tion of a patterned relationship between soundand meaningin his Sonnetshas not been answered, partly because no method of uncovering such correspondences was available. However, once groups of sounds, specifically sonorantand obstruentsequences, are examined as the locus of the sound-meaning nexus, it emerges that Shakespeare consistently aligns these sequences with relational meaningsdefined by the dyad of freedomand constraint. The coherencebetween 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 comprehensiveanswer to the most fundamental question of poetics, whether the sounds of the Sonnets are an echo of the sense. George T. Wright'sbibliographical 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 purportto say beyond noting Shakespeare's obvious use of alliteration, assonance, and consonancein 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 RomanJakobson 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 repeatedin the third strophe.That Shakespeare'affects the letter' in these strophes,and that they are therebylinked at the phonetic level is not in question. Our questionis what performative relationthis purely formallinkage at the level of the signifier might bear to the sonnet's signification,its 'contents' as Shakespeare equivocally puts it. Here Jakobsoncan be of little help, taking as he notoriouslydoes, meaning or content for grantedor reducingit to the received ideas of othercommentators. In termsof his analysis, the most the empirical fact of alliterationcan 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 illustratesas such in the previous sonnet ('0 how much more doth beautybeauteousseem / By that sweet ornament ...'). As ornament or decoration, alliteration bears the same superficially attractive but functionallyinessentialrelationto the poem as 'gilt' does to the 'monuments / O princes' mentioned at the outset.Gilding is to monumental sculptureas alliteration is to the sonnet. (Felperin 1985:176-77). If alliterationis largely irrelevantto understanding the significance of the sound pattern,what else, then, could there be of phonetic relevance in Sonnet 55? That a * I am indebtedto Paul Friedrich and Thomas L. Short for their substantive comments and suggestions, which helped improve this article, and to W. RichardRistow for his statisticalguidance. ' A curiosity of the history of scholarship on this subject are two articlesby B. F. Skinner(1939, 1941). Skinner's conclusion about alliteration in the first of these, that 'Shakespeare might as well have drawnhis words out of a hat' (1939: 191), was countered in detail in Goldsmith 1950. See also Pirkhofer1963:3-14. 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 addressesthe generalproblemof sound-meaning correspon- dences and includes some analysis of Shakespeare's poetry. 81 MICHAEL SHAPIRO Brown University Shakespeare's verse is studded with alliteration andparonomasia. The more fundamental ques- tion of a patterned relationship between soundand meaningin his Sonnetshas not been answered, partly because no method of uncovering such correspondences was available. However, once groups of sounds, specifically sonorantand obstruentsequences, are examined as the locus of the sound-meaning nexus, it emerges that Shakespeare consistently aligns these sequences with relational meaningsdefined by the dyad of freedomand constraint. The coherencebetween 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 comprehensiveanswer to the most fundamental question of poetics, whether the sounds of the Sonnets are an echo of the sense. George T. Wright'sbibliographical 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 purportto say beyond noting Shakespeare's obvious use of alliteration, assonance, and consonancein 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 RomanJakobson 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 repeatedin the third strophe.That Shakespeare'affects the letter' in these strophes,and that they are therebylinked at the phonetic level is not in question. Our questionis what performative relationthis purely formallinkage at the level of the signifier might bear to the sonnet's signification,its 'contents' as Shakespeare equivocally puts it. Here Jakobsoncan be of little help, taking as he notoriouslydoes, meaning or content for grantedor reducingit to the received ideas of othercommentators. In termsof his analysis, the most the empirical fact of alliterationcan 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 illustratesas such in the previous sonnet ('0 how much more doth beautybeauteousseem / By that sweet ornament ...'). As ornament or decoration, alliteration bears the same superficially attractive but functionallyinessentialrelationto the poem as 'gilt' does to the 'monuments / O princes' mentioned at the outset.Gilding is to monumental sculptureas alliteration is to the sonnet. (Felperin 1985:176-77). If alliterationis largely irrelevantto understanding the significance of the sound pattern,what else, then, could there be of phonetic relevance in Sonnet 55? That a * I am indebtedto Paul Friedrich and Thomas L. Short for their substantive comments and suggestions, which helped improve this article, and to W. RichardRistow for his statisticalguidance. ' A curiosity of the history of scholarship on this subject are two articlesby B. F. Skinner(1939, 1941). Skinner's conclusion about alliteration in the first of these, that 'Shakespeare might as well have drawnhis words out of a hat' (1939: 191), was countered in detail in Goldsmith 1950. See also Pirkhofer1963:3-14. 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 addressesthe generalproblemof sound-meaning correspon- dences and includes some analysis of Shakespeare's poetry. 81 MICHAEL SHAPIRO Brown University Shakespeare's verse is studded with alliteration andparonomasia. The more fundamental ques- tion of a patterned relationship between soundand meaningin his Sonnetshas not been answered, partly because no method of uncovering such correspondences was available. However, once groups of sounds, specifically sonorantand obstruentsequences, are examined as the locus of the sound-meaning nexus, it emerges that Shakespeare consistently aligns these sequences with relational meaningsdefined by the dyad of freedomand constraint. The coherencebetween 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 comprehensiveanswer to the most fundamental question of poetics, whether the sounds of the Sonnets are an echo of the sense. George T. Wright'sbibliographical 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 purportto say beyond noting Shakespeare's obvious use of alliteration, assonance, and consonancein 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 RomanJakobson 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 repeatedin the third strophe.That Shakespeare'affects the letter' in these strophes,and that they are therebylinked at the phonetic level is not in question. Our questionis what performative relationthis purely formallinkage at the level of the signifier might bear to the sonnet's signification,its 'contents' as Shakespeare equivocally puts it. Here Jakobsoncan be of little help, taking as he notoriouslydoes, meaning or content for grantedor reducingit to the received ideas of othercommentators. In termsof his analysis, the most the empirical fact of alliterationcan 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 illustratesas such in the previous sonnet ('0 how much more doth beautybeauteousseem / By that sweet ornament ...'). As ornament or decoration, alliteration bears the same superficially attractive but functionallyinessentialrelationto the poem as 'gilt' does to the 'monuments / O princes' mentioned at the outset.Gilding is to monumental sculptureas alliteration is to the sonnet. (Felperin 1985:176-77). If alliterationis largely irrelevantto understanding the significance of the sound pattern,what else, then, could there be of phonetic relevance in Sonnet 55? That a * I am indebtedto Paul Friedrich and Thomas L. Short for their substantive comments and suggestions, which helped improve this article, and to W. RichardRistow for his statisticalguidance. ' A curiosity of the history of scholarship on this subject are two articlesby B. F. Skinner(1939, 1941). Skinner's conclusion about alliteration in the first of these, that 'Shakespeare might as well have drawnhis words out of a hat' (1939: 191), was countered in detail in Goldsmith 1950. See also Pirkhofer1963:3-14. 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 addressesthe generalproblemof sound-meaning correspon- dences and includes some analysis of Shakespeare's poetry. 81 MICHAEL SHAPIRO Brown University Shakespeare's verse is studded with alliteration andparonomasia. The more fundamental ques- tion of a patterned relationship between soundand meaningin his Sonnetshas not been answered, partly because no method of uncovering such correspondences was available. However, once groups of sounds, specifically sonorantand obstruentsequences, are examined as the locus of the sound-meaning nexus, it emerges that Shakespeare consistently aligns these sequences with relational meaningsdefined by the dyad of freedomand constraint. The coherencebetween 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 comprehensiveanswer to the most fundamental question of poetics, whether the sounds of the Sonnets are an echo of the sense. George T. Wright'sbibliographical 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 purportto say beyond noting Shakespeare's obvious use of alliteration, assonance, and consonancein 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 RomanJakobson 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 repeatedin the third strophe.That Shakespeare'affects the letter' in these strophes,and that they are therebylinked at the phonetic level is not in question. Our questionis what performative relationthis purely formallinkage at the level of the signifier might bear to the sonnet's signification,its 'contents' as Shakespeare equivocally puts it. Here Jakobsoncan be of little help, taking as he notoriouslydoes, meaning or content for grantedor reducingit to the received ideas of othercommentators. In termsof his analysis, the most the empirical fact of alliterationcan 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 illustratesas such in the previous sonnet ('0 how much more doth beautybeauteousseem / By that sweet ornament ...'). As ornament or decoration, alliteration bears the same superficially attractive but functionallyinessentialrelationto the poem as 'gilt' does to the 'monuments / O princes' mentioned at the outset.Gilding is to monumental sculptureas alliteration is to the sonnet. (Felperin 1985:176-77). If alliterationis largely irrelevantto understanding the significance of the sound pattern,what else, then, could there be of phonetic relevance in Sonnet 55? That a * I am indebtedto Paul Friedrich and Thomas L. Short for their substantive comments and suggestions, which helped improve this article, and to W. RichardRistow for his statisticalguidance. ' A curiosity of the history of scholarship on this subject are two articlesby B. F. Skinner(1939, 1941). Skinner's conclusion about alliteration in the first of these, that 'Shakespeare might as well have drawnhis words out of a hat' (1939: 191), was countered in detail in Goldsmith 1950. See also Pirkhofer1963:3-14. 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 addressesthe generalproblemof sound-meaning correspon- dences and includes some analysis of Shakespeare's poetry. 81 MICHAEL SHAPIRO Brown University Shakespeare's verse is studded with alliteration andparonomasia. The more fundamental ques- tion of a patterned relationship between soundand meaningin his Sonnetshas not been answered, partly because no method of uncovering such correspondences was available. However, once groups of sounds, specifically sonorantand obstruentsequences, are examined as the locus of the sound-meaning nexus, it emerges that Shakespeare consistently aligns these sequences with relational meaningsdefined by the dyad of freedomand constraint. The coherencebetween 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 comprehensiveanswer to the most fundamental question of poetics, whether the sounds of the Sonnets are an echo of the sense. George T. Wright'sbibliographical 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 purportto say beyond noting Shakespeare's obvious use of alliteration, assonance, and consonancein 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 RomanJakobson 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 repeatedin the third strophe.That Shakespeare'affects the letter' in these strophes,and that they are therebylinked at the phonetic level is not in question. Our questionis what performative relationthis purely formallinkage at the level of the signifier might bear to the sonnet's signification,its 'contents' as Shakespeare equivocally puts it. Here Jakobsoncan be of little help, taking as he notoriouslydoes, meaning or content for grantedor reducingit to the received ideas of othercommentators. In termsof his analysis, the most the empirical fact of alliterationcan 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 illustratesas such in the previous sonnet ('0 how much more doth beautybeauteousseem / By that sweet ornament ...'). As ornament or decoration, alliteration bears the same superficially attractive but functionallyinessentialrelationto the poem as 'gilt' does to the 'monuments / O princes' mentioned at the outset.Gilding is to monumental sculptureas alliteration is to the sonnet. (Felperin 1985:176-77). If alliterationis largely irrelevantto understanding the significance of the sound pattern,what else, then, could there be of phonetic relevance in Sonnet 55? That a * I am indebtedto Paul Friedrich and Thomas L. Short for their substantive comments and suggestions, which helped improve this article, and to W. RichardRistow for his statisticalguidance. ' A curiosity of the history of scholarship on this subject are two articlesby B. F. Skinner(1939, 1941). Skinner's conclusion about alliteration in the first of these, that 'Shakespeare might as well have drawnhis words out of a hat' (1939: 191), was countered in detail in Goldsmith 1950. See also Pirkhofer1963:3-14. 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 addressesthe generalproblemof sound-meaning correspon- dences and includes some analysis of Shakespeare's poetry. 81 MICHAEL SHAPIRO Brown University Shakespeare's verse is studded with alliteration andparonomasia. The more fundamental ques- tion of a patterned relationship between soundand meaningin his Sonnetshas not been answered, partly because no method of uncovering such correspondences was available. However, once groups of sounds, specifically sonorantand obstruentsequences, are examined as the locus of the sound-meaning nexus, it emerges that Shakespeare consistently aligns these sequences with relational meaningsdefined by the dyad of freedomand constraint. The coherencebetween 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 comprehensiveanswer to the most fundamental question of poetics, whether the sounds of the Sonnets are an echo of the sense. George T. Wright'sbibliographical 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 purportto say beyond noting Shakespeare's obvious use of alliteration, assonance, and consonancein 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 RomanJakobson 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 repeatedin the third strophe.That Shakespeare'affects the letter' in these strophes,and that they are therebylinked at the phonetic level is not in question. Our questionis what performative relationthis purely formallinkage at the level of the signifier might bear to the sonnet's signification,its 'contents' as Shakespeare equivocally puts it. Here Jakobsoncan be of little help, taking as he notoriouslydoes, meaning or content for grantedor reducingit to the received ideas of othercommentators. In termsof his analysis, the most the empirical fact of alliterationcan 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 illustratesas such in the previous sonnet ('0 how much more doth beautybeauteousseem / By that sweet ornament ...'). As ornament or decoration, alliteration bears the same superficially attractive but functionallyinessentialrelationto the poem as 'gilt' does to the 'monuments / O princes' mentioned at the outset.Gilding is to monumental sculptureas alliteration is to the sonnet. (Felperin 1985:176-77). If alliterationis largely irrelevantto understanding the significance of the sound pattern,what else, then, could there be of phonetic relevance in Sonnet 55? That a * I am indebtedto Paul Friedrich and Thomas L. Short for their substantive comments and suggestions, which helped improve this article, and to W. RichardRistow for his statisticalguidance. ' A curiosity of the history of scholarship on this subject are two articlesby B. F. Skinner(1939, 1941). Skinner's conclusion about alliteration in the first of these, that 'Shakespeare might as well have drawnhis words out of a hat' (1939: 191), was countered in detail in Goldsmith 1950. See also Pirkhofer1963:3-14. 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 addressesthe generalproblemof sound-meaning correspon- dences and includes some analysis of Shakespeare's poetry. 81 MICHAEL SHAPIRO Brown University Shakespeare's verse is studded with alliteration andparonomasia. The more fundamental ques- tion of a patterned relationship between soundand meaningin his Sonnetshas not been answered, partly because no method of uncovering such correspondences was available. However, once groups of sounds, specifically sonorantand obstruentsequences, are examined as the locus of the sound-meaning nexus, it emerges that Shakespeare consistently aligns these sequences with relational meaningsdefined by the dyad of freedomand constraint. The coherencebetween 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 comprehensiveanswer to the most fundamental question of poetics, whether the sounds of the Sonnets are an echo of the sense. George T. Wright'sbibliographical 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 purportto say beyond noting Shakespeare's obvious use of alliteration, assonance, and consonancein 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 RomanJakobson 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 repeatedin the third strophe.That Shakespeare'affects the letter' in these strophes,and that they are therebylinked at the phonetic level is not in question. Our questionis what performative relationthis purely formallinkage at the level of the signifier might bear to the sonnet's signification,its 'contents' as Shakespeare equivocally puts it. Here Jakobsoncan be of little help, taking as he notoriouslydoes, meaning or content for grantedor reducingit to the received ideas of othercommentators. In termsof his analysis, the most the empirical fact of alliterationcan 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 illustratesas such in the previous sonnet ('0 how much more doth beautybeauteousseem / By that sweet ornament ...'). As ornament or decoration, alliteration bears the same superficially attractive but functionallyinessentialrelationto the poem as 'gilt' does to the 'monuments / O princes' mentioned at the outset.Gilding is to monumental sculptureas alliteration is to the sonnet. (Felperin 1985:176-77). If alliterationis largely irrelevantto understanding the significance of the sound pattern,what else, then, could there be of phonetic relevance in Sonnet 55? That a * I am indebtedto Paul Friedrich and Thomas L. Short for their substantive comments and suggestions, which helped improve this article, and to W. RichardRistow for his statisticalguidance. ' A curiosity of the history of scholarship on this subject are two articlesby B. F. Skinner(1939, 1941). Skinner's conclusion about alliteration in the first of these, that 'Shakespeare might as well have drawnhis words out of a hat' (1939: 191), was countered in detail in Goldsmith 1950. See also Pirkhofer1963:3-14. 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 addressesthe generalproblemof sound-meaning correspon- dences and includes some analysis of Shakespeare's poetry. 81 MICHAEL SHAPIRO Brown University Shakespeare's verse is studded with alliteration andparonomasia. The more fundamental ques- tion of a patterned relationship between soundand meaningin his Sonnetshas not been answered, partly because no method of uncovering such correspondences was available. However, once groups of sounds, specifically sonorantand obstruentsequences, are examined as the locus of the sound-meaning nexus, it emerges that Shakespeare consistently aligns these sequences with relational meaningsdefined by the dyad of freedomand constraint. The coherencebetween 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 comprehensiveanswer to the most fundamental question of poetics, whether the sounds of the Sonnets are an echo of the sense. George T. Wright'sbibliographical 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 purportto say beyond noting Shakespeare's obvious use of alliteration, assonance, and consonancein 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 RomanJakobson 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 repeatedin the third strophe.That Shakespeare'affects the letter' in these strophes,and that they are therebylinked at the phonetic level is not in question. Our questionis what performative relationthis purely formallinkage at the level of the signifier might bear to the sonnet's signification,its 'contents' as Shakespeare equivocally puts it. Here Jakobsoncan be of little help, taking as he notoriouslydoes, meaning or content for grantedor reducingit to the received ideas of othercommentators. In termsof his analysis, the most the empirical fact of alliterationcan 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 illustratesas such in the previous sonnet ('0 how much more doth beautybeauteousseem / By that sweet ornament ...'). As ornament or decoration, alliteration bears the same superficially attractive but functionallyinessentialrelationto the poem as 'gilt' does to the 'monuments / O princes' mentioned at the outset.Gilding is to monumental sculptureas alliteration is to the sonnet. (Felperin 1985:176-77). If alliterationis largely irrelevantto understanding the significance of the sound pattern,what else, then, could there be of phonetic relevance in Sonnet 55? That a * I am indebtedto Paul Friedrich and Thomas L. Short for their substantive comments and suggestions, which helped improve this article, and to W. RichardRistow for his statisticalguidance. ' A curiosity of the history of scholarship on this subject are two articlesby B. F. Skinner(1939, 1941). Skinner's conclusion about alliteration in the first of these, that 'Shakespeare might as well have drawnhis words out of a hat' (1939: 191), was countered in detail in Goldsmith 1950. See also Pirkhofer1963:3-14. 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 addressesthe generalproblemof sound-meaning correspon- dences and includes some analysis of Shakespeare's poetry. 81 MICHAEL SHAPIRO Brown University Shakespeare's verse is studded with alliteration andparonomasia. The more fundamental ques- tion of a patterned relationship between soundand meaningin his Sonnetshas not been answered, partly because no method of uncovering such correspondences was available. However, once groups of sounds, specifically sonorantand obstruentsequences, are examined as the locus of the sound-meaning nexus, it emerges that Shakespeare consistently aligns these sequences with relational meaningsdefined by the dyad of freedomand constraint. The coherencebetween 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 comprehensiveanswer to the most fundamental question of poetics, whether the sounds of the Sonnets are an echo of the sense. George T. Wright'sbibliographical 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 purportto say beyond noting Shakespeare's obvious use of alliteration, assonance, and consonancein 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 RomanJakobson 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 repeatedin the third strophe.That Shakespeare'affects the letter' in these strophes,and that they are therebylinked at the phonetic level is not in question. Our questionis what performative relationthis purely formallinkage at the level of the signifier might bear to the sonnet's signification,its 'contents' as Shakespeare equivocally puts it. Here Jakobsoncan be of little help, taking as he notoriouslydoes, meaning or content for grantedor reducingit to the received ideas of othercommentators. In termsof his analysis, the most the empirical fact of alliterationcan 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 illustratesas such in the previous sonnet ('0 how much more doth beautybeauteousseem / By that sweet ornament ...'). As ornament or decoration, alliteration bears the same superficially attractive but functionallyinessentialrelationto the poem as 'gilt' does to the 'monuments / O princes' mentioned at the outset.Gilding is to monumental sculptureas alliteration is to the sonnet. (Felperin 1985:176-77). If alliterationis largely irrelevantto understanding the significance of the sound pattern,what else, then, could there be of phonetic relevance in Sonnet 55? That a * I am indebtedto Paul Friedrich and Thomas L. Short for their substantive comments and suggestions, which helped improve this article, and to W. RichardRistow for his statisticalguidance. ' A curiosity of the history of scholarship on this subject are two articlesby B. F. Skinner(1939, 1941). Skinner's conclusion about alliteration in the first of these, that 'Shakespeare might as well have drawnhis words out of a hat' (1939: 191), was countered in detail in Goldsmith 1950. See also Pirkhofer1963:3-14. 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 addressesthe generalproblemof sound-meaning correspon- dences and includes some analysis of Shakespeare's poetry. 81 MICHAEL SHAPIRO Brown University Shakespeare's verse is studded with alliteration andparonomasia. The more fundamental ques- tion of a patterned relationship between soundand meaningin his Sonnetshas not been answered, partly because no method of uncovering such correspondences was available. However, once groups of sounds, specifically sonorantand obstruentsequences, are examined as the locus of the sound-meaning nexus, it emerges that Shakespeare consistently aligns these sequences with relational meaningsdefined by the dyad of freedomand constraint. The coherencebetween 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 comprehensiveanswer to the most fundamental question of poetics, whether the sounds of the Sonnets are an echo of the sense. George T. Wright'sbibliographical 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 purportto say beyond noting Shakespeare's obvious use of alliteration, assonance, and consonancein 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 RomanJakobson 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 repeatedin the third strophe.That Shakespeare'affects the letter' in these strophes,and that they are therebylinked at the phonetic level is not in question. Our questionis what performative relationthis purely formallinkage at the level of the signifier might bear to the sonnet's signification,its 'contents' as Shakespeare equivocally puts it. Here Jakobsoncan be of little help, taking as he notoriouslydoes, meaning or content for grantedor reducingit to the received ideas of othercommentators. In termsof his analysis, the most the empirical fact of alliterationcan 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 illustratesas such in the previous sonnet ('0 how much more doth beautybeauteousseem / By that sweet ornament ...'). As ornament or decoration, alliteration bears the same superficially attractive but functionallyinessentialrelationto the poem as 'gilt' does to the 'monuments / O princes' mentioned at the outset.Gilding is to monumental sculptureas alliteration is to the sonnet. (Felperin 1985:176-77). If alliterationis largely irrelevantto understanding the significance of the sound pattern,what else, then, could there be of phonetic relevance in Sonnet 55? That a * I am indebtedto Paul Friedrich and Thomas L. Short for their substantive comments and suggestions, which helped improve this article, and to W. RichardRistow for his statisticalguidance. ' A curiosity of the history of scholarship on this subject are two articlesby B. F. Skinner(1939, 1941). Skinner's conclusion about alliteration in the first of these, that 'Shakespeare might as well have drawnhis words out of a hat' (1939: 191), was countered in detail in Goldsmith 1950. See also Pirkhofer1963:3-14. 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 addressesthe generalproblemof sound-meaning correspon- dences and includes some analysis of Shakespeare's poetry. 81 MICHAEL SHAPIRO Brown University Shakespeare's verse is studded with alliteration andparonomasia. The more fundamental ques- tion of a patterned relationship between soundand meaningin his Sonnetshas not been answered, partly because no method of uncovering such correspondences was available. However, once groups of sounds, specifically sonorantand obstruentsequences, are examined as the locus of the sound-meaning nexus, it emerges that Shakespeare consistently aligns these sequences with relational meaningsdefined by the dyad of freedomand constraint. The coherencebetween 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 comprehensiveanswer to the most fundamental question of poetics, whether the sounds of the Sonnets are an echo of the sense. George T. Wright'sbibliographical 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 purportto say beyond noting Shakespeare's obvious use of alliteration, assonance, and consonancein 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 RomanJakobson 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 repeatedin the third strophe.That Shakespeare'affects the letter' in these strophes,and that they are therebylinked at the phonetic level is not in question. Our questionis what performative relationthis purely formallinkage at the level of the signifier might bear to the sonnet's signification,its 'contents' as Shakespeare equivocally puts it. Here Jakobsoncan be of little help, taking as he notoriouslydoes, meaning or content for grantedor reducingit to the received ideas of othercommentators. In termsof his analysis, the most the empirical fact of alliterationcan 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 illustratesas such in the previous sonnet ('0 how much more doth beautybeauteousseem / By that sweet ornament ...'). As ornament or decoration, alliteration bears the same superficially attractive but functionallyinessentialrelationto the poem as 'gilt' does to the 'monuments / O princes' mentioned at the outset.Gilding is to monumental sculptureas alliteration is to the sonnet. (Felperin 1985:176-77). If alliterationis largely irrelevantto understanding the significance of the sound pattern,what else, then, could there be of phonetic relevance in Sonnet 55? That a * I am indebtedto Paul Friedrich and Thomas L. Short for their substantive comments and suggestions, which helped improve this article, and to W. RichardRistow for his statisticalguidance. ' A curiosity of the history of scholarship on this subject are two articlesby B. F. Skinner(1939, 1941). Skinner's conclusion about alliteration in the first of these, that 'Shakespeare might as well have drawnhis words out of a hat' (1939: 191), was countered in detail in Goldsmith 1950. See also Pirkhofer1963:3-14. 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 addressesthe generalproblemof sound-meaning correspon- dences and includes some analysis of Shakespeare's poetry. 81 MICHAEL SHAPIRO Brown University Shakespeare's verse is studded with alliteration andparonomasia. The more fundamental ques- tion of a patterned relationship between soundand meaningin his Sonnetshas not been answered, partly because no method of uncovering such correspondences was available. However, once groups of sounds, specifically sonorantand obstruentsequences, are examined as the locus of the sound-meaning nexus, it emerges that Shakespeare consistently aligns these sequences with relational meaningsdefined by the dyad of freedomand constraint. The coherencebetween 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 comprehensiveanswer to the most fundamental question of poetics, whether the sounds of the Sonnets are an echo of the sense. George T. Wright'sbibliographical 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 purportto say beyond noting Shakespeare's obvious use of alliteration, assonance, and consonancein 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 RomanJakobson 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 repeatedin the third strophe.That Shakespeare'affects the letter' in these strophes,and that they are therebylinked at the phonetic level is not in question. Our questionis what performative relationthis purely formallinkage at the level of the signifier might bear to the sonnet's signification,its 'contents' as Shakespeare equivocally puts it. Here Jakobsoncan be of little help, taking as he notoriouslydoes, meaning or content for grantedor reducingit to the received ideas of othercommentators. In termsof his analysis, the most the empirical fact of alliterationcan 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 illustratesas such in the previous sonnet ('0 how much more doth beautybeauteousseem / By that sweet ornament ...'). As ornament or decoration, alliteration bears the same superficially attractive but functionallyinessentialrelationto the poem as 'gilt' does to the 'monuments / O princes' mentioned at the outset.Gilding is to monumental sculptureas alliteration is to the sonnet. (Felperin 1985:176-77). If alliterationis largely irrelevantto understanding the significance of the sound pattern,what else, then, could there be of phonetic relevance in Sonnet 55? That a * I am indebtedto Paul Friedrich and Thomas L. Short for their substantive comments and suggestions, which helped improve this article, and to W. RichardRistow for his statisticalguidance. ' A curiosity of the history of scholarship on this subject are two articlesby B. F. Skinner(1939, 1941). Skinner's conclusion about alliteration in the first of these, that 'Shakespeare might as well have drawnhis words out of a hat' (1939: 191), was countered in detail in Goldsmith 1950. See also Pirkhofer1963:3-14. 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 addressesthe generalproblemof sound-meaning correspon- dences and includes some analysis of Shakespeare's poetry. 81 MICHAEL SHAPIRO Brown University Shakespeare's verse is studded with alliteration andparonomasia. The more fundamental ques- tion of a patterned relationship between soundand meaningin his Sonnetshas not been answered, partly because no method of uncovering such correspondences was available. However, once groups of sounds, specifically sonorantand obstruentsequences, are examined as the locus of the sound-meaning nexus, it emerges that Shakespeare consistently aligns these sequences with relational meaningsdefined by the dyad of freedomand constraint. The coherencebetween 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 comprehensiveanswer to the most fundamental question of poetics, whether the sounds of the Sonnets are an echo of the sense. George T. Wright'sbibliographical 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 purportto say beyond noting Shakespeare's obvious use of alliteration, assonance, and consonancein 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 RomanJakobson 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 repeatedin the third strophe.That Shakespeare'affects the letter' in these strophes,and that they are therebylinked at the phonetic level is not in question. Our questionis what performative relationthis purely formallinkage at the level of the signifier might bear to the sonnet's signification,its 'contents' as Shakespeare equivocally puts it. Here Jakobsoncan be of little help, taking as he notoriouslydoes, meaning or content for grantedor reducingit to the received ideas of othercommentators. In termsof his analysis, the most the empirical fact of alliterationcan 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 illustratesas such in the previous sonnet ('0 how much more doth beautybeauteousseem / By that sweet ornament ...'). As ornament or decoration, alliteration bears the same superficially attractive but functionallyinessentialrelationto the poem as 'gilt' does to the 'monuments / O princes' mentioned at the outset.Gilding is to monumental sculptureas alliteration is to the sonnet. (Felperin 1985:176-77). If alliterationis largely irrelevantto understanding the significance of the sound pattern,what else, then, could there be of phonetic relevance in Sonnet 55? That a * I am indebtedto Paul Friedrich and Thomas L. Short for their substantive comments and suggestions, which helped improve this article, and to W. RichardRistow for his statisticalguidance. ' A curiosity of the history of scholarship on this subject are two articlesby B. F. Skinner(1939, 1941). Skinner's conclusion about alliteration in the first of these, that 'Shakespeare might as well have drawnhis words out of a hat' (1939: 191), was countered in detail in Goldsmith 1950. See also Pirkhofer1963:3-14. 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 addressesthe generalproblemof sound-meaning correspon- dences and includes some analysis of Shakespeare's poetry. 81 MICHAEL SHAPIRO Brown University Shakespeare's verse is studded with alliteration andparonomasia. The more fundamental ques- tion of a patterned relationship between soundand meaningin his Sonnetshas not been answered, partly because no method of uncovering such correspondences was available. However, once groups of sounds, specifically sonorantand obstruentsequences, are examined as the locus of the sound-meaning nexus, it emerges that Shakespeare consistently aligns these sequences with relational meaningsdefined by the dyad of freedomand constraint. The coherencebetween 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 comprehensiveanswer to the most fundamental question of poetics, whether the sounds of the Sonnets are an echo of the sense. George T. Wright'sbibliographical 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 purportto say beyond noting Shakespeare's obvious use of alliteration, assonance, and consonancein 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 RomanJakobson 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 repeatedin the third strophe.That Shakespeare'affects the letter' in these strophes,and that they are therebylinked at the phonetic level is not in question. Our questionis what performative relationthis purely formallinkage at the level of the signifier might bear to the sonnet's signification,its 'contents' as Shakespeare equivocally puts it. Here Jakobsoncan be of little help, taking as he notoriouslydoes, meaning or content for grantedor reducingit to the received ideas of othercommentators. In termsof his analysis, the most the empirical fact of alliterationcan 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 illustratesas such in the previous sonnet ('0 how much more doth beautybeauteousseem / By that sweet ornament ...'). As ornament or decoration, alliteration bears the same superficially attractive but functionallyinessentialrelationto the poem as 'gilt' does to the 'monuments / O princes' mentioned at the outset.Gilding is to monumental sculptureas alliteration is to the sonnet. (Felperin 1985:176-77). If alliterationis largely irrelevantto understanding the significance of the sound pattern,what else, then, could there be of phonetic relevance in Sonnet 55? That a * I am indebtedto Paul Friedrich and Thomas L. Short for their substantive comments and suggestions, which helped improve this article, and to W. RichardRistow for his statisticalguidance. ' A curiosity of the history of scholarship on this subject are two articlesby B. F. Skinner(1939, 1941). Skinner's conclusion about alliteration in the first of these, that 'Shakespeare might as well have drawnhis words out of a hat' (1939: 191), was countered in detail in Goldsmith 1950. See also Pirkhofer1963:3-14. 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 addressesthe generalproblemof sound-meaning correspon- dences and includes some analysis of Shakespeare's poetry. 81 MICHAEL SHAPIRO Brown University Shakespeare's verse is studded with alliteration andparonomasia. The more fundamental ques- tion of a patterned relationship between soundand meaningin his Sonnetshas not been answered, partly because no method of uncovering such correspondences was available. However, once groups of sounds, specifically sonorantand obstruentsequences, are examined as the locus of the sound-meaning nexus, it emerges that Shakespeare consistently aligns these sequences with relational meaningsdefined by the dyad of freedomand constraint. The coherencebetween 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 comprehensiveanswer to the most fundamental question of poetics, whether the sounds of the Sonnets are an echo of the sense. George T. Wright'sbibliographical 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 purportto say beyond noting Shakespeare's obvious use of alliteration, assonance, and consonancein 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 RomanJakobson 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 repeatedin the third strophe.That Shakespeare'affects the letter' in these strophes,and that they are therebylinked at the phonetic level is not in question. Our questionis what performative relationthis purely formallinkage at the level of the signifier might bear to the sonnet's signification,its 'contents' as Shakespeare equivocally puts it. Here Jakobsoncan be of little help, taking as he notoriouslydoes, meaning or content for grantedor reducingit to the received ideas of othercommentators. In termsof his analysis, the most the empirical fact of alliterationcan 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 illustratesas such in the previous sonnet ('0 how much more doth beautybeauteousseem / By that sweet ornament ...'). As ornament or decoration, alliteration bears the same superficially attractive but functionallyinessentialrelationto the poem as 'gilt' does to the 'monuments / O princes' mentioned at the outset.Gilding is to monumental sculptureas alliteration is to the sonnet. (Felperin 1985:176-77). If alliterationis largely irrelevantto understanding the significance of the sound pattern,what else, then, could there be of phonetic relevance in Sonnet 55? That a * I am indebtedto Paul Friedrich and Thomas L. Short for their substantive comments and suggestions, which helped improve this article, and to W. RichardRistow for his statisticalguidance. ' A curiosity of the history of scholarship on this subject are two articlesby B. F. Skinner(1939, 1941). Skinner's conclusion about alliteration in the first of these, that 'Shakespeare might as well have drawnhis words out of a hat' (1939: 191), was countered in detail in Goldsmith 1950. See also Pirkhofer1963:3-14. 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 addressesthe generalproblemof sound-meaning correspon- dences and includes some analysis of Shakespeare's poetry. 81 MICHAEL SHAPIRO Brown University Shakespeare's verse is studded with alliteration andparonomasia. The more fundamental ques- tion of a patterned relationship between soundand meaningin his Sonnetshas not been answered, partly because no method of uncovering such correspondences was available. However, once groups of sounds, specifically sonorantand obstruentsequences, are examined as the locus of the sound-meaning nexus, it emerges that Shakespeare consistently aligns these sequences with relational meaningsdefined by the dyad of freedomand constraint. The coherencebetween 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 comprehensiveanswer to the most fundamental question of poetics, whether the sounds of the Sonnets are an echo of the sense. George T. Wright'sbibliographical 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 purportto say beyond noting Shakespeare's obvious use of alliteration, assonance, and consonancein 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 RomanJakobson 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 repeatedin the third strophe.That Shakespeare'affects the letter' in these strophes,and that they are therebylinked at the phonetic level is not in question. Our questionis what performative relationthis purely formallinkage at the level of the signifier might bear to the sonnet's signification,its 'contents' as Shakespeare equivocally puts it. Here Jakobsoncan be of little help, taking as he notoriouslydoes, meaning or content for grantedor reducingit to the received ideas of othercommentators. In termsof his analysis, the most the empirical fact of alliterationcan 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 illustratesas such in the previous sonnet ('0 how much more doth beautybeauteousseem / By that sweet ornament ...'). As ornament or decoration, alliteration bears the same superficially attractive but functionallyinessentialrelationto the poem as 'gilt' does to the 'monuments / O princes' mentioned at the outset.Gilding is to monumental sculptureas alliteration is to the sonnet. (Felperin 1985:176-77). If alliterationis largely irrelevantto understanding the significance of the sound pattern,what else, then, could there be of phonetic relevance in Sonnet 55? That a * I am indebtedto Paul Friedrich and Thomas L. Short for their substantive comments and suggestions, which helped improve this article, and to W. RichardRistow for his statisticalguidance. ' A curiosity of the history of scholarship on this subject are two articlesby B. F. Skinner(1939, 1941). Skinner's conclusion about alliteration in the first of these, that 'Shakespeare might as well have drawnhis words out of a hat' (1939: 191), was countered in detail in Goldsmith 1950. See also Pirkhofer1963:3-14. 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 addressesthe generalproblemof sound-meaning correspon- dences and includes some analysis of Shakespeare's poetry. 81 MICHAEL SHAPIRO Brown University Shakespeare's verse is studded with alliteration andparonomasia. The more fundamental ques- tion of a patterned relationship between soundand meaningin his Sonnetshas not been answered, partly because no method of uncovering such correspondences was available. However, once groups of sounds, specifically sonorantand obstruentsequences, are examined as the locus of the sound-meaning nexus, it emerges that Shakespeare consistently aligns these sequences with relational meaningsdefined by the dyad of freedomand constraint. The coherencebetween 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 comprehensiveanswer to the most fundamental question of poetics, whether the sounds of the Sonnets are an echo of the sense. George T. Wright'sbibliographical 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 purportto say beyond noting Shakespeare's obvious use of alliteration, assonance, and consonancein 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 RomanJakobson 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 repeatedin the third strophe.That Shakespeare'affects the letter' in these strophes,and that they are therebylinked at the phonetic level is not in question. Our questionis what performative relationthis purely formallinkage at the level of the signifier might bear to the sonnet's signification,its 'contents' as Shakespeare equivocally puts it. Here Jakobsoncan be of little help, taking as he notoriouslydoes, meaning or content for grantedor reducingit to the received ideas of othercommentators. In termsof his analysis, the most the empirical fact of alliterationcan 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 illustratesas such in the previous sonnet ('0 how much more doth beautybeauteousseem / By that sweet ornament ...'). As ornament or decoration, alliteration bears the same superficially attractive but functionallyinessentialrelationto the poem as 'gilt' does to the 'monuments / O princes' mentioned at the outset.Gilding is to monumental sculptureas alliteration is to the sonnet. (Felperin 1985:176-77). If alliterationis largely irrelevantto understanding the significance of the sound pattern,what else, then, could there be of phonetic relevance in Sonnet 55? That a * I am indebtedto Paul Friedrich and Thomas L. Short for their substantive comments and suggestions, which helped improve this article, and to W. RichardRistow for his statisticalguidance. ' A curiosity of the history of scholarship on this subject are two articlesby B. F. Skinner(1939, 1941). Skinner's conclusion about alliteration in the first of these, that 'Shakespeare might as well have drawnhis words out of a hat' (1939: 191), was countered in detail in Goldsmith 1950. See also Pirkhofer1963:3-14. 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 addressesthe generalproblemof sound-meaning correspon- dences and includes some analysis of Shakespeare's poetry. 81 MICHAEL SHAPIRO Brown University Shakespeare's verse is studded with alliteration andparonomasia. The more fundamental ques- tion of a patterned relationship between soundand meaningin his Sonnetshas not been answered, partly because no method of uncovering such correspondences was available. However, once groups of sounds, specifically sonorantand obstruentsequences, are examined as the locus of the sound-meaning nexus, it emerges that Shakespeare consistently aligns these sequences with relational meaningsdefined by the dyad of freedomand constraint. The coherencebetween 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 comprehensiveanswer to the most fundamental question of poetics, whether the sounds of the Sonnets are an echo of the sense. George T. Wright'sbibliographical 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 purportto say beyond noting Shakespeare's obvious use of alliteration, assonance, and consonancein 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 RomanJakobson 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 repeatedin the third strophe.That Shakespeare'affects the letter' in these strophes,and that they are therebylinked at the phonetic level is not in question. Our questionis what performative relationthis purely formallinkage at the level of the signifier might bear to the sonnet's signification,its 'contents' as Shakespeare equivocally puts it. Here Jakobsoncan be of little help, taking as he notoriouslydoes, meaning or content for grantedor reducingit to the received ideas of othercommentators. In termsof his analysis, the most the empirical fact of alliterationcan 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 illustratesas such in the previous sonnet ('0 how much more doth beautybeauteousseem / By that sweet ornament ...'). As ornament or decoration, alliteration bears the same superficially attractive but functionallyinessentialrelationto the poem as 'gilt' does to the 'monuments / O princes' mentioned at the outset.Gilding is to monumental sculptureas alliteration is to the sonnet. (Felperin 1985:176-77). If alliterationis largely irrelevantto understanding the significance of the sound pattern,what else, then, could there be of phonetic relevance in Sonnet 55? That a * I am indebtedto Paul Friedrich and Thomas L. Short for their substantive comments and suggestions, which helped improve this article, and to W. RichardRistow for his statisticalguidance. ' A curiosity of the history of scholarship on this subject are two articlesby B. F. Skinner(1939, 1941). Skinner's conclusion about alliteration in the first of these, that 'Shakespeare might as well have drawnhis words out of a hat' (1939: 191), was countered in detail in Goldsmith 1950. See also Pirkhofer1963:3-14. 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 addressesthe generalproblemof sound-meaning correspon- dences and includes some analysis of Shakespeare's poetry. 81 MICHAEL SHAPIRO Brown University Shakespeare's verse is studded with alliteration andparonomasia. The more fundamental ques- tion of a patterned relationship between soundand meaningin his Sonnetshas not been answered, partly because no method of uncovering such correspondences was available. However, once groups of sounds, specifically sonorantand obstruentsequences, are examined as the locus of the sound-meaning nexus, it emerges that Shakespeare consistently aligns these sequences with relational meaningsdefined by the dyad of freedomand constraint. The coherencebetween 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 comprehensiveanswer to the most fundamental question of poetics, whether the sounds of the Sonnets are an echo of the sense. George T. Wright'sbibliographical 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 purportto say beyond noting Shakespeare's obvious use of alliteration, assonance, and consonancein 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 RomanJakobson 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 repeatedin the third strophe.That Shakespeare'affects the letter' in these strophes,and that they are therebylinked at the phonetic level is not in question. Our questionis what performative relationthis purely formallinkage at the level of the signifier might bear to the sonnet's signification,its 'contents' as Shakespeare equivocally puts it. Here Jakobsoncan be of little help, taking as he notoriouslydoes, meaning or content for grantedor reducingit to the received ideas of othercommentators. In termsof his analysis, the most the empirical fact of alliterationcan 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 illustratesas such in the previous sonnet ('0 how much more doth beautybeauteousseem / By that sweet ornament ...'). As ornament or decoration, alliteration bears the same superficially attractive but functionallyinessentialrelationto the poem as 'gilt' does to the 'monuments / O princes' mentioned at the outset.Gilding is to monumental sculptureas alliteration is to the sonnet. (Felperin 1985:176-77). If alliterationis largely irrelevantto understanding the significance of the sound pattern,what else, then, could there be of phonetic relevance in Sonnet 55? That a * I am indebtedto Paul Friedrich and Thomas L. Short for their substantive comments and suggestions, which helped improve this article, and to W. RichardRistow for his statisticalguidance. ' A curiosity of the history of scholarship on this subject are two articlesby B. F. Skinner(1939, 1941). Skinner's conclusion about alliteration in the first of these, that 'Shakespeare might as well have drawnhis words out of a hat' (1939: 191), was countered in detail in Goldsmith 1950. See also Pirkhofer1963:3-14. 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 addressesthe generalproblemof sound-meaning correspon- dences and includes some analysis of Shakespeare's poetry. 81 MICHAEL SHAPIRO Brown University Shakespeare's verse is studded with alliteration andparonomasia. The more fundamental ques- tion of a patterned relationship between soundand meaningin his Sonnetshas not been answered, partly because no method of uncovering such correspondences was available. However, once groups of sounds, specifically sonorantand obstruentsequences, are examined as the locus of the sound-meaning nexus, it emerges that Shakespeare consistently aligns these sequences with relational meaningsdefined by the dyad of freedomand constraint. The coherencebetween 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 comprehensiveanswer to the most fundamental question of poetics, whether the sounds of the Sonnets are an echo of the sense. George T. Wright'sbibliographical 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 purportto say beyond noting Shakespeare's obvious use of alliteration, assonance, and consonancein 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 RomanJakobson 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 repeatedin the third strophe.That Shakespeare'affects the letter' in these strophes,and that they are therebylinked at the phonetic level is not in question. Our questionis what performative relationthis purely formallinkage at the level of the signifier might bear to the sonnet's signification,its 'contents' as Shakespeare equivocally puts it. Here Jakobsoncan be of little help, taking as he notoriouslydoes, meaning or content for grantedor reducingit to the received ideas of othercommentators. In termsof his analysis, the most the empirical fact of alliterationcan 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 illustratesas such in the previous sonnet ('0 how much more doth beautybeauteousseem / By that sweet ornament ...'). As ornament or decoration, alliteration bears the same superficially attractive but functionallyinessentialrelationto the poem as 'gilt' does to the 'monuments / O princes' mentioned at the outset.Gilding is to monumental sculptureas alliteration is to the sonnet. (Felperin 1985:176-77). If alliterationis largely irrelevantto understanding the significance of the sound pattern,what else, then, could there be of phonetic relevance in Sonnet 55? That a * I am indebtedto Paul Friedrich and Thomas L. Short for their substantive comments and suggestions, which helped improve this article, and to W. RichardRistow for his statisticalguidance. ' A curiosity of the history of scholarship on this subject are two articlesby B. F. Skinner(1939, 1941). Skinner's conclusion about alliteration in the first of these, that 'Shakespeare might as well have drawnhis words out of a hat' (1939: 191), was countered in detail in Goldsmith 1950. See also Pirkhofer1963:3-14. 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 addressesthe generalproblemof sound-meaning correspon- dences and includes some analysis of Shakespeare's poetry. 81 MICHAEL SHAPIRO Brown University Shakespeare's verse is studded with alliteration andparonomasia. The more fundamental ques- tion of a patterned relationship between soundand meaningin his Sonnetshas not been answered, partly because no method of uncovering such correspondences was available. However, once groups of sounds, specifically sonorantand obstruentsequences, are examined as the locus of the sound-meaning nexus, it emerges that Shakespeare consistently aligns these sequences with relational meaningsdefined by the dyad of freedomand constraint. The coherencebetween 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 comprehensiveanswer to the most fundamental question of poetics, whether the sounds of the Sonnets are an echo of the sense. George T. Wright'sbibliographical 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 purportto say beyond noting Shakespeare's obvious use of alliteration, assonance, and consonancein 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 RomanJakobson 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 repeatedin the third strophe.That Shakespeare'affects the letter' in these strophes,and that they are therebylinked at the phonetic level is not in question. Our questionis what performative relationthis purely formallinkage at the level of the signifier might bear to the sonnet's signification,its 'contents' as Shakespeare equivocally puts it. Here Jakobsoncan be of little help, taking as he notoriouslydoes, meaning or content for grantedor reducingit to the received ideas of othercommentators. In termsof his analysis, the most the empirical fact of alliterationcan 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 illustratesas such in the previous sonnet ('0 how much more doth beautybeauteousseem / By that sweet ornament ...'). As ornament or decoration, alliteration bears the same superficially attractive but functionallyinessentialrelationto the poem as 'gilt' does to the 'monuments / O princes' mentioned at the outset.Gilding is to monumental sculptureas alliteration is to the sonnet. (Felperin 1985:176-77). If alliterationis largely irrelevantto understanding the significance of the sound pattern,what else, then, could there be of phonetic relevance in Sonnet 55? That a * I am indebtedto Paul Friedrich and Thomas L. Short for their substantive comments and suggestions, which helped improve this article, and to W. RichardRistow for his statisticalguidance. ' A curiosity of the history of scholarship on this subject are two articlesby B. F. Skinner(1939, 1941). Skinner's conclusion about alliteration in the first of these, that 'Shakespeare might as well have drawnhis words out of a hat' (1939: 191), was countered in detail in Goldsmith 1950. See also Pirkhofer1963:3-14. 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 addressesthe generalproblemof sound-meaning correspon- dences and includes some analysis of Shakespeare's poetry. 81 MICHAEL SHAPIRO Brown University Shakespeare's verse is studded with alliteration andparonomasia. The more fundamental ques- tion of a patterned relationship between soundand meaningin his Sonnetshas not been answered, partly because no method of uncovering such correspondences was available. However, once groups of sounds, specifically sonorantand obstruentsequences, are examined as the locus of the sound-meaning nexus, it emerges that Shakespeare consistently aligns these sequences with relational meaningsdefined by the dyad of freedomand constraint. The coherencebetween 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 comprehensiveanswer to the most fundamental question of poetics, whether the sounds of the Sonnets are an echo of the sense. George T. Wright'sbibliographical 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 purportto say beyond noting Shakespeare's obvious use of alliteration, assonance, and consonancein 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 RomanJakobson 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 repeatedin the third strophe.That Shakespeare'affects the letter' in these strophes,and that they are therebylinked at the phonetic level is not in question. Our questionis what performative relationthis purely formallinkage at the level of the signifier might bear to the sonnet's signification,its 'contents' as Shakespeare equivocally puts it. Here Jakobsoncan be of little help, taking as he notoriouslydoes, meaning or content for grantedor reducingit to the received ideas of othercommentators. In termsof his analysis, the most the empirical fact of alliterationcan 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 illustratesas such in the previous sonnet ('0 how much more doth beautybeauteousseem / By that sweet ornament ...'). As ornament or decoration, alliteration bears the same superficially attractive but functionallyinessentialrelationto the poem as 'gilt' does to the 'monuments / O princes' mentioned at the outset.Gilding is to monumental sculptureas alliteration is to the sonnet. (Felperin 1985:176-77). If alliterationis largely irrelevantto understanding the significance of the sound pattern,what else, then, could there be of phonetic relevance in Sonnet 55? That a * I am indebtedto Paul Friedrich and Thomas L. Short for their substantive comments and suggestions, which helped improve this article, and to W. RichardRistow for his statisticalguidance. ' A curiosity of the history of scholarship on this subject are two articlesby B. F. Skinner(1939, 1941). Skinner's conclusion about alliteration in the first of these, that 'Shakespeare might as well have drawnhis words out of a hat' (1939: 191), was countered in detail in Goldsmith 1950. See also Pirkhofer1963:3-14. 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 addressesthe generalproblemof sound-meaning correspon- dences and includes some analysis of Shakespeare's poetry. 81 MICHAEL SHAPIRO Brown University Shakespeare's verse is studded with alliteration andparonomasia. The more fundamental ques- tion of a patterned relationship between soundand meaningin his Sonnetshas not been answered, partly because no method of uncovering such correspondences was available. However, once groups of sounds, specifically sonorantand obstruentsequences, are examined as the locus of the sound-meaning nexus, it emerges that Shakespeare consistently aligns these sequences with relational meaningsdefined by the dyad of freedomand constraint. The coherencebetween 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 comprehensiveanswer to the most fundamental question of poetics, whether the sounds of the Sonnets are an echo of the sense. George T. Wright'sbibliographical 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 purportto say beyond noting Shakespeare's obvious use of alliteration, assonance, and consonancein 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 RomanJakobson 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 repeatedin the third strophe.That Shakespeare'affects the letter' in these strophes,and that they are therebylinked at the phonetic level is not in question. Our questionis what performative relationthis purely formallinkage at the level of the signifier might bear to the sonnet's signification,its 'contents' as Shakespeare equivocally puts it. Here Jakobsoncan be of little help, taking as he notoriouslydoes, meaning or content for grantedor reducingit to the received ideas of othercommentators. In termsof his analysis, the most the empirical fact of alliterationcan 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 illustratesas such in the previous sonnet ('0 how much more doth beautybeauteousseem / By that sweet ornament ...'). As ornament or decoration, alliteration bears the same superficially attractive but functionallyinessentialrelationto the poem as 'gilt' does to the 'monuments / O princes' mentioned at the outset.Gilding is to monumental sculptureas alliteration is to the sonnet. (Felperin 1985:176-77). If alliterationis largely irrelevantto understanding the significance of the sound pattern,what else, then, could there be of phonetic relevance in Sonnet 55? That a * I am indebtedto Paul Friedrich and Thomas L. Short for their substantive comments and suggestions, which helped improve this article, and to W. RichardRistow for his statisticalguidance. ' A curiosity of the history of scholarship on this subject are two articlesby B. F. Skinner(1939, 1941). Skinner's conclusion about alliteration in the first of these, that 'Shakespeare might as well have drawnhis words out of a hat' (1939: 191), was countered in detail in Goldsmith 1950. See also Pirkhofer1963:3-14. 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 addressesthe generalproblemof sound-meaning correspon- dences and includes some analysis of Shakespeare's poetry. 81 MICHAEL SHAPIRO Brown University Shakespeare's verse is studded with alliteration andparonomasia. The more fundamental ques- tion of a patterned relationship between soundand meaningin his Sonnetshas not been answered, partly because no method of uncovering such correspondences was available. However, once groups of sounds, specifically sonorantand obstruentsequences, are examined as the locus of the sound-meaning nexus, it emerges that Shakespeare consistently aligns these sequences with relational meaningsdefined by the dyad of freedomand constraint. The coherencebetween 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 comprehensiveanswer to the most fundamental question of poetics, whether the sounds of the Sonnets are an echo of the sense. George T. Wright'sbibliographical 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 purportto say beyond noting Shakespeare's obvious use of alliteration, assonance, and consonancein 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 RomanJakobson 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 repeatedin the third strophe.That Shakespeare'affects the letter' in these strophes,and that they are therebylinked at the phonetic level is not in question. Our questionis what performative relationthis purely formallinkage at the level of the signifier might bear to the sonnet's signification,its 'contents' as Shakespeare equivocally puts it. Here Jakobsoncan be of little help, taking as he notoriouslydoes, meaning or content for grantedor reducingit to the received ideas of othercommentators. In termsof his analysis, the most the empirical fact of alliterationcan 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 illustratesas such in the previous sonnet ('0 how much more doth beautybeauteousseem / By that sweet ornament ...'). As ornament or decoration, alliteration bears the same superficially attractive but functionallyinessentialrelationto the poem as 'gilt' does to the 'monuments / O princes' mentioned at the outset.Gilding is to monumental sculptureas alliteration is to the sonnet. (Felperin 1985:176-77). If alliterationis largely irrelevantto understanding the significance of the sound pattern,what else, then, could there be of phonetic relevance in Sonnet 55? That a * I am indebtedto Paul Friedrich and Thomas L. Short for their substantive comments and suggestions, which helped improve this article, and to W. RichardRistow for his statisticalguidance. ' A curiosity of the history of scholarship on this subject are two articlesby B. F. Skinner(1939, 1941). Skinner's conclusion about alliteration in the first of these, that 'Shakespeare might as well have drawnhis words out of a hat' (1939: 191), was countered in detail in Goldsmith 1950. See also Pirkhofer1963:3-14. 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 addressesthe generalproblemof sound-meaning correspon- dences and includes some analysis of Shakespeare's poetry. 81 MICHAEL SHAPIRO Brown University Shakespeare's verse is studded with alliteration andparonomasia. The more fundamental ques- tion of a patterned relationship between soundand meaningin his Sonnetshas not been answered, partly because no method of uncovering such correspondences was available. However, once groups of sounds, specifically sonorantand obstruentsequences, are examined as the locus of the sound-meaning nexus, it emerges that Shakespeare consistently aligns these sequences with relational meaningsdefined by the dyad of freedomand constraint. The coherencebetween 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 comprehensiveanswer to the most fundamental question of poetics, whether the sounds of the Sonnets are an echo of the sense. George T. Wright'sbibliographical 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 purportto say beyond noting Shakespeare's obvious use of alliteration, assonance, and consonancein 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 RomanJakobson 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 repeatedin the third strophe.That Shakespeare'affects the letter' in these strophes,and that they are therebylinked at the phonetic level is not in question. Our questionis what performative relationthis purely formallinkage at the level of the signifier might bear to the sonnet's signification,its 'contents' as Shakespeare equivocally puts it. Here Jakobsoncan be of little help, taking as he notoriouslydoes, meaning or content for grantedor reducingit to the received ideas of othercommentators. In termsof his analysis, the most the empirical fact of alliterationcan 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 illustratesas such in the previous sonnet ('0 how much more doth beautybeauteousseem / By that sweet ornament ...'). As ornament or decoration, alliteration bears the same superficially attractive but functionallyinessentialrelationto the poem as 'gilt' does to the 'monuments / O princes' mentioned at the outset.Gilding is to monumental sculptureas alliteration is to the sonnet. (Felperin 1985:176-77). If alliterationis largely irrelevantto understanding the significance of the sound pattern,what else, then, could there be of phonetic relevance in Sonnet 55? That a * I am indebtedto Paul Friedrich and Thomas L. Short for their substantive comments and suggestions, which helped improve this article, and to W. RichardRistow for his statisticalguidance. ' A curiosity of the history of scholarship on this subject are two articlesby B. F. Skinner(1939, 1941). Skinner's conclusion about alliteration in the first of these, that 'Shakespeare might as well have drawnhis words out of a hat' (1939: 191), was countered in detail in Goldsmith 1950. See also Pirkhofer1963:3-14. 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 addressesthe generalproblemof sound-meaning correspon- dences and includes some analysis of Shakespeare's poetry. 81 MICHAEL SHAPIRO Brown University Shakespeare's verse is studded with alliteration andparonomasia. The more fundamental ques- tion of a patterned relationship between soundand meaningin his Sonnetshas not been answered, partly because no method of uncovering such correspondences was available. However, once groups of sounds, specifically sonorantand obstruentsequences, are examined as the locus of the sound-meaning nexus, it emerges that Shakespeare consistently aligns these sequences with relational meaningsdefined by the dyad of freedomand constraint. The coherencebetween 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 comprehensiveanswer to the most fundamental question of poetics, whether the sounds of the Sonnets are an echo of the sense. George T. Wright'sbibliographical 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 purportto say beyond noting Shakespeare's obvious use of alliteration, assonance, and consonancein 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 RomanJakobson 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 repeatedin the third strophe.That Shakespeare'affects the letter' in these strophes,and that they are therebylinked at the phonetic level is not in question. Our questionis what performative relationthis purely formallinkage at the level of the signifier might bear to the sonnet's signification,its 'contents' as Shakespeare equivocally puts it. Here Jakobsoncan be of little help, taking as he notoriouslydoes, meaning or content for grantedor reducingit to the received ideas of othercommentators. In termsof his analysis, the most the empirical fact of alliterationcan 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 illustratesas such in the previous sonnet ('0 how much more doth beautybeauteousseem / By that sweet ornament ...'). As ornament or decoration, alliteration bears the same superficially attractive but functionallyinessentialrelationto the poem as 'gilt' does to the 'monuments / O princes' mentioned at the outset.Gilding is to monumental sculptureas alliteration is to the sonnet. (Felperin 1985:176-77). If alliterationis largely irrelevantto understanding the significance of the sound pattern,what else, then, could there be of phonetic relevance in Sonnet 55? That a * I am indebtedto Paul Friedrich and Thomas L. Short for their substantive comments and suggestions, which helped improve this article, and to W. RichardRistow for his statisticalguidance. ' A curiosity of the history of scholarship on this subject are two articlesby B. F. Skinner(1939, 1941). Skinner's conclusion about alliteration in the first of these, that 'Shakespeare might as well have drawnhis words out of a hat' (1939: 191), was countered in detail in Goldsmith 1950. See also Pirkhofer1963:3-14. 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 addressesthe generalproblemof sound-meaning correspon- dences and includes some analysis of Shakespeare's poetry. 81 MICHAEL SHAPIRO Brown University Shakespeare's verse is studded with alliteration andparonomasia. The more fundamental ques- tion of a patterned relationship between soundand meaningin his Sonnetshas not been answered, partly because no method of uncovering such correspondences was available. However, once groups of sounds, specifically sonorantand obstruentsequences, are examined as the locus of the sound-meaning nexus, it emerges that Shakespeare consistently aligns these sequences with relational meaningsdefined by the dyad of freedomand constraint. The coherencebetween 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 comprehensiveanswer to the most fundamental question of poetics, whether the sounds of the Sonnets are an echo of the sense. George T. Wright'sbibliographical 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 purportto say beyond noting Shakespeare's obvious use of alliteration, assonance, and consonancein 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 RomanJakobson 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 repeatedin the third strophe.That Shakespeare'affects the letter' in these strophes,and that they are therebylinked at the phonetic level is not in question. Our questionis what performative relationthis purely formallinkage at the level of the signifier might bear to the sonnet's signification,its 'contents' as Shakespeare equivocally puts it. Here Jakobsoncan be of little help, taking as he notoriouslydoes, meaning or content for grantedor reducingit to the received ideas of othercommentators. In termsof his analysis, the most the empirical fact of alliterationcan 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 illustratesas such in the previous sonnet ('0 how much more doth beautybeauteousseem / By that sweet ornament ...'). As ornament or decoration, alliteration bears the same superficially attractive but functionallyinessentialrelationto the poem as 'gilt' does to the 'monuments / O princes' mentioned at the outset.Gilding is to monumental sculptureas alliteration is to the sonnet. (Felperin 1985:176-77). If alliterationis largely irrelevantto understanding the significance of the sound pattern,what else, then, could there be of phonetic relevance in Sonnet 55? That a * I am indebtedto Paul Friedrich and Thomas L. Short for their substantive comments and suggestions, which helped improve this article, and to W. RichardRistow for his statisticalguidance. ' A curiosity of the history of scholarship on this subject are two articlesby B. F. Skinner(1939, 1941). Skinner's conclusion about alliteration in the first of these, that 'Shakespeare might as well have drawnhis words out of a hat' (1939: 191), was countered in detail in Goldsmith 1950. See also Pirkhofer1963:3-14. 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 addressesthe generalproblemof sound-meaning correspon- dences and includes some analysis of Shakespeare's poetry. 81 MICHAEL SHAPIRO Brown University Shakespeare's verse is studded with alliteration andparonomasia. The more fundamental ques- tion of a patterned relationship between soundand meaningin his Sonnetshas not been answered, partly because no method of uncovering such correspondences was available. However, once groups of sounds, specifically sonorantand obstruentsequences, are examined as the locus of the sound-meaning nexus, it emerges that Shakespeare consistently aligns these sequences with relational meaningsdefined by the dyad of freedomand constraint. The coherencebetween 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 comprehensiveanswer to the most fundamental question of poetics, whether the sounds of the Sonnets are an echo of the sense. George T. Wright'sbibliographical 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 purportto say beyond noting Shakespeare's obvious use of alliteration, assonance, and consonancein 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 RomanJakobson 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 repeatedin the third strophe.That Shakespeare'affects the letter' in these strophes,and that they are therebylinked at the phonetic level is not in question. Our questionis what performative relationthis purely formallinkage at the level of the signifier might bear to the sonnet's signification,its 'contents' as Shakespeare equivocally puts it. Here Jakobsoncan be of little help, taking as he notoriouslydoes, meaning or content for grantedor reducingit to the received ideas of othercommentators. In termsof his analysis, the most the empirical fact of alliterationcan 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 illustratesas such in the previous sonnet ('0 how much more doth beautybeauteousseem / By that sweet ornament ...'). As ornament or decoration, alliteration bears the same superficially attractive but functionallyinessentialrelationto the poem as 'gilt' does to the 'monuments / O princes' mentioned at the outset.Gilding is to monumental sculptureas alliteration is to the sonnet. (Felperin 1985:176-77). If alliterationis largely irrelevantto understanding the significance of the sound pattern,what else, then, could there be of phonetic relevance in Sonnet 55? That a * I am indebtedto Paul Friedrich and Thomas L. Short for their substantive comments and suggestions, which helped improve this article, and to W. RichardRistow for his statisticalguidance. ' A curiosity of the history of scholarship on this subject are two articlesby B. F. Skinner(1939, 1941). Skinner's conclusion about alliteration in the first of these, that 'Shakespeare might as well have drawnhis words out of a hat' (1939: 191), was countered in detail in Goldsmith 1950. See also Pirkhofer1963:3-14. 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 addressesthe generalproblemof sound-meaning correspon- dences and includes some analysis of Shakespeare's poetry. 81 MICHAEL SHAPIRO Brown University Shakespeare's verse is studded with alliteration andparonomasia. The more fundamental ques- tion of a patterned relationship between soundand meaningin his Sonnetshas not been answered, partly because no method of uncovering such correspondences was available. However, once groups of sounds, specifically sonorantand obstruentsequences, are examined as the locus of the sound-meaning nexus, it emerges that Shakespeare consistently aligns these sequences with relational meaningsdefined by the dyad of freedomand constraint. The coherencebetween 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 comprehensiveanswer to the most fundamental question of poetics, whether the sounds of the Sonnets are an echo of the sense. George T. Wright'sbibliographical 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 purportto say beyond noting Shakespeare's obvious use of alliteration, assonance, and consonancein 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 RomanJakobson 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 repeatedin the third strophe.That Shakespeare'affects the letter' in these strophes,and that they are therebylinked at the phonetic level is not in question. Our questionis what performative relationthis purely formallinkage at the level of the signifier might bear to the sonnet's signification,its 'contents' as Shakespeare equivocally puts it. Here Jakobsoncan be of little help, taking as he notoriouslydoes, meaning or content for grantedor reducingit to the received ideas of othercommentators. In termsof his analysis, the most the empirical fact of alliterationcan 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 illustratesas such in the previous sonnet ('0 how much more doth beautybeauteousseem / By that sweet ornament ...'). As ornament or decoration, alliteration bears the same superficially attractive but functionallyinessentialrelationto the poem as 'gilt' does to the 'monuments / O princes' mentioned at the outset.Gilding is to monumental sculptureas alliteration is to the sonnet. (Felperin 1985:176-77). If alliterationis largely irrelevantto understanding the significance of the sound pattern,what else, then, could there be of phonetic relevance in Sonnet 55? That a * I am indebtedto Paul Friedrich and Thomas L. Short for their substantive comments and suggestions, which helped improve this article, and to W. RichardRistow for his statisticalguidance. ' A curiosity of the history of scholarship on this subject are two articlesby B. F. Skinner(1939, 1941). Skinner's conclusion about alliteration in the first of these, that 'Shakespeare might as well have drawnhis words out of a hat' (1939: 191), was countered in detail in Goldsmith 1950. See also Pirkhofer1963:3-14. 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 addressesthe generalproblemof sound-meaning correspon- dences and includes some analysis of Shakespeare's poetry. 81 MICHAEL SHAPIRO Brown University Shakespeare's verse is studded with alliteration andparonomasia. The more fundamental ques- tion of a patterned relationship between soundand meaningin his Sonnetshas not been answered, partly because no method of uncovering such correspondences was available. However, once groups of sounds, specifically sonorantand obstruentsequences, are examined as the locus of the sound-meaning nexus, it emerges that Shakespeare consistently aligns these sequences with relational meaningsdefined by the dyad of freedomand constraint. The coherencebetween 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 comprehensiveanswer to the most fundamental question of poetics, whether the sounds of the Sonnets are an echo of the sense. George T. Wright'sbibliographical 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 purportto say beyond noting Shakespeare's obvious use of alliteration, assonance, and consonancein 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 RomanJakobson 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 repeatedin the third strophe.That Shakespeare'affects the letter' in these strophes,and that they are therebylinked at the phonetic level is not in question. Our questionis what performative relationthis purely formallinkage at the level of the signifier might bear to the sonnet's signification,its 'contents' as Shakespeare equivocally puts it. Here Jakobsoncan be of little help, taking as he notoriouslydoes, meaning or content for grantedor reducingit to the received ideas of othercommentators. In termsof his analysis, the most the empirical fact of alliterationcan 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 illustratesas such in the previous sonnet ('0 how much more doth beautybeauteousseem / By that sweet ornament ...'). As ornament or decoration, alliteration bears the same superficially attractive but functionallyinessentialrelationto the poem as 'gilt' does to the 'monuments / O princes' mentioned at the outset.Gilding is to monumental sculptureas alliteration is to the sonnet. (Felperin 1985:176-77). If alliterationis largely irrelevantto understanding the significance of the sound pattern,what else, then, could there be of phonetic relevance in Sonnet 55? That a * I am indebtedto Paul Friedrich and Thomas L. Short for their substantive comments and suggestions, which helped improve this article, and to W. RichardRistow for his statisticalguidance. ' A curiosity of the history of scholarship on this subject are two articlesby B. F. Skinner(1939, 1941). Skinner's conclusion about alliteration in the first of these, that 'Shakespeare might as well have drawnhis words out of a hat' (1939: 191), was countered in detail in Goldsmith 1950. See also Pirkhofer1963:3-14. 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 addressesthe generalproblemof sound-meaning correspon- dences and includes some analysis of Shakespeare's poetry. 81 MICHAEL SHAPIRO Brown University Shakespeare's verse is studded with alliteration andparonomasia. The more fundamental ques- tion of a patterned relationship between soundand meaningin his Sonnetshas not been answered, partly because no method of uncovering such correspondences was available. However, once groups of sounds, specifically sonorantand obstruentsequences, are examined as the locus of the sound-meaning nexus, it emerges that Shakespeare consistently aligns these sequences with relational meaningsdefined by the dyad of freedomand constraint. The coherencebetween 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 comprehensiveanswer to the most fundamental question of poetics, whether the sounds of the Sonnets are an echo of the sense. George T. Wright'sbibliographical 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 purportto say beyond noting Shakespeare's obvious use of alliteration, assonance, and consonancein 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 RomanJakobson 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 repeatedin the third strophe.That Shakespeare'affects the letter' in these strophes,and that they are therebylinked at the phonetic level is not in question. Our questionis what performative relationthis purely formallinkage at the level of the signifier might bear to the sonnet's signification,its 'contents' as Shakespeare equivocally puts it. Here Jakobsoncan be of little help, taking as he notoriouslydoes, meaning or content for grantedor reducingit to the received ideas of othercommentators. In termsof his analysis, the most the empirical fact of alliterationcan 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 illustratesas such in the previous sonnet ('0 how much more doth beautybeauteousseem / By that sweet ornament ...'). As ornament or decoration, alliteration bears the same superficially attractive but functionallyinessentialrelationto the poem as 'gilt' does to the 'monuments / O princes' mentioned at the outset.Gilding is to monumental sculptureas alliteration is to the sonnet. (Felperin 1985:176-77). If alliterationis largely irrelevantto understanding the significance of the sound pattern,what else, then, could there be of phonetic relevance in Sonnet 55? That a * I am indebtedto Paul Friedrich and Thomas L. Short for their substantive comments and suggestions, which helped improve this article, and to W. RichardRistow for his statisticalguidance. ' A curiosity of the history of scholarship on this subject are two articlesby B. F. Skinner(1939, 1941). Skinner's conclusion about alliteration in the first of these, that 'Shakespeare might as well have drawnhis words out of a hat' (1939: 191), was countered in detail in Goldsmith 1950. See also Pirkhofer1963:3-14. 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 addressesthe generalproblemof sound-meaning correspon- dences and includes some analysis of Shakespeare's poetry. 81 MICHAEL SHAPIRO Brown University Shakespeare's verse is studded with alliteration andparonomasia. The more fundamental ques- tion of a patterned relationship between soundand meaningin his Sonnetshas not been answered, partly because no method of uncovering such correspondences was available. However, once groups of sounds, specifically sonorantand obstruentsequences, are examined as the locus of the sound-meaning nexus, it emerges that Shakespeare consistently aligns these sequences with relational meaningsdefined by the dyad of freedomand constraint. The coherencebetween 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 comprehensiveanswer to the most fundamental question of poetics, whether the sounds of the Sonnets are an echo of the sense. George T. Wright'sbibliographical 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 purportto say beyond noting Shakespeare's obvious use of alliteration, assonance, and consonancein 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 RomanJakobson 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 repeatedin the third strophe.That Shakespeare'affects the letter' in these strophes,and that they are therebylinked at the phonetic level is not in question. Our questionis what performative relationthis purely formallinkage at the level of the signifier might bear to the sonnet's signification,its 'contents' as Shakespeare equivocally puts it. Here Jakobsoncan be of little help, taking as he notoriouslydoes, meaning or content for grantedor reducingit to the received ideas of othercommentators. In termsof his analysis, the most the empirical fact of alliterationcan 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 illustratesas such in the previous sonnet ('0 how much more doth beautybeauteousseem / By that sweet ornament ...'). As ornament or decoration, alliteration bears the same superficially attractive but functionallyinessentialrelationto the poem as 'gilt' does to the 'monuments / O princes' mentioned at the outset.Gilding is to monumental sculptureas alliteration is to the sonnet. (Felperin 1985:176-77). If alliterationis largely irrelevantto understanding the significance of the sound pattern,what else, then, could there be of phonetic relevance in Sonnet 55? That a * I am indebtedto Paul Friedrich and Thomas L. Short for their substantive comments and suggestions, which helped improve this article, and to W. RichardRistow for his statisticalguidance. ' A curiosity of the history of scholarship on this subject are two articlesby B. F. Skinner(1939, 1941). Skinner's conclusion about alliteration in the first of these, that 'Shakespeare might as well have drawnhis words out of a hat' (1939: 191), was countered in detail in Goldsmith 1950. See also Pirkhofer1963:3-14. 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 addressesthe generalproblemof sound-meaning correspon- dences and includes some analysis of Shakespeare's poetry. 81 MICHAEL SHAPIRO Brown University Shakespeare's verse is studded with alliteration andparonomasia. The more fundamental ques- tion of a patterned relationship between soundand meaningin his Sonnetshas not been answered, partly because no method of uncovering such correspondences was available. However, once groups of sounds, specifically sonorantand obstruentsequences, are examined as the locus of the sound-meaning nexus, it emerges that Shakespeare consistently aligns these sequences with relational meaningsdefined by the dyad of freedomand constraint. The coherencebetween 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 comprehensiveanswer to the most fundamental question of poetics, whether the sounds of the Sonnets are an echo of the sense. George T. Wright'sbibliographical 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 purportto say beyond noting Shakespeare's obvious use of alliteration, assonance, and consonancein 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 RomanJakobson 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 repeatedin the third strophe.That Shakespeare'affects the letter' in these strophes,and that they are therebylinked at the phonetic level is not in question. Our questionis what performative relationthis purely formallinkage at the level of the signifier might bear to the sonnet's signification,its 'contents' as Shakespeare equivocally puts it. Here Jakobsoncan be of little help, taking as he notoriouslydoes, meaning or content for grantedor reducingit to the received ideas of othercommentators. In termsof his analysis, the most the empirical fact of alliterationcan 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 illustratesas such in the previous sonnet ('0 how much more doth beautybeauteousseem / By that sweet ornament ...'). As ornament or decoration, alliteration bears the same superficially attractive but functionallyinessentialrelationto the poem as 'gilt' does to the 'monuments / O princes' mentioned at the outset.Gilding is to monumental sculptureas alliteration is to the sonnet. (Felperin 1985:176-77). If alliterationis largely irrelevantto understanding the significance of the sound pattern,what else, then, could there be of phonetic relevance in Sonnet 55? That a * I am indebtedto Paul Friedrich and Thomas L. Short for their substantive comments and suggestions, which helped improve this article, and to W. RichardRistow for his statisticalguidance. ' A curiosity of the history of scholarship on this subject are two articlesby B. F. Skinner(1939, 1941). Skinner's conclusion about alliteration in the first of these, that 'Shakespeare might as well have drawnhis words out of a hat' (1939: 191), was countered in detail in Goldsmith 1950. See also Pirkhofer1963:3-14. 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 addressesthe generalproblemof sound-meaning correspon- dences and includes some analysis of Shakespeare's poetry. 81 MICHAEL SHAPIRO Brown University Shakespeare's verse is studded with alliteration andparonomasia. The more fundamental ques- tion of a patterned relationship between soundand meaningin his Sonnetshas not been answered, partly because no method of uncovering such correspondences was available. However, once groups of sounds, specifically sonorantand obstruentsequences, are examined as the locus of the sound-meaning nexus, it emerges that Shakespeare consistently aligns these sequences with relational meaningsdefined by the dyad of freedomand constraint. The coherencebetween 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 comprehensiveanswer to the most fundamental question of poetics, whether the sounds of the Sonnets are an echo of the sense. George T. Wright'sbibliographical 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 purportto say beyond noting Shakespeare's obvious use of alliteration, assonance, and consonancein 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 RomanJakobson 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 repeatedin the third strophe.That Shakespeare'affects the letter' in these strophes,and that they are therebylinked at the phonetic level is not in question. Our questionis what performative relationthis purely formallinkage at the level of the signifier might bear to the sonnet's signification,its 'contents' as Shakespeare equivocally puts it. Here Jakobsoncan be of little help, taking as he notoriouslydoes, meaning or content for grantedor reducingit to the received ideas of othercommentators. In termsof his analysis, the most the empirical fact of alliterationcan 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 illustratesas such in the previous sonnet ('0 how much more doth beautybeauteousseem / By that sweet ornament ...'). As ornament or decoration, alliteration bears the same superficially attractive but functionallyinessentialrelationto the poem as 'gilt' does to the 'monuments / O princes' mentioned at the outset.Gilding is to monumental sculptureas alliteration is to the sonnet. (Felperin 1985:176-77). If alliterationis largely irrelevantto understanding the significance of the sound pattern,what else, then, could there be of phonetic relevance in Sonnet 55? That a * I am indebtedto Paul Friedrich and Thomas L. Short for their substantive comments and suggestions, which helped improve this article, and to W. RichardRistow for his statisticalguidance. ' A curiosity of the history of scholarship on this subject are two articlesby B. F. Skinner(1939, 1941). Skinner's conclusion about alliteration in the first of these, that 'Shakespeare might as well have drawnhis words out of a hat' (1939: 191), was countered in detail in Goldsmith 1950. See also Pirkhofer1963:3-14. 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 addressesthe generalproblemof sound-meaning correspon- dences and includes some analysis of Shakespeare's poetry. 81 MICHAEL SHAPIRO Brown University Shakespeare's verse is studded with alliteration andparonomasia. The more fundamental ques- tion of a patterned relationship between soundand meaningin his Sonnetshas not been answered, partly because no method of uncovering such correspondences was available. However, once groups of sounds, specifically sonorantand obstruentsequences, are examined as the locus of the sound-meaning nexus, it emerges that Shakespeare consistently aligns these sequences with relational meaningsdefined by the dyad of freedomand constraint. The coherencebetween 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 comprehensiveanswer to the most fundamental question of poetics, whether the sounds of the Sonnets are an echo of the sense. George T. Wright'sbibliographical 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 purportto say beyond noting Shakespeare's obvious use of alliteration, assonance, and consonancein 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 RomanJakobson 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 repeatedin the third strophe.That Shakespeare'affects the letter' in these strophes,and that they are therebylinked at the phonetic level is not in question. Our questionis what performative relationthis purely formallinkage at the level of the signifier might bear to the sonnet's signification,its 'contents' as Shakespeare equivocally puts it. Here Jakobsoncan be of little help, taking as he notoriouslydoes, meaning or content for grantedor reducingit to the received ideas of othercommentators. In termsof his analysis, the most the empirical fact of alliterationcan 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 illustratesas such in the previous sonnet ('0 how much more doth beautybeauteousseem / By that sweet ornament ...'). As ornament or decoration, alliteration bears the same superficially attractive but functionallyinessentialrelationto the poem as 'gilt' does to the 'monuments / O princes' mentioned at the outset.Gilding is to monumental sculptureas alliteration is to the sonnet. (Felperin 1985:176-77). If alliterationis largely irrelevantto understanding the significance of the sound pattern,what else, then, could there be of phonetic relevance in Sonnet 55? That a * I am indebtedto Paul Friedrich and Thomas L. Short for their substantive comments and suggestions, which helped improve this article, and to W. RichardRistow for his statisticalguidance. ' A curiosity of the history of scholarship on this subject are two articlesby B. F. Skinner(1939, 1941). Skinner's conclusion about alliteration in the first of these, that 'Shakespeare might as well have drawnhis words out of a hat' (1939: 191), was countered in detail in Goldsmith 1950. See also Pirkhofer1963:3-14. 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 addressesthe generalproblemof sound-meaning correspon- dences and includes some analysis of Shakespeare's poetry. 81 MICHAEL SHAPIRO Brown University Shakespeare's verse is studded with alliteration andparonomasia. The more fundamental ques- tion of a patterned relationship between soundand meaningin his Sonnetshas not been answered, partly because no method of uncovering such correspondences was available. However, once groups of sounds, specifically sonorantand obstruentsequences, are examined as the locus of the sound-meaning nexus, it emerges that Shakespeare consistently aligns these sequences with relational meaningsdefined by the dyad of freedomand constraint. The coherencebetween 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 comprehensiveanswer to the most fundamental question of poetics, whether the sounds of the Sonnets are an echo of the sense. George T. Wright'sbibliographical 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 purportto say beyond noting Shakespeare's obvious use of alliteration, assonance, and consonancein 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 RomanJakobson 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 repeatedin the third strophe.That Shakespeare'affects the letter' in these strophes,and that they are therebylinked at the phonetic level is not in question. Our questionis what performative relationthis purely formallinkage at the level of the signifier might bear to the sonnet's signification,its 'contents' as Shakespeare equivocally puts it. Here Jakobsoncan be of little help, taking as he notoriouslydoes, meaning or content for grantedor reducingit to the received ideas of othercommentators. In termsof his analysis, the most the empirical fact of alliterationcan 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 illustratesas such in the previous sonnet ('0 how much more doth beautybeauteousseem / By that sweet ornament ...'). As ornament or decoration, alliteration bears the same superficially attractive but functionallyinessentialrelationto the poem as 'gilt' does to the 'monuments / O princes' mentioned at the outset.Gilding is to monumental sculptureas alliteration is to the sonnet. (Felperin 1985:176-77). If alliterationis largely irrelevantto understanding the significance of the sound pattern,what else, then, could there be of phonetic relevance in Sonnet 55? That a * I am indebtedto Paul Friedrich and Thomas L. Short for their substantive comments and suggestions, which helped improve this article, and to W. RichardRistow for his statisticalguidance. ' A curiosity of the history of scholarship on this subject are two articlesby B. F. Skinner(1939, 1941). Skinner's conclusion about alliteration in the first of these, that 'Shakespeare might as well have drawnhis words out of a hat' (1939: 191), was countered in detail in Goldsmith 1950. See also Pirkhofer1963:3-14. 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 addressesthe generalproblemof sound-meaning correspon- dences and includes some analysis of Shakespeare's poetry. 81 MICHAEL SHAPIRO Brown University Shakespeare's verse is studded with alliteration andparonomasia. The more fundamental ques- tion of a patterned relationship between soundand meaningin his Sonnetshas not been answered, partly because no method of uncovering such correspondences was available. However, once groups of sounds, specifically sonorantand obstruentsequences, are examined as the locus of the sound-meaning nexus, it emerges that Shakespeare consistently aligns these sequences with relational meaningsdefined by the dyad of freedomand constraint. The coherencebetween 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 comprehensiveanswer to the most fundamental question of poetics, whether the sounds of the Sonnets are an echo of the sense. George T. Wright'sbibliographical 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 purportto say beyond noting Shakespeare's obvious use of alliteration, assonance, and consonancein 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 RomanJakobson 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 repeatedin the third strophe.That Shakespeare'affects the letter' in these strophes,and that they are therebylinked at the phonetic level is not in question. Our questionis what performative relationthis purely formallinkage at the level of the signifier might bear to the sonnet's signification,its 'contents' as Shakespeare equivocally puts it. Here Jakobsoncan be of little help, taking as he notoriouslydoes, meaning or content for grantedor reducingit to the received ideas of othercommentators. In termsof his analysis, the most the empirical fact of alliterationcan 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 illustratesas such in the previous sonnet ('0 how much more doth beautybeauteousseem / By that sweet ornament ...'). As ornament or decoration, alliteration bears the same superficially attractive but functionallyinessentialrelationto the poem as 'gilt' does to the 'monuments / O princes' mentioned at the outset.Gilding is to monumental sculptureas alliteration is to the sonnet. (Felperin 1985:176-77). If alliterationis largely irrelevantto understanding the significance of the sound pattern,what else, then, could there be of phonetic relevance in Sonnet 55? That a * I am indebtedto Paul Friedrich and Thomas L. Short for their substantive comments and suggestions, which helped improve this article, and to W. RichardRistow for his statisticalguidance. ' A curiosity of the history of scholarship on this subject are two articlesby B. F. Skinner(1939, 1941). Skinner's conclusion about alliteration in the first of these, that 'Shakespeare might as well have drawnhis words out of a hat' (1939: 191), was countered in detail in Goldsmith 1950. See also Pirkhofer1963:3-14. 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 addressesthe generalproblemof sound-meaning correspon- dences and includes some analysis of Shakespeare's poetry. 81 MICHAEL SHAPIRO Brown University Shakespeare's verse is studded with alliteration andparonomasia. The more fundamental ques- tion of a patterned relationship between soundand meaningin his Sonnetshas not been answered, partly because no method of uncovering such correspondences was available. However, once groups of sounds, specifically sonorantand obstruentsequences, are examined as the locus of the sound-meaning nexus, it emerges that Shakespeare consistently aligns these sequences with relational meaningsdefined by the dyad of freedomand constraint. The coherencebetween 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 comprehensiveanswer to the most fundamental question of poetics, whether the sounds of the Sonnets are an echo of the sense. George T. Wright'sbibliographical 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 purportto say beyond noting Shakespeare's obvious use of alliteration, assonance, and consonancein 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 RomanJakobson 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 repeatedin the third strophe.That Shakespeare'affects the letter' in these strophes,and that they are therebylinked at the phonetic level is not in question. Our questionis what performative relationthis purely formallinkage at the level of the signifier might bear to the sonnet's signification,its 'contents' as Shakespeare equivocally puts it. Here Jakobsoncan be of little help, taking as he notoriouslydoes, meaning or content for grantedor reducingit to the received ideas of othercommentators. In termsof his analysis, the most the empirical fact of alliterationcan 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 illustratesas such in the previous sonnet ('0 how much more doth beautybeauteousseem / By that sweet ornament ...'). As ornament or decoration, alliteration bears the same superficially attractive but functionallyinessentialrelationto the poem as 'gilt' does to the 'monuments / O princes' mentioned at the outset.Gilding is to monumental sculptureas alliteration is to the sonnet. (Felperin 1985:176-77). If alliterationis largely irrelevantto understanding the significance of the sound pattern,what else, then, could there be of phonetic relevance in Sonnet 55? That a * I am indebtedto Paul Friedrich and Thomas L. Short for their substantive comments and suggestions, which helped improve this article, and to W. RichardRistow for his statisticalguidance. ' A curiosity of the history of scholarship on this subject are two articlesby B. F. Skinner(1939, 1941). Skinner's conclusion about alliteration in the first of these, that 'Shakespeare might as well have drawnhis words out of a hat' (1939: 191), was countered in detail in Goldsmith 1950. See also Pirkhofer1963:3-14. 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 addressesthe generalproblemof sound-meaning correspon- dences and includes some analysis of Shakespeare's poetry. 81 MICHAEL SHAPIRO Brown University Shakespeare's verse is studded with alliteration andparonomasia. The more fundamental ques- tion of a patterned relationship between soundand meaningin his Sonnetshas not been answered, partly because no method of uncovering such correspondences was available. However, once groups of sounds, specifically sonorantand obstruentsequences, are examined as the locus of the sound-meaning nexus, it emerges that Shakespeare consistently aligns these sequences with relational meaningsdefined by the dyad of freedomand constraint. The coherencebetween 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 comprehensiveanswer to the most fundamental question of poetics, whether the sounds of the Sonnets are an echo of the sense. George T. Wright'sbibliographical 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 purportto say beyond noting Shakespeare's obvious use of alliteration, assonance, and consonancein 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 RomanJakobson 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 repeatedin the third strophe.That Shakespeare'affects the letter' in these strophes,and that they are therebylinked at the phonetic level is not in question. Our questionis what performative relationthis purely formallinkage at the level of the signifier might bear to the sonnet's signification,its 'contents' as Shakespeare equivocally puts it. Here Jakobsoncan be of little help, taking as he notoriouslydoes, meaning or content for grantedor reducingit to the received ideas of othercommentators. In termsof his analysis, the most the empirical fact of alliterationcan 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 illustratesas such in the previous sonnet ('0 how much more doth beautybeauteousseem / By that sweet ornament ...'). As ornament or decoration, alliteration bears the same superficially attractive but functionallyinessentialrelationto the poem as 'gilt' does to the 'monuments / O princes' mentioned at the outset.Gilding is to monumental sculptureas alliteration is to the sonnet. (Felperin 1985:176-77). If alliterationis largely irrelevantto understanding the significance of the sound pattern,what else, then, could there be of phonetic relevance in Sonnet 55? That a * I am indebtedto Paul Friedrich and Thomas L. Short for their substantive comments and suggestions, which helped improve this article, and to W. RichardRistow for his statisticalguidance. ' A curiosity of the history of scholarship on this subject are two articlesby B. F. Skinner(1939, 1941). Skinner's conclusion about alliteration in the first of these, that 'Shakespeare might as well have drawnhis words out of a hat' (1939: 191), was countered in detail in Goldsmith 1950. See also Pirkhofer1963:3-14. 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 addressesthe generalproblemof sound-meaning correspon- dences and includes some analysis of Shakespeare's poetry. 81 MICHAEL SHAPIRO Brown University Shakespeare's verse is studded with alliteration andparonomasia. The more fundamental ques- tion of a patterned relationship between soundand meaningin his Sonnetshas not been answered, partly because no method of uncovering such correspondences was available. However, once groups of sounds, specifically sonorantand obstruentsequences, are examined as the locus of the sound-meaning nexus, it emerges that Shakespeare consistently aligns these sequences with relational meaningsdefined by the dyad of freedomand constraint. The coherencebetween 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 comprehensiveanswer to the most fundamental question of poetics, whether the sounds of the Sonnets are an echo of the sense. George T. Wright'sbibliographical 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 purportto say beyond noting Shakespeare's obvious use of alliteration, assonance, and consonancein 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 RomanJakobson 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 repeatedin the third strophe.That Shakespeare'affects the letter' in these strophes,and that they are therebylinked at the phonetic level is not in question. Our questionis what performative relationthis purely formallinkage at the level of the signifier might bear to the sonnet's signification,its 'contents' as Shakespeare equivocally puts it. Here Jakobsoncan be of little help, taking as he notoriouslydoes, meaning or content for grantedor reducingit to the received ideas of othercommentators. In termsof his analysis, the most the empirical fact of alliterationcan 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 illustratesas such in the previous sonnet ('0 how much more doth beautybeauteousseem / By that sweet ornament ...'). As ornament or decoration, alliteration bears the same superficially attractive but functionallyinessentialrelationto the poem as 'gilt' does to the 'monuments / O princes' mentioned at the outset.Gilding is to monumental sculptureas alliteration is to the sonnet. (Felperin 1985:176-77). If alliterationis largely irrelevantto understanding the significance of the sound pattern,what else, then, could there be of phonetic relevance in Sonnet 55? That a * I am indebtedto Paul Friedrich and Thomas L. Short for their substantive comments and suggestions, which helped improve this article, and to W. RichardRistow for his statisticalguidance. ' A curiosity of the history of scholarship on this subject are two articlesby B. F. Skinner(1939, 1941). Skinner's conclusion about alliteration in the first of these, that 'Shakespeare might as well have drawnhis words out of a hat' (1939: 191), was countered in detail in Goldsmith 1950. See also Pirkhofer1963:3-14. 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 addressesthe generalproblemof sound-meaning correspon- dences and includes some analysis of Shakespeare's poetry. 81 MICHAEL SHAPIRO Brown University Shakespeare's verse is studded with alliteration andparonomasia. The more fundamental ques- tion of a patterned relationship between soundand meaningin his Sonnetshas not been answered, partly because no method of uncovering such correspondences was available. However, once groups of sounds, specifically sonorantand obstruentsequences, are examined as the locus of the sound-meaning nexus, it emerges that Shakespeare consistently aligns these sequences with relational meaningsdefined by the dyad of freedomand constraint. The coherencebetween 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 comprehensiveanswer to the most fundamental question of poetics, whether the sounds of the Sonnets are an echo of the sense. George T. Wright'sbibliographical 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 purportto say beyond noting Shakespeare's obvious use of alliteration, assonance, and consonancein 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 RomanJakobson 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 repeatedin the third strophe.That Shakespeare'affects the letter' in these strophes,and that they are therebylinked at the phonetic level is not in question. Our questionis what performative relationthis purely formallinkage at the level of the signifier might bear to the sonnet's signification,its 'contents' as Shakespeare equivocally puts it. Here Jakobsoncan be of little help, taking as he notoriouslydoes, meaning or content for grantedor reducingit to the received ideas of othercommentators. In termsof his analysis, the most the empirical fact of alliterationcan 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 illustratesas such in the previous sonnet ('0 how much more doth beautybeauteousseem / By that sweet ornament ...'). As ornament or decoration, alliteration bears the same superficially attractive but functionallyinessentialrelationto the poem as 'gilt' does to the 'monuments / O princes' mentioned at the outset.Gilding is to monumental sculptureas alliteration is to the sonnet. (Felperin 1985:176-77). If alliterationis largely irrelevantto understanding the significance of the sound pattern,what else, then, could there be of phonetic relevance in Sonnet 55? That a * I am indebtedto Paul Friedrich and Thomas L. Short for their substantive comments and suggestions, which helped improve this article, and to W. RichardRistow for his statisticalguidance. ' A curiosity of the history of scholarship on this subject are two articlesby B. F. Skinner(1939, 1941). Skinner's conclusion about alliteration in the first of these, that 'Shakespeare might as well have drawnhis words out of a hat' (1939: 191), was countered in detail in Goldsmith 1950. See also Pirkhofer1963:3-14. 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 addressesthe generalproblemof sound-meaning correspon- dences and includes some analysis of Shakespeare's poetry. 81 MICHAEL SHAPIRO Brown University Shakespeare's verse is studded with alliteration andparonomasia. The more fundamental ques- tion of a patterned relationship between soundand meaningin his Sonnetshas not been answered, partly because no method of uncovering such correspondences was available. However, once groups of sounds, specifically sonorantand obstruentsequences, are examined as the locus of the sound-meaning nexus, it emerges that Shakespeare consistently aligns these sequences with relational meaningsdefined by the dyad of freedomand constraint. The coherencebetween 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 comprehensiveanswer to the most fundamental question of poetics, whether the sounds of the Sonnets are an echo of the sense. George T. Wright'sbibliographical 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 purportto say beyond noting Shakespeare's obvious use of alliteration, assonance, and consonancein 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 RomanJakobson 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 repeatedin the third strophe.That Shakespeare'affects the letter' in these strophes,and that they are therebylinked at the phonetic level is not in question. Our questionis what performative relationthis purely formallinkage at the level of the signifier might bear to the sonnet's signification,its 'contents' as Shakespeare equivocally puts it. Here Jakobsoncan be of little help, taking as he notoriouslydoes, meaning or content for grantedor reducingit to the received ideas of othercommentators. In termsof his analysis, the most the empirical fact of alliterationcan 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 illustratesas such in the previous sonnet ('0 how much more doth beautybeauteousseem / By that sweet ornament ...'). As ornament or decoration, alliteration bears the same superficially attractive but functionallyinessentialrelationto the poem as 'gilt' does to the 'monuments / O princes' mentioned at the outset.Gilding is to monumental sculptureas alliteration is to the sonnet. (Felperin 1985:176-77). If alliterationis largely irrelevantto understanding the significance of the sound pattern,what else, then, could there be of phonetic relevance in Sonnet 55? That a * I am indebtedto Paul Friedrich and Thomas L. Short for their substantive comments and suggestions, which helped improve this article, and to W. RichardRistow for his statisticalguidance. ' A curiosity of the history of scholarship on this subject are two articlesby B. F. Skinner(1939, 1941). Skinner's conclusion about alliteration in the first of these, that 'Shakespeare might as well have drawnhis words out of a hat' (1939: 191), was countered in detail in Goldsmith 1950. See also Pirkhofer1963:3-14. 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 addressesthe generalproblemof sound-meaning correspon- dences and includes some analysis of Shakespeare's poetry. 81 MICHAEL SHAPIRO Brown University Shakespeare's verse is studded with alliteration andparonomasia. The more fundamental ques- tion of a patterned relationship between soundand meaningin his Sonnetshas not been answered, partly because no method of uncovering such correspondences was available. However, once groups of sounds, specifically sonorantand obstruentsequences, are examined as the locus of the sound-meaning nexus, it emerges that Shakespeare consistently aligns these sequences with relational meaningsdefined by the dyad of freedomand constraint. The coherencebetween 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 comprehensiveanswer to the most fundamental question of poetics, whether the sounds of the Sonnets are an echo of the sense. George T. Wright'sbibliographical 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 purportto say beyond noting Shakespeare's obvious use of alliteration, assonance, and consonancein 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 RomanJakobson 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 repeatedin the third strophe.That Shakespeare'affects the letter' in these strophes,and that they are therebylinked at the phonetic level is not in question. Our questionis what performative relationthis purely formallinkage at the level of the signifier might bear to the sonnet's signification,its 'contents' as Shakespeare equivocally puts it. Here Jakobsoncan be of little help, taking as he notoriouslydoes, meaning or content for grantedor reducingit to the received ideas of othercommentators. In termsof his analysis, the most the empirical fact of alliterationcan 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 illustratesas such in the previous sonnet ('0 how much more doth beautybeauteousseem / By that sweet ornament ...'). As ornament or decoration, alliteration bears the same superficially attractive but functionallyinessentialrelationto the poem as 'gilt' does to the 'monuments / O princes' mentioned at the outset.Gilding is to monumental sculptureas alliteration is to the sonnet. (Felperin 1985:176-77). If alliterationis largely irrelevantto understanding the significance of the sound pattern,what else, then, could there be of phonetic relevance in Sonnet 55? That a * I am indebtedto Paul Friedrich and Thomas L. Short for their substantive comments and suggestions, which helped improve this article, and to W. RichardRistow for his statisticalguidance. ' A curiosity of the history of scholarship on this subject are two articlesby B. F. Skinner(1939, 1941). Skinner's conclusion about alliteration in the first of these, that 'Shakespeare might as well have drawnhis words out of a hat' (1939: 191), was countered in detail in Goldsmith 1950. See also Pirkhofer1963:3-14. 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 addressesthe generalproblemof sound-meaning correspon- dences and includes some analysis of Shakespeare's poetry. 81 MICHAEL SHAPIRO Brown University Shakespeare's verse is studded with alliteration andparonomasia. The more fundamental ques- tion of a patterned relationship between soundand meaningin his Sonnetshas not been answered, partly because no method of uncovering such correspondences was available. However, once groups of sounds, specifically sonorantand obstruentsequences, are examined as the locus of the sound-meaning nexus, it emerges that Shakespeare consistently aligns these sequences with relational meaningsdefined by the dyad of freedomand constraint. The coherencebetween 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 comprehensiveanswer to the most fundamental question of poetics, whether the sounds of the Sonnets are an echo of the sense. George T. Wright'sbibliographical 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 purportto say beyond noting Shakespeare's obvious use of alliteration, assonance, and consonancein 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 RomanJakobson 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 repeatedin the third strophe.That Shakespeare'affects the letter' in these strophes,and that they are therebylinked at the phonetic level is not in question. Our questionis what performative relationthis purely formallinkage at the level of the signifier might bear to the sonnet's signification,its 'contents' as Shakespeare equivocally puts it. Here Jakobsoncan be of little help, taking as he notoriouslydoes, meaning or content for grantedor reducingit to the received ideas of othercommentators. In termsof his analysis, the most the empirical fact of alliterationcan 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 illustratesas such in the previous sonnet ('0 how much more doth beautybeauteousseem / By that sweet ornament ...'). As ornament or decoration, alliteration bears the same superficially attractive but functionallyinessentialrelationto the poem as 'gilt' does to the 'monuments / O princes' mentioned at the outset.Gilding is to monumental sculptureas alliteration is to the sonnet. (Felperin 1985:176-77). If alliterationis largely irrelevantto understanding the significance of the sound pattern,what else, then, could there be of phonetic relevance in Sonnet 55? That a * I am indebtedto Paul Friedrich and Thomas L. Short for their substantive comments and suggestions, which helped improve this article, and to W. RichardRistow for his statisticalguidance. ' A curiosity of the history of scholarship on this subject are two articlesby B. F. Skinner(1939, 1941). Skinner's conclusion about alliteration in the first of these, that 'Shakespeare might as well have drawnhis words out of a hat' (1939: 191), was countered in detail in Goldsmith 1950. See also Pirkhofer1963:3-14. 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 addressesthe generalproblemof sound-meaning correspon- dences and includes some analysis of Shakespeare's poetry. 81 MICHAEL SHAPIRO Brown University Shakespeare's verse is studded with alliteration andparonomasia. The more fundamental ques- tion of a patterned relationship between soundand meaningin his Sonnetshas not been answered, partly because no method of uncovering such correspondences was available. However, once groups of sounds, specifically sonorantand obstruentsequences, are examined as the locus of the sound-meaning nexus, it emerges that Shakespeare consistently aligns these sequences with relational meaningsdefined by the dyad of freedomand constraint. The coherencebetween 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 comprehensiveanswer to the most fundamental question of poetics, whether the sounds of the Sonnets are an echo of the sense. George T. Wright'sbibliographical 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 purportto say beyond noting Shakespeare's obvious use of alliteration, assonance, and consonancein 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 RomanJakobson 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 repeatedin the third strophe.That Shakespeare'affects the letter' in these strophes,and that they are therebylinked at the phonetic level is not in question. Our questionis what performative relationthis purely formallinkage at the level of the signifier might bear to the sonnet's signification,its 'contents' as Shakespeare equivocally puts it. Here Jakobsoncan be of little help, taking as he notoriouslydoes, meaning or content for grantedor reducingit to the received ideas of othercommentators. In termsof his analysis, the most the empirical fact of alliterationcan 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 illustratesas such in the previous sonnet ('0 how much more doth beautybeauteousseem / By that sweet ornament ...'). As ornament or decoration, alliteration bears the same superficially attractive but functionallyinessentialrelationto the poem as 'gilt' does to the 'monuments / O princes' mentioned at the outset.Gilding is to monumental sculptureas alliteration is to the sonnet. (Felperin 1985:176-77). If alliterationis largely irrelevantto understanding the significance of the sound pattern,what else, then, could there be of phonetic relevance in Sonnet 55? That a * I am indebtedto Paul Friedrich and Thomas L. Short for their substantive comments and suggestions, which helped improve this article, and to W. RichardRistow for his statisticalguidance. ' A curiosity of the history of scholarship on this subject are two articlesby B. F. Skinner(1939, 1941). Skinner's conclusion about alliteration in the first of these, that 'Shakespeare might as well have drawnhis words out of a hat' (1939: 191), was countered in detail in Goldsmith 1950. See also Pirkhofer1963:3-14. 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 addressesthe generalproblemof sound-meaning correspon- dences and includes some analysis of Shakespeare's poetry. 81 MICHAEL SHAPIRO Brown University Shakespeare's verse is studded with alliteration andparonomasia. The more fundamental ques- tion of a patterned relationship between soundand meaningin his Sonnetshas not been answered, partly because no method of uncovering such correspondences was available. However, once groups of sounds, specifically sonorantand obstruentsequences, are examined as the locus of the sound-meaning nexus, it emerges that Shakespeare consistently aligns these sequences with relational meaningsdefined by the dyad of freedomand constraint. The coherencebetween 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 comprehensiveanswer to the most fundamental question of poetics, whether the sounds of the Sonnets are an echo of the sense. George T. Wright'sbibliographical 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 purportto say beyond noting Shakespeare's obvious use of alliteration, assonance, and consonancein 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 RomanJakobson 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 repeatedin the third strophe.That Shakespeare'affects the letter' in these strophes,and that they are therebylinked at the phonetic level is not in question. Our questionis what performative relationthis purely formallinkage at the level of the signifier might bear to the sonnet's signification,its 'contents' as Shakespeare equivocally puts it. Here Jakobsoncan be of little help, taking as he notoriouslydoes, meaning or content for grantedor reducingit to the received ideas of othercommentators. In termsof his analysis, the most the empirical fact of alliterationcan 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 illustratesas such in the previous sonnet ('0 how much more doth beautybeauteousseem / By that sweet ornament ...'). As ornament or decoration, alliteration bears the same superficially attractive but functionallyinessentialrelationto the poem as 'gilt' does to the 'monuments / O princes' mentioned at the outset.Gilding is to monumental sculptureas alliteration is to the sonnet. (Felperin 1985:176-77). If alliterationis largely irrelevantto understanding the significance of the sound pattern,what else, then, could there be of phonetic relevance in Sonnet 55? That a * I am indebtedto Paul Friedrich and Thomas L. Short for their substantive comments and suggestions, which helped improve this article, and to W. RichardRistow for his statisticalguidance. ' A curiosity of the history of scholarship on this subject are two articlesby B. F. Skinner(1939, 1941). Skinner's conclusion about alliteration in the first of these, that 'Shakespeare might as well have drawnhis words out of a hat' (1939: 191), was countered in detail in Goldsmith 1950. See also Pirkhofer1963:3-14. 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 addressesthe generalproblemof sound-meaning correspon- dences and includes some analysis of Shakespeare's poetry. 81 MICHAEL SHAPIRO Brown University Shakespeare's verse is studded with alliteration andparonomasia. The more fundamental ques- tion of a patterned relationship between soundand meaningin his Sonnetshas not been answered, partly because no method of uncovering such correspondences was available. However, once groups of sounds, specifically sonorantand obstruentsequences, are examined as the locus of the sound-meaning nexus, it emerges that Shakespeare consistently aligns these sequences with relational meaningsdefined by the dyad of freedomand constraint. The coherencebetween 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 comprehensiveanswer to the most fundamental question of poetics, whether the sounds of the Sonnets are an echo of the sense. George T. Wright'sbibliographical 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 purportto say beyond noting Shakespeare's obvious use of alliteration, assonance, and consonancein 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 RomanJakobson 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 repeatedin the third strophe.That Shakespeare'affects the letter' in these strophes,and that they are therebylinked at the phonetic level is not in question. Our questionis what performative relationthis purely formallinkage at the level of the signifier might bear to the sonnet's signification,its 'contents' as Shakespeare equivocally puts it. Here Jakobsoncan be of little help, taking as he notoriouslydoes, meaning or content for grantedor reducingit to the received ideas of othercommentators. In termsof his analysis, the most the empirical fact of alliterationcan 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 illustratesas such in the previous sonnet ('0 how much more doth beautybeauteousseem / By that sweet ornament ...'). As ornament or decoration, alliteration bears the same superficially attractive but functionallyinessentialrelationto the poem as 'gilt' does to the 'monuments / O princes' mentioned at the outset.Gilding is to monumental sculptureas alliteration is to the sonnet. (Felperin 1985:176-77). If alliterationis largely irrelevantto understanding the significance of the sound pattern,what else, then, could there be of phonetic relevance in Sonnet 55? That a * I am indebtedto Paul Friedrich and Thomas L. Short for their substantive comments and suggestions, which helped improve this article, and to W. RichardRistow for his statisticalguidance. ' A curiosity of the history of scholarship on this subject are two articlesby B. F. Skinner(1939, 1941). Skinner's conclusion about alliteration in the first of these, that 'Shakespeare might as well have drawnhis words out of a hat' (1939: 191), was countered in detail in Goldsmith 1950. See also Pirkhofer1963:3-14. 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 addressesthe generalproblemof sound-meaning correspon- dences and includes some analysis of Shakespeare's poetry. 81 MICHAEL SHAPIRO Brown University Shakespeare's verse is studded with alliteration andparonomasia. The more fundamental ques- tion of a patterned relationship between soundand meaningin his Sonnetshas not been answered, partly because no method of uncovering such correspondences was available. However, once groups of sounds, specifically sonorantand obstruentsequences, are examined as the locus of the sound-meaning nexus, it emerges that Shakespeare consistently aligns these sequences with relational meaningsdefined by the dyad of freedomand constraint. The coherencebetween 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 comprehensiveanswer to the most fundamental question of poetics, whether the sounds of the Sonnets are an echo of the sense. George T. Wright'sbibliographical 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 purportto say beyond noting Shakespeare's obvious use of alliteration, assonance, and consonancein 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 RomanJakobson 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 repeatedin the third strophe.That Shakespeare'affects the letter' in these strophes,and that they are therebylinked at the phonetic level is not in question. Our questionis what performative relationthis purely formallinkage at the level of the signifier might bear to the sonnet's signification,its 'contents' as Shakespeare equivocally puts it. Here Jakobsoncan be of little help, taking as he notoriouslydoes, meaning or content for grantedor reducingit to the received ideas of othercommentators. In termsof his analysis, the most the empirical fact of alliterationcan 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 illustratesas such in the previous sonnet ('0 how much more doth beautybeauteousseem / By that sweet ornament ...'). As ornament or decoration, alliteration bears the same superficially attractive but functionallyinessentialrelationto the poem as 'gilt' does to the 'monuments / O princes' mentioned at the outset.Gilding is to monumental sculptureas alliteration is to the sonnet. (Felperin 1985:176-77). If alliterationis largely irrelevantto understanding the significance of the sound pattern,what else, then, could there be of phonetic relevance in Sonnet 55? That a * I am indebtedto Paul Friedrich and Thomas L. Short for their substantive comments and suggestions, which helped improve this article, and to W. RichardRistow for his statisticalguidance. ' A curiosity of the history of scholarship on this subject are two articlesby B. F. Skinner(1939, 1941). Skinner's conclusion about alliteration in the first of these, that 'Shakespeare might as well have drawnhis words out of a hat' (1939: 191), was countered in detail in Goldsmith 1950. See also Pirkhofer1963:3-14. 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 addressesthe generalproblemof sound-meaning correspon- dences and includes some analysis of Shakespeare's poetry. 81 MICHAEL SHAPIRO Brown University Shakespeare's verse is studded with alliteration andparonomasia. The more fundamental ques- tion of a patterned relationship between soundand meaningin his Sonnetshas not been answered, partly because no method of uncovering such correspondences was available. However, once groups of sounds, specifically sonorantand obstruentsequences, are examined as the locus of the sound-meaning nexus, it emerges that Shakespeare consistently aligns these sequences with relational meaningsdefined by the dyad of freedomand constraint. The coherencebetween 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 comprehensiveanswer to the most fundamental question of poetics, whether the sounds of the Sonnets are an echo of the sense. George T. Wright'sbibliographical 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 purportto say beyond noting Shakespeare's obvious use of alliteration, assonance, and consonancein 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 RomanJakobson 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 repeatedin the third strophe.That Shakespeare'affects the letter' in these strophes,and that they are therebylinked at the phonetic level is not in question. Our questionis what performative relationthis purely formallinkage at the level of the signifier might bear to the sonnet's signification,its 'contents' as Shakespeare equivocally puts it. Here Jakobsoncan be of little help, taking as he notoriouslydoes, meaning or content for grantedor reducingit to the received ideas of othercommentators. In termsof his analysis, the most the empirical fact of alliterationcan 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 illustratesas such in the previous sonnet ('0 how much more doth beautybeauteousseem / By that sweet ornament ...'). As ornament or decoration, alliteration bears the same superficially attractive but functionallyinessentialrelationto the poem as 'gilt' does to the 'monuments / O princes' mentioned at the outset.Gilding is to monumental sculptureas alliteration is to the sonnet. (Felperin 1985:176-77). If alliterationis largely irrelevantto understanding the significance of the sound pattern,what else, then, could there be of phonetic relevance in Sonnet 55? That a * I am indebtedto Paul Friedrich and Thomas L. Short for their substantive comments and suggestions, which helped improve this article, and to W. RichardRistow for his statisticalguidance. ' A curiosity of the history of scholarship on this subject are two articlesby B. F. Skinner(1939, 1941). Skinner's conclusion about alliteration in the first of these, that 'Shakespeare might as well have drawnhis words out of a hat' (1939: 191), was countered in detail in Goldsmith 1950. See also Pirkhofer1963:3-14. 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 addressesthe generalproblemof sound-meaning correspon- dences and includes some analysis of Shakespeare's poetry. 81 MICHAEL SHAPIRO Brown University Shakespeare's verse is studded with alliteration andparonomasia. The more fundamental ques- tion of a patterned relationship between soundand meaningin his Sonnetshas not been answered, partly because no method of uncovering such correspondences was available. However, once groups of sounds, specifically sonorantand obstruentsequences, are examined as the locus of the sound-meaning nexus, it emerges that Shakespeare consistently aligns these sequences with relational meaningsdefined by the dyad of freedomand constraint. The coherencebetween 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 comprehensiveanswer to the most fundamental question of poetics, whether the sounds of the Sonnets are an echo of the sense. George T. Wright'sbibliographical 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 purportto say beyond noting Shakespeare's obvious use of alliteration, assonance, and consonancein 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 RomanJakobson 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 repeatedin the third strophe.That Shakespeare'affects the letter' in these strophes,and that they are therebylinked at the phonetic level is not in question. Our questionis what performative relationthis purely formallinkage at the level of the signifier might bear to the sonnet's signification,its 'contents' as Shakespeare equivocally puts it. Here Jakobsoncan be of little help, taking as he notoriouslydoes, meaning or content for grantedor reducingit to the received ideas of othercommentators. In termsof his analysis, the most the empirical fact of alliterationcan 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 illustratesas such in the previous sonnet ('0 how much more doth beautybeauteousseem / By that sweet ornament ...'). As ornament or decoration, alliteration bears the same superficially attractive but functionallyinessentialrelationto the poem as 'gilt' does to the 'monuments / O princes' mentioned at the outset.Gilding is to monumental sculptureas alliteration is to the sonnet. (Felperin 1985:176-77). If alliterationis largely irrelevantto understanding the significance of the sound pattern,what else, then, could there be of phonetic relevance in Sonnet 55? That a * I am indebtedto Paul Friedrich and Thomas L. Short for their substantive comments and suggestions, which helped improve this article, and to W. RichardRistow for his statisticalguidance. ' A curiosity of the history of scholarship on this subject are two articlesby B. F. Skinner(1939, 1941). Skinner's conclusion about alliteration in the first of these, that 'Shakespeare might as well have drawnhis words out of a hat' (1939: 191), was countered in detail in Goldsmith 1950. See also Pirkhofer1963:3-14. 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 addressesthe generalproblemof sound-meaning correspon- dences and includes some analysis of Shakespeare's poetry. 81 MICHAEL SHAPIRO Brown University Shakespeare's verse is studded with alliteration andparonomasia. The more fundamental ques- tion of a patterned relationship between soundand meaningin his Sonnetshas not been answered, partly because no method of uncovering such correspondences was available. However, once groups of sounds, specifically sonorantand obstruentsequences, are examined as the locus of the sound-meaning nexus, it emerges that Shakespeare consistently aligns these sequences with relational meaningsdefined by the dyad of freedomand constraint. The coherencebetween 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 comprehensiveanswer to the most fundamental question of poetics, whether the sounds of the Sonnets are an echo of the sense. George T. Wright'sbibliographical 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 purportto say beyond noting Shakespeare's obvious use of alliteration, assonance, and consonancein 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 RomanJakobson 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 repeatedin the third strophe.That Shakespeare'affects the letter' in these strophes,and that they are therebylinked at the phonetic level is not in question. Our questionis what performative relationthis purely formallinkage at the level of the signifier might bear to the sonnet's signification,its 'contents' as Shakespeare equivocally puts it. Here Jakobsoncan be of little help, taking as he notoriouslydoes, meaning or content for grantedor reducingit to the received ideas of othercommentators. In termsof his analysis, the most the empirical fact of alliterationcan 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 illustratesas such in the previous sonnet ('0 how much more doth beautybeauteousseem / By that sweet ornament ...'). As ornament or decoration, alliteration bears the same superficially attractive but functionallyinessentialrelationto the poem as 'gilt' does to the 'monuments / O princes' mentioned at the outset.Gilding is to monumental sculptureas alliteration is to the sonnet. (Felperin 1985:176-77). If alliterationis largely irrelevantto understanding the significance of the sound pattern,what else, then, could there be of phonetic relevance in Sonnet 55? That a * I am indebtedto Paul Friedrich and Thomas L. Short for their substantive comments and suggestions, which helped improve this article, and to W. RichardRistow for his statisticalguidance. ' A curiosity of the history of scholarship on this subject are two articlesby B. F. Skinner(1939, 1941). Skinner's conclusion about alliteration in the first of these, that 'Shakespeare might as well have drawnhis words out of a hat' (1939: 191), was countered in detail in Goldsmith 1950. See also Pirkhofer1963:3-14. 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 addressesthe generalproblemof sound-meaning correspon- dences and includes some analysis of Shakespeare's poetry. 81 MICHAEL SHAPIRO Brown University Shakespeare's verse is studded with alliteration andparonomasia. The more fundamental ques- tion of a patterned relationship between soundand meaningin his Sonnetshas not been answered, partly because no method of uncovering such correspondences was available. However, once groups of sounds, specifically sonorantand obstruentsequences, are examined as the locus of the sound-meaning nexus, it emerges that Shakespeare consistently aligns these sequences with relational meaningsdefined by the dyad of freedomand constraint. The coherencebetween 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 comprehensiveanswer to the most fundamental question of poetics, whether the sounds of the Sonnets are an echo of the sense. George T. Wright'sbibliographical 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 purportto say beyond noting Shakespeare's obvious use of alliteration, assonance, and consonancein 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 RomanJakobson 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 repeatedin the third strophe.That Shakespeare'affects the letter' in these strophes,and that they are therebylinked at the phonetic level is not in question. Our questionis what performative relationthis purely formallinkage at the level of the signifier might bear to the sonnet's signification,its 'contents' as Shakespeare equivocally puts it. Here Jakobsoncan be of little help, taking as he notoriouslydoes, meaning or content for grantedor reducingit to the received ideas of othercommentators. In termsof his analysis, the most the empirical fact of alliterationcan 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 illustratesas such in the previous sonnet ('0 how much more doth beautybeauteousseem / By that sweet ornament ...'). As ornament or decoration, alliteration bears the same superficially attractive but functionallyinessentialrelationto the poem as 'gilt' does to the 'monuments / O princes' mentioned at the outset.Gilding is to monumental sculptureas alliteration is to the sonnet. (Felperin 1985:176-77). If alliterationis largely irrelevantto understanding the significance of the sound pattern,what else, then, could there be of phonetic relevance in Sonnet 55? That a * I am indebtedto Paul Friedrich and Thomas L. Short for their substantive comments and suggestions, which helped improve this article, and to W. RichardRistow for his statisticalguidance. ' A curiosity of the history of scholarship on this subject are two articlesby B. F. Skinner(1939, 1941). Skinner's conclusion about alliteration in the first of these, that 'Shakespeare might as well have drawnhis words out of a hat' (1939: 191), was countered in detail in Goldsmith 1950. See also Pirkhofer1963:3-14. 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 addressesthe generalproblemof sound-meaning correspon- dences and includes some analysis of Shakespeare's poetry. 81 MICHAEL SHAPIRO Brown University Shakespeare's verse is studded with alliteration andparonomasia. The more fundamental ques- tion of a patterned relationship between soundand meaningin his Sonnetshas not been answered, partly because no method of uncovering such correspondences was available. However, once groups of sounds, specifically sonorantand obstruentsequences, are examined as the locus of the sound-meaning nexus, it emerges that Shakespeare consistently aligns these sequences with relational meaningsdefined by the dyad of freedomand constraint. The coherencebetween 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 comprehensiveanswer to the most fundamental question of poetics, whether the sounds of the Sonnets are an echo of the sense. George T. Wright'sbibliographical 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 purportto say beyond noting Shakespeare's obvious use of alliteration, assonance, and consonancein 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 RomanJakobson 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 repeatedin the third strophe.That Shakespeare'affects the letter' in these strophes,and that they are therebylinked at the phonetic level is not in question. Our questionis what performative relationthis purely formallinkage at the level of the signifier might bear to the sonnet's signification,its 'contents' as Shakespeare equivocally puts it. Here Jakobsoncan be of little help, taking as he notoriouslydoes, meaning or content for grantedor reducingit to the received ideas of othercommentators. In termsof his analysis, the most the empirical fact of alliterationcan 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 illustratesas such in the previous sonnet ('0 how much more doth beautybeauteousseem / By that sweet ornament ...'). As ornament or decoration, alliteration bears the same superficially attractive but functionallyinessentialrelationto the poem as 'gilt' does to the 'monuments / O princes' mentioned at the outset.Gilding is to monumental sculptureas alliteration is to the sonnet. (Felperin 1985:176-77). If alliterationis largely irrelevantto understanding the significance of the sound pattern,what else, then, could there be of phonetic relevance in Sonnet 55? That a * I am indebtedto Paul Friedrich and Thomas L. Short for their substantive comments and suggestions, which helped improve this article, and to W. RichardRistow for his statisticalguidance. ' A curiosity of the history of scholarship on this subject are two articlesby B. F. Skinner(1939, 1941). Skinner's conclusion about alliteration in the first of these, that 'Shakespeare might as well have drawnhis words out of a hat' (1939: 191), was countered in detail in Goldsmith 1950. See also Pirkhofer1963:3-14. 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 addressesthe generalproblemof sound-meaning correspon- dences and includes some analysis of Shakespeare's poetry. 81 MICHAEL SHAPIRO Brown University Shakespeare's verse is studded with alliteration andparonomasia. The more fundamental ques- tion of a patterned relationship between soundand meaningin his Sonnetshas not been answered, partly because no method of uncovering such correspondences was available. However, once groups of sounds, specifically sonorantand obstruentsequences, are examined as the locus of the sound-meaning nexus, it emerges that Shakespeare consistently aligns these sequences with relational meaningsdefined by the dyad of freedomand constraint. The coherencebetween 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 comprehensiveanswer to the most fundamental question of poetics, whether the sounds of the Sonnets are an echo of the sense. George T. Wright'sbibliographical 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 purportto say beyond noting Shakespeare's obvious use of alliteration, assonance, and consonancein 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 RomanJakobson 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 repeatedin the third strophe.That Shakespeare'affects the letter' in these strophes,and that they are therebylinked at the phonetic level is not in question. Our questionis what performative relationthis purely formallinkage at the level of the signifier might bear to the sonnet's signification,its 'contents' as Shakespeare equivocally puts it. Here Jakobsoncan be of little help, taking as he notoriouslydoes, meaning or content for grantedor reducingit to the received ideas of othercommentators. In termsof his analysis, the most the empirical fact of alliterationcan 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 illustratesas such in the previous sonnet ('0 how much more doth beautybeauteousseem / By that sweet ornament ...'). As ornament or decoration, alliteration bears the same superficially attractive but functionallyinessentialrelationto the poem as 'gilt' does to the 'monuments / O princes' mentioned at the outset.Gilding is to monumental sculptureas alliteration is to the sonnet. (Felperin 1985:176-77). If alliterationis largely irrelevantto understanding the significance of the sound pattern,what else, then, could there be of phonetic relevance in Sonnet 55? That a * I am indebtedto Paul Friedrich and Thomas L. Short for their substantive comments and suggestions, which helped improve this article, and to W. RichardRistow for his statisticalguidance. ' A curiosity of the history of scholarship on this subject are two articlesby B. F. Skinner(1939, 1941). Skinner's conclusion about alliteration in the first of these, that 'Shakespeare might as well have drawnhis words out of a hat' (1939: 191), was countered in detail in Goldsmith 1950. See also Pirkhofer1963:3-14. 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 addressesthe generalproblemof sound-meaning correspon- dences and includes some analysis of Shakespeare's poetry. 81 MICHAEL SHAPIRO Brown University Shakespeare's verse is studded with alliteration andparonomasia. The more fundamental ques- tion of a patterned relationship between soundand meaningin his Sonnetshas not been answered, partly because no method of uncovering such correspondences was available. However, once groups of sounds, specifically sonorantand obstruentsequences, are examined as the locus of the sound-meaning nexus, it emerges that Shakespeare consistently aligns these sequences with relational meaningsdefined by the dyad of freedomand constraint. The coherencebetween 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 comprehensiveanswer to the most fundamental question of poetics, whether the sounds of the Sonnets are an echo of the sense. George T. Wright'sbibliographical 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 purportto say beyond noting Shakespeare's obvious use of alliteration, assonance, and consonancein 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 RomanJakobson 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 repeatedin the third strophe.That Shakespeare'affects the letter' in these strophes,and that they are therebylinked at the phonetic level is not in question. Our questionis what performative relationthis purely formallinkage at the level of the signifier might bear to the sonnet's signification,its 'contents' as Shakespeare equivocally puts it. Here Jakobsoncan be of little help, taking as he notoriouslydoes, meaning or content for grantedor reducingit to the received ideas of othercommentators. In termsof his analysis, the most the empirical fact of alliterationcan 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 illustratesas such in the previous sonnet ('0 how much more doth beautybeauteousseem / By that sweet ornament ...'). As ornament or decoration, alliteration bears the same superficially attractive but functionallyinessentialrelationto the poem as 'gilt' does to the 'monuments / O princes' mentioned at the outset.Gilding is to monumental sculptureas alliteration is to the sonnet. (Felperin 1985:176-77). If alliterationis largely irrelevantto understanding the significance of the sound pattern,what else, then, could there be of phonetic relevance in Sonnet 55? That a * I am indebtedto Paul Friedrich and Thomas L. Short for their substantive comments and suggestions, which helped improve this article, and to W. RichardRistow for his statisticalguidance. ' A curiosity of the history of scholarship on this subject are two articlesby B. F. Skinner(1939, 1941). Skinner's conclusion about alliteration in the first of these, that 'Shakespeare might as well have drawnhis words out of a hat' (1939: 191), was countered in detail in Goldsmith 1950. See also Pirkhofer1963:3-14. 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 addressesthe generalproblemof sound-meaning correspon- dences and includes some analysis of Shakespeare's poetry. 81 MICHAEL SHAPIRO Brown University Shakespeare's verse is studded with alliteration andparonomasia. The more fundamental ques- tion of a patterned relationship between soundand meaningin his Sonnetshas not been answered, partly because no method of uncovering such correspondences was available. However, once groups of sounds, specifically sonorantand obstruentsequences, are examined as the locus of the sound-meaning nexus, it emerges that Shakespeare consistently aligns these sequences with relational meaningsdefined by the dyad of freedomand constraint. The coherencebetween 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 comprehensiveanswer to the most fundamental question of poetics, whether the sounds of the Sonnets are an echo of the sense. George T. Wright'sbibliographical 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 purportto say beyond noting Shakespeare's obvious use of alliteration, assonance, and consonancein 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 RomanJakobson 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 repeatedin the third strophe.That Shakespeare'affects the letter' in these strophes,and that they are therebylinked at the phonetic level is not in question. Our questionis what performative relationthis purely formallinkage at the level of the signifier might bear to the sonnet's signification,its 'contents' as Shakespeare equivocally puts it. Here Jakobsoncan be of little help, taking as he notoriouslydoes, meaning or content for grantedor reducingit to the received ideas of othercommentators. In termsof his analysis, the most the empirical fact of alliterationcan 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 illustratesas such in the previous sonnet ('0 how much more doth beautybeauteousseem / By that sweet ornament ...'). As ornament or decoration, alliteration bears the same superficially attractive but functionallyinessentialrelationto the poem as 'gilt' does to the 'monuments / O princes' mentioned at the outset.Gilding is to monumental sculptureas alliteration is to the sonnet. (Felperin 1985:176-77). If alliterationis largely irrelevantto understanding the significance of the sound pattern,what else, then, could there be of phonetic relevance in Sonnet 55? That a * I am indebtedto Paul Friedrich and Thomas L. Short for their substantive comments and suggestions, which helped improve this article, and to W. RichardRistow for his statisticalguidance. ' A curiosity of the history of scholarship on this subject are two articlesby B. F. Skinner(1939, 1941). Skinner's conclusion about alliteration in the first of these, that 'Shakespeare might as well have drawnhis words out of a hat' (1939: 191), was countered in detail in Goldsmith 1950. See also Pirkhofer1963:3-14. 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 addressesthe generalproblemof sound-meaning correspon- dences and includes some analysis of Shakespeare's poetry. 81 MICHAEL SHAPIRO Brown University Shakespeare's verse is studded with alliteration andparonomasia. The more fundamental ques- tion of a patterned relationship between soundand meaningin his Sonnetshas not been answered, partly because no method of uncovering such correspondences was available. However, once groups of sounds, specifically sonorantand obstruentsequences, are examined as the locus of the sound-meaning nexus, it emerges that Shakespeare consistently aligns these sequences with relational meaningsdefined by the dyad of freedomand constraint. The coherencebetween 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 comprehensiveanswer to the most fundamental question of poetics, whether the sounds of the Sonnets are an echo of the sense. George T. Wright'sbibliographical 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 purportto say beyond noting Shakespeare's obvious use of alliteration, assonance, and consonancein 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 RomanJakobson 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 repeatedin the third strophe.That Shakespeare'affects the letter' in these strophes,and that they are therebylinked at the phonetic level is not in question. Our questionis what performative relationthis purely formallinkage at the level of the signifier might bear to the sonnet's signification,its 'contents' as Shakespeare equivocally puts it. Here Jakobsoncan be of little help, taking as he notoriouslydoes, meaning or content for grantedor reducingit to the received ideas of othercommentators. In termsof his analysis, the most the empirical fact of alliterationcan 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 illustratesas such in the previous sonnet ('0 how much more doth beautybeauteousseem / By that sweet ornament ...'). As ornament or decoration, alliteration bears the same superficially attractive but functionallyinessentialrelationto the poem as 'gilt' does to the 'monuments / O princes' mentioned at the outset.Gilding is to monumental sculptureas alliteration is to the sonnet. (Felperin 1985:176-77). If alliterationis largely irrelevantto understanding the significance of the sound pattern,what else, then, could there be of phonetic relevance in Sonnet 55? That a * I am indebtedto Paul Friedrich and Thomas L. Short for their substantive comments and suggestions, which helped improve this article, and to W. RichardRistow for his statisticalguidance. ' A curiosity of the history of scholarship on this subject are two articlesby B. F. Skinner(1939, 1941). Skinner's conclusion about alliteration in the first of these, that 'Shakespeare might as well have drawnhis words out of a hat' (1939: 191), was countered in detail in Goldsmith 1950. See also Pirkhofer1963:3-14. 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 addressesthe generalproblemof sound-meaning correspon- dences and includes some analysis of Shakespeare's poetry. 81 MICHAEL SHAPIRO Brown University Shakespeare's verse is studded with alliteration andparonomasia. The more fundamental ques- tion of a patterned relationship between soundand meaningin his Sonnetshas not been answered, partly because no method of uncovering such correspondences was available. However, once groups of sounds, specifically sonorantand obstruentsequences, are examined as the locus of the sound-meaning nexus, it emerges that Shakespeare consistently aligns these sequences with relational meaningsdefined by the dyad of freedomand constraint. The coherencebetween 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 comprehensiveanswer to the most fundamental question of poetics, whether the sounds of the Sonnets are an echo of the sense. George T. Wright'sbibliographical 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 purportto say beyond noting Shakespeare's obvious use of alliteration, assonance, and consonancein 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 RomanJakobson 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 repeatedin the third strophe.That Shakespeare'affects the letter' in these strophes,and that they are therebylinked at the phonetic level is not in question. Our questionis what performative relationthis purely formallinkage at the level of the signifier might bear to the sonnet's signification,its 'contents' as Shakespeare equivocally puts it. Here Jakobsoncan be of little help, taking as he notoriouslydoes, meaning or content for grantedor reducingit to the received ideas of othercommentators. In termsof his analysis, the most the empirical fact of alliterationcan 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 illustratesas such in the previous sonnet ('0 how much more doth beautybeauteousseem / By that sweet ornament ...'). As ornament or decoration, alliteration bears the same superficially attractive but functionallyinessentialrelationto the poem as 'gilt' does to the 'monuments / O princes' mentioned at the outset.Gilding is to monumental sculptureas alliteration is to the sonnet. (Felperin 1985:176-77). If alliterationis largely irrelevantto understanding the significance of the sound pattern,what else, then, could there be of phonetic relevance in Sonnet 55? That a * I am indebtedto Paul Friedrich and Thomas L. Short for their substantive comments and suggestions, which helped improve this article, and to W. RichardRistow for his statisticalguidance. ' A curiosity of the history of scholarship on this subject are two articlesby B. F. Skinner(1939, 1941). Skinner's conclusion about alliteration in the first of these, that 'Shakespeare might as well have drawnhis words out of a hat' (1939: 191), was countered in detail in Goldsmith 1950. See also Pirkhofer1963:3-14. 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 addressesthe generalproblemof sound-meaning correspon- dences and includes some analysis of Shakespeare's poetry. 81 MICHAEL SHAPIRO Brown University Shakespeare's verse is studded with alliteration andparonomasia. The more fundamental ques- tion of a patterned relationship between soundand meaningin his Sonnetshas not been answered, partly because no method of uncovering such correspondences was available. However, once groups of sounds, specifically sonorantand obstruentsequences, are examined as the locus of the sound-meaning nexus, it emerges that Shakespeare consistently aligns these sequences with relational meaningsdefined by the dyad of freedomand constraint. The coherencebetween 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 comprehensiveanswer to the most fundamental question of poetics, whether the sounds of the Sonnets are an echo of the sense. George T. Wright'sbibliographical 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 purportto say beyond noting Shakespeare's obvious use of alliteration, assonance, and consonancein 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 RomanJakobson 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 repeatedin the third strophe.That Shakespeare'affects the letter' in these strophes,and that they are therebylinked at the phonetic level is not in question. Our questionis what performative relationthis purely formallinkage at the level of the signifier might bear to the sonnet's signification,its 'contents' as Shakespeare equivocally puts it. Here Jakobsoncan be of little help, taking as he notoriouslydoes, meaning or content for grantedor reducingit to the received ideas of othercommentators. In termsof his analysis, the most the empirical fact of alliterationcan 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 illustratesas such in the previous sonnet ('0 how much more doth beautybeauteousseem / By that sweet ornament ...'). As ornament or decoration, alliteration bears the same superficially attractive but functionallyinessentialrelationto the poem as 'gilt' does to the 'monuments / O princes' mentioned at the outset.Gilding is to monumental sculptureas alliteration is to the sonnet. (Felperin 1985:176-77). If alliterationis largely irrelevantto understanding the significance of the sound pattern,what else, then, could there be of phonetic relevance in Sonnet 55? That a * I am indebtedto Paul Friedrich and Thomas L. Short for their substantive comments and suggestions, which helped improve this article, and to W. RichardRistow for his statisticalguidance. ' A curiosity of the history of scholarship on this subject are two articlesby B. F. Skinner(1939, 1941). Skinner's conclusion about alliteration in the first of these, that 'Shakespeare might as well have drawnhis words out of a hat' (1939: 191), was countered in detail in Goldsmith 1950. See also Pirkhofer1963:3-14. 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 addressesthe generalproblemof sound-meaning correspon- dences and includes some analysis of Shakespeare's poetry. 81 MICHAEL SHAPIRO Brown University Shakespeare's verse is studded with alliteration andparonomasia. The more fundamental ques- tion of a patterned relationship between soundand meaningin his Sonnetshas not been answered, partly because no method of uncovering such correspondences was available. However, once groups of sounds, specifically sonorantand obstruentsequences, are examined as the locus of the sound-meaning nexus, it emerges that Shakespeare consistently aligns these sequences with relational meaningsdefined by the dyad of freedomand constraint. The coherencebetween 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 comprehensiveanswer to the most fundamental question of poetics, whether the sounds of the Sonnets are an echo of the sense. George T. Wright'sbibliographical 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 purportto say beyond noting Shakespeare's obvious use of alliteration, assonance, and consonancein 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 RomanJakobson 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 repeatedin the third strophe.That Shakespeare'affects the letter' in these strophes,and that they are therebylinked at the phonetic level is not in question. Our questionis what performative relationthis purely formallinkage at the level of the signifier might bear to the sonnet's signification,its 'contents' as Shakespeare equivocally puts it. Here Jakobsoncan be of little help, taking as he notoriouslydoes, meaning or content for grantedor reducingit to the received ideas of othercommentators. In termsof his analysis, the most the empirical fact of alliterationcan 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 illustratesas such in the previous sonnet ('0 how much more doth beautybeauteousseem / By that sweet ornament ...'). As ornament or decoration, alliteration bears the same superficially attractive but functionallyinessentialrelationto the poem as 'gilt' does to the 'monuments / O princes' mentioned at the outset.Gilding is to monumental sculptureas alliteration is to the sonnet. (Felperin 1985:176-77). If alliterationis largely irrelevantto understanding the significance of the sound pattern,what else, then, could there be of phonetic relevance in Sonnet 55? That a * I am indebtedto Paul Friedrich and Thomas L. Short for their substantive comments and suggestions, which helped improve this article, and to W. RichardRistow for his statisticalguidance. ' A curiosity of the history of scholarship on this subject are two articlesby B. F. Skinner(1939, 1941). Skinner's conclusion about alliteration in the first of these, that 'Shakespeare might as well have drawnhis words out of a hat' (1939: 191), was countered in detail in Goldsmith 1950. See also Pirkhofer1963:3-14. 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 addressesthe generalproblemof sound-meaning correspon- dences and includes some analysis of Shakespeare's poetry. 81 MICHAEL SHAPIRO Brown University Shakespeare's verse is studded with alliteration andparonomasia. The more fundamental ques- tion of a patterned relationship between soundand meaningin his Sonnetshas not been answered, partly because no method of uncovering such correspondences was available. However, once groups of sounds, specifically sonorantand obstruentsequences, are examined as the locus of the sound-meaning nexus, it emerges that Shakespeare consistently aligns these sequences with relational meaningsdefined by the dyad of freedomand constraint. The coherencebetween 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 comprehensiveanswer to the most fundamental question of poetics, whether the sounds of the Sonnets are an echo of the sense. George T. Wright'sbibliographical 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 purportto say beyond noting Shakespeare's obvious use of alliteration, assonance, and consonancein 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 RomanJakobson 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 repeatedin the third strophe.That Shakespeare'affects the letter' in these strophes,and that they are therebylinked at the phonetic level is not in question. Our questionis what performative relationthis purely formallinkage at the level of the signifier might bear to the sonnet's signification,its 'contents' as Shakespeare equivocally puts it. Here Jakobsoncan be of little help, taking as he notoriouslydoes, meaning or content for grantedor reducingit to the received ideas of othercommentators. In termsof his analysis, the most the empirical fact of alliterationcan 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 illustratesas such in the previous sonnet ('0 how much more doth beautybeauteousseem / By that sweet ornament ...'). As ornament or decoration, alliteration bears the same superficially attractive but functionallyinessentialrelationto the poem as 'gilt' does to the 'monuments / O princes' mentioned at the outset.Gilding is to monumental sculptureas alliteration is to the sonnet. (Felperin 1985:176-77). If alliterationis largely irrelevantto understanding the significance of the sound pattern,what else, then, could there be of phonetic relevance in Sonnet 55? That a * I am indebtedto Paul Friedrich and Thomas L. Short for their substantive comments and suggestions, which helped improve this article, and to W. RichardRistow for his statisticalguidance. ' A curiosity of the history of scholarship on this subject are two articlesby B. F. Skinner(1939, 1941). Skinner's conclusion about alliteration in the first of these, that 'Shakespeare might as well have drawnhis words out of a hat' (1939: 191), was countered in detail in Goldsmith 1950. See also Pirkhofer1963:3-14. 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 addressesthe generalproblemof sound-meaning correspon- dences and includes some analysis of Shakespeare's poetry. 81 MICHAEL SHAPIRO Brown University Shakespeare's verse is studded with alliteration andparonomasia. The more fundamental ques- tion of a patterned relationship between soundand meaningin his Sonnetshas not been answered, partly because no method of uncovering such correspondences was available. However, once groups of sounds, specifically sonorantand obstruentsequences, are examined as the locus of the sound-meaning nexus, it emerges that Shakespeare consistently aligns these sequences with relational meaningsdefined by the dyad of freedomand constraint. The coherencebetween 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 comprehensiveanswer to the most fundamental question of poetics, whether the sounds of the Sonnets are an echo of the sense. George T. Wright'sbibliographical 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 purportto say beyond noting Shakespeare's obvious use of alliteration, assonance, and consonancein 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 RomanJakobson 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 repeatedin the third strophe.That Shakespeare'affects the letter' in these strophes,and that they are therebylinked at the phonetic level is not in question. Our questionis what performative relationthis purely formallinkage at the level of the signifier might bear to the sonnet's signification,its 'contents' as Shakespeare equivocally puts it. Here Jakobsoncan be of little help, taking as he notoriouslydoes, meaning or content for grantedor reducingit to the received ideas of othercommentators. In termsof his analysis, the most the empirical fact of alliterationcan 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 illustratesas such in the previous sonnet ('0 how much more doth beautybeauteousseem / By that sweet ornament ...'). As ornament or decoration, alliteration bears the same superficially attractive but functionallyinessentialrelationto the poem as 'gilt' does to the 'monuments / O princes' mentioned at the outset.Gilding is to monumental sculptureas alliteration is to the sonnet. (Felperin 1985:176-77). If alliterationis largely irrelevantto understanding the significance of the sound pattern,what else, then, could there be of phonetic relevance in Sonnet 55? That a * I am indebtedto Paul Friedrich and Thomas L. Short for their substantive comments and suggestions, which helped improve this article, and to W. RichardRistow for his statisticalguidance. ' A curiosity of the history of scholarship on this subject are two articlesby B. F. Skinner(1939, 1941). Skinner's conclusion about alliteration in the first of these, that 'Shakespeare might as well have drawnhis words out of a hat' (1939: 191), was countered in detail in Goldsmith 1950. See also Pirkhofer1963:3-14. 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 addressesthe generalproblemof sound-meaning correspon- dences and includes some analysis of Shakespeare's poetry. 81 MICHAEL SHAPIRO Brown University Shakespeare's verse is studded with alliteration andparonomasia. The more fundamental ques- tion of a patterned relationship between soundand meaningin his Sonnetshas not been answered, partly because no method of uncovering such correspondences was available. However, once groups of sounds, specifically sonorantand obstruentsequences, are examined as the locus of the sound-meaning nexus, it emerges that Shakespeare consistently aligns these sequences with relational meaningsdefined by the dyad of freedomand constraint. The coherencebetween 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 comprehensiveanswer to the most fundamental question of poetics, whether the sounds of the Sonnets are an echo of the sense. George T. Wright'sbibliographical 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 purportto say beyond noting Shakespeare's obvious use of alliteration, assonance, and consonancein 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 RomanJakobson 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 repeatedin the third strophe.That Shakespeare'affects the letter' in these strophes,and that they are therebylinked at the phonetic level is not in question. Our questionis what performative relationthis purely formallinkage at the level of the signifier might bear to the sonnet's signification,its 'contents' as Shakespeare equivocally puts it. Here Jakobsoncan be of little help, taking as he notoriouslydoes, meaning or content for grantedor reducingit to the received ideas of othercommentators. In termsof his analysis, the most the empirical fact of alliterationcan 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 illustratesas such in the previous sonnet ('0 how much more doth beautybeauteousseem / By that sweet ornament ...'). As ornament or decoration, alliteration bears the same superficially attractive but functionallyinessentialrelationto the poem as 'gilt' does to the 'monuments / O princes' mentioned at the outset.Gilding is to monumental sculptureas alliteration is to the sonnet. (Felperin 1985:176-77). If alliterationis largely irrelevantto understanding the significance of the sound pattern,what else, then, could there be of phonetic relevance in Sonnet 55? That a * I am indebtedto Paul Friedrich and Thomas L. Short for their substantive comments and suggestions, which helped improve this article, and to W. RichardRistow for his statisticalguidance. ' A curiosity of the history of scholarship on this subject are two articlesby B. F. Skinner(1939, 1941). Skinner's conclusion about alliteration in the first of these, that 'Shakespeare might as well have drawnhis words out of a hat' (1939: 191), was countered in detail in Goldsmith 1950. See also Pirkhofer1963:3-14. 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 addressesthe generalproblemof sound-meaning correspon- dences and includes some analysis of Shakespeare's poetry. 81