The Roots of Shakespeare’s “Rhythmical Italics” and of Formulas in Literary Verse

Abstract

The article deals with the origin of “rhythmical figures” serving as “rhythmical italics” to enhance meaning in English poetry from Chaucer to Frost (14th–20th centuries). In Surrey’s translation of The Aeneid (the first decades of the 16th century) the rhythmical figures already resemble their use in the later 16th-century poetry by Sidney and Spenser who were aware of the role of rhythmical deviations from the meter and used them to emphasize meaning, i.e., as rhythmical italics. Shakespeare inherited this device and widened its scope. Eighteenth-century Classicists (Pope, Thomson) confirmed the link between the “deviations” from the meter and semantics, while 19th-century Romantics (Shelley, Byron) in spite of their critique of Classicism used the same rhythmical figures on syllabic positions WS(W), the same grammatical patterns (“verb plus object”) and the same lexicon (the verbs “tremble, shake”) as Surrey, Spenser, Shakespeare and Pope, turning them into formulas.