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In Act 3 of Hamlet, immediately following the king's stormy exit at the climax of the play within the play, Hamlet and Horatio have an exchange that foregrounds the issue of poetry within the play. The prince who supposedly penned a cluster of rhymed couplets for inclusion in The Murder of Gonzago now proceeds to address his friend in a quatrain of awkward iambs:
For thou dost know, O Damon dear,
This realm dismantled was
Of Jove himself, and now reigns here
A very, very-pajock.
(3.2.258-61)1
Sounding a bit like a literary critic with a formalist bent, Horatio responds, "You might have rhymed" (l. 262). I will return to these lines in due course. For now, I want to point out something that has received little comment: at a moment of high dramatic and emotional tension in a very tense play, Shakespeare explicitly calls our attention to rhyme. No one has offered much explanation for why Hamlet is rife with rhyme. In plays about love in which Shakespeare made the love lyric itself a thematic focal point, rhymed verse does not surprise us. But why did the characters and themes of Hamlet compel Shakespeare to use rhyme so frequently? I think the answer lies in the play's profound concern with reason, with passion, and with madness. This essay argues that for most of Hamlet, Shakespeare emphasizes rhyme's apartness from reason, associating it instead with madness and with the tyrannical rule of passion in the unbalanced soul. When something apparently lacks common sense or has no clear rationale behind it, we often say that it has "no rhyme or reason," as if those terms were synonymous. For Shakespeare, however, they usually functioned as antonyms. In The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Valentine overhears Speed's rhymed aside and asks, "what-are you reasoning with your self?" (2.1.127). The servant's reply, "Nay, I was rhyming. 'Tis you that have the reason" (l. 128), speaks directly to their mutual exclusivity.
While the idea of poetic inspiration as a kind of madness stretches back to Plato, the poetry he knew was unrhymed. The specific link between rhyme and madness was forged in the early modern period, when the aesthetic, cultural, and intellectual value of vernacular poetry became a matter of vigorous debate....