A Note on Feminine Rhymes and John Fletcher

It has been quite a while since I sullied this blog with something other than a poem, but the itch has come again and will not be denied. In today's edition, I will ponder an aspect of rhyme that I have come to reconsider since this blog began: the feminine rhyme in the style of John Fletcher.

For those of you who are looking at the page very blankly, John Fletcher is a playwright - or was a playwright, as far as I am aware he is dead, buried, and gone, sans Zombie Fletcher, though that would be cool but I digress - from the late Elizabethan, Jacobean, and even Caroline periods of the English Renaissance. He was a major force in his day, especially in collaboration with Francis Beaumont (so much so that after Fletcher's death {he outlived Beaumont} a large number of his solo works were bundled into a Beaumont and Fletcher joint folio), Philip Massinger, and William Shakespeare, among others. He is supposed to have had a hand in many of Shakespeare's later works, including the lost Cardenio, but his reputation has faded with the years as the kind of showy, mixed genre theater he primarily wrote has waned in popularity and critical acclaim.

For those of you looking a little less blankly, or who just read that, Fletcher had a somewhat distinctive writing style, characterized for our purpose by a particular verbal tic: the tendency towards feminine rhyme (or at least feminine endings of lines) with a monosyllablic word at the end of the line. That is, "I am a poet though I did not know it": 11 syllables, iambic, and therefore with the stress on the penultimate rather than the ultimate syllable, despite the last syllable being a word in and of itself.

Now, as far as I know Fletcher published no sonnets (he was big a little after the late 1500s sonnet craze) but that does not in any way reduce how associated he is with that style. I have no doubt he would have used it in sonnets had he published them, and the question still remains of what to do about the style within the sonnet. Are these rhymes useful or appropriate to the sonnet?

I have for years disliked this choice and considered it inartistic and ugly, especially in rhyme (I have fewer reservations about blank verse in the style, though I still try to avoid it). This is because I have always felt that rhyme should use new words each time as much as possible (I am not of the Homer Simpson bowling episode position that rhyming Homer and homer deserves applause), and this style results in rhymes like "know it" and "blow it" which use the same rhyme word at the end. I am less troubled by "poet" and "know it," assuming your dialect makes it a true and not slant rhyme, because they are different words.

However, recently I have come to a greater comfort with this style, as I have reasoned that certain words are almost unrhymeable without it, as they have difficult stress patterns to match or complicated internal assonance or consonance. Also, I have had to confront the fact that my idea that the restrictions on form should be pared down to the minimum necessary in order to highlight the chosen restrictions more brilliantly conflicts with this prejudice. As such, I am now much more open to this style, which I hope in the fullness of time will be a good thing, artistically and critically.