Hostname: page-component-6bf8c574d5-r8w4l Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-03-09T02:03:15.582Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Rude Railing Rhymers: Reading Close Rhyme in Skeltonic Verse and Hip-Hop

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 March 2023

Emma Brush
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

At the turn of the sixteenth century, John Skelton left a strange legacy to the English literary canon: a verse form characterized solely by short lines and long rhyme sequences. This formal innovation, a species of close rhyme now called “the Skeltonic,” has puzzled Skelton's interlocutors for centuries, leaving him a liminal figure within literary history. But if Skelton was an anomaly, the Skeltonic does not stand alone within the English-language literary canon. American hip-hop, one of the most formally innovative, commercially successful, and contentious poetic forms of our day, foregrounds a style and ethos that in many ways picks up where Skelton left off. Hip-hop, like the Skeltonic, requires the explanatory force of its own context, and yet its remarkable, persistent, historically dissonant commitment to rhyme suggests a striking formal parallel with Skelton's verse, one that offers transhistorical insight into the performative poetics and paradoxical politics of close rhyme.

Type
Essay
Information
PMLA , Volume 138 , Issue 1 , January 2023 , pp. 20 - 36
Copyright
Copyright © 2023 The Author(s). Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Modern Language Association of America

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Works Cited

Adams, Kyle. “Aspects of the Music/Text Relationship in Rap.” Music Theory Online, vol. 14, no. 2, May 2008, pp. 1–12.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Alim, H. Samy. “On Some Serious Next Millennium Rap Ishhh: Pharoahe Monch, Hip Hop Poetics, and the Internal Rhymes of Internal Affairs.” Journal of English Linguistics, vol. 31, no. 1, 2003, pp. 60–84.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Attridge, Derek. Well-Weighed Syllables: Elizabethan Verse in Classical Metres. Cambridge UP, 1974.Google Scholar
Auden, W. H. “The Great Tudors.” Edwards, pp. 176–86.Google Scholar
Bailey, Julius. Philosophy and Hip-Hop: Ruminations on Postmodern Cultural Form. Springer, 2014.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Baker, Houston A., Jr. Black Studies, Rap, and the Academy. U of Chicago P, 1993.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Barclay, Alexander. “The Ship of Fools.” Edwards, p. 46.Google Scholar
Barnes, A. W. “Constructing the Sexual Subject of John Skelton.” ELH, vol. 71, no. 1, 2004, pp. 29–51.Google Scholar
Berry, Michael. Listening to Rap: An Introduction. Routledge, 2018.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Best, Stephen. None Like Us: Blackness, Belonging, Aesthetic Life. Duke UP, 2018.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Best, Stephen, and Marcus, Sharon. “Surface Reading: An Introduction.” Representations, vol. 108, no. 1, 2009, pp. 1–21.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Blanchard, W. Scott. “Skelton: The Voice of the Mob in Sanctuary.” Rethinking the Henrician Era: Essays on Early Tudor Texts and Contexts, edited by Herman, Peter C., U of Illinois P, 1994, pp. 123–44.Google Scholar
Bradley, Adam. Book of Rhymes: The Poetics of Hip Hop. 2nd ed., BasicCivitas, 2017.Google Scholar
Bradley, Adam, and DuBois, Andrew. Introduction. The Anthology of Rap, edited by Bradley, and DuBois, , Yale UP, 2010, pp. xxix–xlvii.Google Scholar
Brogan, T. V. F., and Spaar, Lisa Russ. “Close Rhyme.” The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, edited by Greene, Roland et al. , 4th ed., Princeton UP, 2012, pp. 269–70.Google Scholar
Bronstein, Michaela. Out of Context: The Uses of Modernist Fiction. Oxford UP, 2018.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Brown, Richard Danson. The Art of The Faerie Queene. Manchester UP, 2019.Google Scholar
Caplan, David. Rhyme's Challenge: Hip Hop, Poetry, and Contemporary Rhyming Culture. Oxford UP, 2014.Google Scholar
Cardi, B. “Money.” Atlanta Records, 2018.Google Scholar
Carpenter, Nan Cooke. “Skelton and Music: Roty Bully Joys.” The Review of English Studies, vol. 6, no. 21, Jan. 1955, pp. 279–84.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Chang, Jeff. Can't Stop Won't Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation. Picador, 2005.Google Scholar
Chang, Jeff. “Hip-Hop Arts: Our Expanding Universe.” Introduction. Total Chaos: The Art and Aesthetics of Hip-Hop, edited by Chang, BasicCivitas, 2006, pp. ix–xv.Google Scholar
Charity, Justin. “Declaring a Moratorium on the Term ‘Mumble Rap.’” The Ringer, 18 Apr. 2017, www.theringer.com/2017/4/18/16047136/mumble-rap-moratorium-lil-yachty-desiigner-15bc3647dae9.Google Scholar
Cobb, William Jelani. To the Break of Dawn: A Freestyle on the Hip Hop Aesthetic. New York UP, 2007.Google Scholar
Cooper, Helen. Pastoral: Mediaeval into Renaissance. D. S. Brewer, 1977.Google Scholar
Daileader, Celia R. “When a Sparrow Falls: Women Readers, Male Critics, and John Skelton's Phyllyp Sparowe.” Philological Quarterly, vol. 75, no. 4, 1996, pp. 391–409.Google Scholar
Dance, Daryl Cumber. From My People: Four Hundred Years of African American Folklore. W. W. Norton, 2003.Google Scholar
Dimock, Wai Chee. “Planetary Time and Global Translation: ‘Context’ in Literary Studies.” Common Knowledge, vol. 9, no. 3, 2003, pp. 488–507.Google Scholar
Dimock, Wai Chee. “A Theory of Resonance.” PMLA, vol. 112, no. 5, Oct. 1997, pp. 1060–71.Google Scholar
Dimock, Wai Chee. Through Other Continents: American Literature across Deep Time. Princeton UP, 2008.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dyson, Michael Eric. Holler If You Hear Me: Searching for Tupac Shakur. Basic Books, 2001.Google Scholar
Edwards, Anthony S. G., editor. John Skelton: The Critical Heritage. Routledge, 2002.Google Scholar
Ellison, Ralph. Shadow and Act. Knopf Doubleday, 1995.Google Scholar
Eminem. “The Real Slim Shady.” The Marshall Mathers LP, Aftermath Entertainment / Interscope Records, 2000.Google Scholar
Eminem “White America.” The Eminem Show. Aftermath Entertainment / Interscope Records / Shady Records, 2002.Google Scholar
Felski, Rita. The Limits of Critique. U of Chicago P, 2015.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fish, Stanley Eugene. John Skelton's Poetry. Yale UP, 1965.Google Scholar
Fowler, Elizabeth. Literary Character: The Human Figure in Early English Writing. Cornell UP, 2003.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gates, Henry Louis Jr. Foreword. The Anthology of Rap, edited by Bradley, Adam and DuBois, Andrew, Yale UP, 2010, pp. xxii–xxvii.Google Scholar
Gates, Henry Louis Jr. “Hip-Hop and the Fate of Signifying.” Introduction. The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism, Twenty-fifth anniversary ed., Oxford UP, 2014, pp. xxix–xxxiii.Google Scholar
Gates, Henry Louis Jr. The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism. Oxford UP, 1988.Google Scholar
Goldberg, Jonathan, and Menon, Madhavi. “Queering History.” PMLA, vol. 120, no. 5, Oct. 2005, pp. 1608–17.Google Scholar
Golding, Louis. “Merie Skelton.” The Saturday Review, vol. 133, no. 3455, 14 Jan. 1922, pp. 30–31.Google Scholar
Gore, Tipper. “Hate, Rape and Rap.” The Washington Post, 8 Jan. 1990, www.washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/1990/01/08/hate-rape-and-rap/b4c16c35-4e96-4dec-8866-68ff6c1350f4/.Google Scholar
Gray, Douglas. The Phoenix and the Parrot: Skelton and the Language of Satire. U of Otago, 2012.Google Scholar
Greene, Roland. “Calling Colin Clout.” Spenser Studies, vol. 10, 1992, pp. 229–44.Google Scholar
Griffiths, Jane. “‘An Ende of an Olde Song’: Middle English Lyric and the Skeltonic.” The Review of English Studies, vol. 60, no. 247, 2009, pp. 705–22.Google Scholar
Griffiths, Jane. John Skelton and Poetic Authority: Defining the Liberty to Speak. Oxford UP, 2006.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Grow, Kory. “Riot on the Set: How Public Enemy Crafted the Anthem ‘Fight the Power.’” Rolling Stone, June 2014, www.rollingstone.com/feature/riot-on-the-set-how-public-enemy-crafted-the-anthem-fight-the-power-244152/.Google Scholar
Hadfield, Andrew. Literature, Politics and National Identity: Reformation to Renaissance. Cambridge UP, 1994.Google Scholar
Halliday, Aria S., and Payne, Ashley N.. “Savage and Savvy: Mapping Contemporary Hip Hop Feminism.” Introduction. The Journal of Hip Hop Studies, vol. 7, no. 1, 2020, pp. 8–18.Google Scholar
Halpern, Richard. The Poetics of Primitive Accumulation: English Renaissance Culture and the Genealogy of Capital. Cornell UP, 1991.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hayot, Eric. “Against Periodization; or, On Institutional Time.” New Literary History, vol. 42, no. 4, 2011, pp. 739–56.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Heiserman, A. R. Skelton and Satire. U of Chicago P, 1961.Google Scholar
Herman, Peter C. “Leaky Ladies and Droopy Dames: The Grotesque Realism of Skelton's The Tunnynge of Elynour Rummynge.” Rethinking the Henrician Era: Essays on Early Tudor Texts and Contexts, edited by Herman, , U of Illinois P, 1994, pp. 145–67.Google Scholar
Jakobson, Roman. On Translation. Edited by Brower, Reuben A., Harvard UP, 1959.Google Scholar
Jay-Z. Decoded. Enhanced ed., Random House, 2010.Google Scholar
Jenkins, Candice M. “Introduction: ‘Reading’ Hip-Hop Discourse in the Twenty-First Century.” African American Review, vol. 46, no. 1, 2013, pp. 1–8.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kajikawa, Loren. Sounding Race in Rap Songs. U of California P, 2015.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kelly, John C. “A Perfect Feast of Fools and Plenty: Carnival in John Skelton's Poem ‘The Tunning of Elinour Rumming.’” English Studies in Canada, vol. 22, no. 2, 1996, pp. 129–48.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kendle, Burton Stuart. The Ancestry and Character of the Skeltonic. 1961. U of Wisconsin, Madison, PhD dissertation.Google Scholar
Keyes, Cheryl Lynette. Rap Music and Street Consciousness. U of Illinois P, 2004.Google Scholar
Kezar, Dennis. Guilty Creatures: Renaissance Poetry and the Ethics of Authorship. Oxford UP, 2001.Google Scholar
Kinney, Arthur F. John Skelton, Priest as Poet: Seasons of Discovery. U of North Carolina P, 1987.Google Scholar
Kinsman, Robert S. “Skelton's ‘Colyn Cloute’: The Mask of Vox Populi.” Essays Critical and Historical Dedicated to Lily B. Campbell, U of California P, 1950, pp. 17–23.Google Scholar
Kinsman, Robert S. “Skelton's ‘Uppon a Deedmans Hed’: New Light on the Origin of the Skeltonic.” Studies in Philology, vol. 50, no. 2, 1953, pp. 101–09.Google Scholar
Kitwana, Bakari. Why White Kids Love Hip Hop: Wankstas, Wiggers, Wannabes, and the New Reality of Race in America. BasicCivitas, 2006.Google Scholar
Krims, Adam. Rap Music and the Poetics of Identity. Cambridge UP, 2000.Google Scholar
Lamar, Kendrick. “DNA.” DAMN., Aftermath Entertainment / Interscope Records / Top Dawg Entertainment, 2017.Google Scholar
Lecky, Kat. “‘Come Who So Wyll’: Inclusive Poetics in Skelton's Elynour Rummynge.” Exemplaria, vol. 25, no. 1, Jan. 2013, pp. 59–78.Google Scholar
Levine, Caroline. Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network. Princeton UP, 2015.Google Scholar
Levinson, Marjorie. “What Is New Formalism?” PMLA, vol. 122, no. 2, Mar. 2007, pp. 558–69.Google Scholar
Lewis, C. S. English Literature in the Sixteenth Century Excluding Drama. Oxford UP, 1954.Google Scholar
Love, Heather. “Close but Not Deep: Literary Ethics and the Descriptive Turn.” New Literary History, vol. 41, no. 2, 2010, pp. 371–91.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mancini, Rob. “Eminem Targeted at Senate Hearing.” MTV News, 13 Sept. 2000, www.mtv.com/news/1428579/eminem-targeted-at-senate-hearing/.Google Scholar
Marcus, Sharon, et al. “Building a Better Description.” Representations, no. 135, 2016, pp. 1–21.Google Scholar
McKie, Michael. “The Origins and Early Development of Rhyme in English Verse.” The Modern Language Review, vol. 92, no. 4, 1997, pp. 817–31.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McWhorter, John. “Americans Have Never Loved Poetry More—But They Call It Rap.” Daily Beast, 29 June 2014, www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/06/29/americans-have-never-loved-poetry-more-but-they-call-it-rap.Google Scholar
Munro, Lucy. “Skeltonics: Jonson, Shakespeare, the Literary Past and Imagined Futures.” Shakespeare, vol. 12, no. 4, 2016, pp. 338–50.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nelson, William. John Skelton, Laureate. Columbia UP, 1939.Google Scholar
Nielson, Erik, and Dennis, Andrea L.. Rap on Trial: Race, Lyrics, and Guilt in America. New Press, 2019.Google Scholar
Nolan, Maura. John Lydgate and the Making of Public Culture. Cambridge UP, 2005.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pask, Kevin. “Ancients and Moderns: The Origins of Literary History.” Modern Language Quarterly, vol. 73, no. 4, Jan. 2012, pp. 505–26.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Paster, Gail Kern. “Leaky Vessels: The Incontinent Women of City Comedy.” Renaissance Drama, vol. 18, 1987, pp. 43–65.Google Scholar
Perry, Curtis. “Court and Coterie Culture.” A New Companion to English Renaissance Literature and Culture, John Wiley and Sons, 2010, pp. 304–19.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Perry, Imani. Prophets of the Hood: Politics and Poetics in Hip Hop. Duke UP, 2004.Google Scholar
Pollet, Maurice. John Skelton: Poet of Tudor England. Translated by Warrington, John, J. M. Dent, 1971.Google Scholar
Pope, Alexander. “An Essay on Criticism.” Pastoral Poetry and “An Essay on Criticism,” edited by Audra, E. and Williams, Aubrey, Methuen, 1961, pp. 233–326.Google Scholar
Pope, Alexander. “Imitations of Horace.” Edwards, pp. 75–76.Google Scholar
Potter, Russell A. Spectacular Vernaculars: Hip-Hop and the Politics of Postmodernism. State U of New York P, 1995.Google Scholar
Public Enemy. “Bring the Noise.” It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, Def Jam Recordings / Columbia Records, 1988.Google Scholar
Public Enemy. “Fight the Power.” Fear of a Black Planet, Def Jam Recordings / Columbia Records, 1990.Google Scholar
Public Enemy. “Rebel without a Pause.” It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, Def Jam Recordings / Columbia Records, 1988.Google Scholar
Puttenham, George. The Arte of English Poesie. Edited by Willcock, Gladys Doidge and Walker, Alice, Cambridge UP, 1936.Google Scholar
Pyle, Fitzroy. “The Origins of the Skeltonic.” Notes and Queries, vol. 171, Nov. 1936, pp. 362–64.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
“The Quarterly Review on Dyce's Edition of Skelton.” Edwards, pp. 101–21.Google Scholar
Reid, Shaheem. “Eminem's ‘We Made You’ Video Slammed by Bill O'Reilly.” MTV News, 9 Apr. 2009, www.mtv.com/news/1608906/eminems-we-made-you-video-slammed-by-bill-oreilly/.Google Scholar
Rhodes, Neil. “Framing and Tuning in Renaissance English Verse.” Renaissance Transformations: The Making of English Writing 1500–1650, edited by Healy, Margaret and Healy, Thomas, Edinburgh UP, 2009, pp. 32–47.Google Scholar
Rhodes, William. “Why Colin Clout Came Back: English Reformation Literature and Edmund Spenser's Late Work.” ELH, vol. 84, no. 3, 2017, pp. 503–27.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Robbins, Bruce. Afterword. PMLA, vol. 122, no. 5, Oct. 2007, pp. 1644–51.Google Scholar
Rose, Tricia. Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America. Wesleyan UP, 1994.Google Scholar
Rose, Tricia. The Hip Hop Wars: What We Talk about When We Talk about Hip Hop—And Why It Matters. Basic Books, 2008.Google Scholar
Sanneh, Kelefa. “Word: Jay-Z's ‘Decoded’ and the Language of Hip-Hop.” The New Yorker, 28 Nov. 2010, www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/12/06/word-kelefa-sanneh.Google Scholar
Schibanoff, Susan. “Taking Jane's Cue: Phyllyp Sparowe as a Primer for Women Readers.” PMLA, vol. 101, no. 5, Oct. 1986, pp. 832–47.Google Scholar
Schloss, Joseph G. Making Beats: The Art of Sample-Based Hip-Hop. Wesleyan UP, 2014.Google Scholar
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading; or, You're So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay Is about You.” Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity, Duke UP, 2003, pp. 123–52.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Segall, Kreg. “Skeltonic Anxiety and Rumination in ‘The Shepheardes Calender.’” Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900, vol. 47, no. 1, 2007, pp. 29–56.Google Scholar
Shelby, Tommie. Dark Ghettos: Injustice, Dissent, and Reform. Harvard UP, 2016.Google Scholar
Sidney, Philip. “A Defence of Poetry (1595).” English Renaissance Literary Criticism, edited by Vickers, Brian, Oxford UP, 1999, pp. 336–91.Google Scholar
Simon, Ed. “The Renaissance Precursor of Rap Battles and Flow.” Paris Review, 19 Oct. 2017, www.theparisreview.org/blog/2017/10/19/renaissance-poetry-precursor-rap-battles-flow/.Google Scholar
Skelton, John. “Agenst Garnesche.” Skelton, Complete English Poems, pp. 121–34.Google Scholar
Skelton, John. “Collyn Clout.” Skelton, Complete English Poems, pp. 246–78.Google Scholar
Skelton, John. The Complete English Poems. Edited by Scattergood, John, Penguin Books, 1983.Google Scholar
Skelton, John. “Elynour Rummynge.” Skelton, Complete English Poems, pp. 214–30.Google Scholar
Skelton, John. “Phyllyp Sparowe.” Skelton, Complete English Poems, pp. 71–106.Google Scholar
Skelton, John. The Poetical Works of John Skelton. Edited by Dyce, Alexander, Thomas Rodd, 1843.Google Scholar
Snead, James A. “On Repetition in Black Culture.” Black American Literature Forum, vol. 15, no. 4, 1981, pp. 146–54.Google Scholar
Sylvester, Richard Standish, editor. English Sixteenth-Century Verse: An Anthology. W. W. Norton, 1984.Google Scholar
Talley, Thomas W. Negro Folk Rhymes: Wise and Otherwise. Macmillan, 1922.Google Scholar
Tonry, Kathleen. “John Skelton and the New Fifteenth Century.” Literature Compass, vol. 5, no. 4, 2008, pp. 721–39.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Traub, Valerie. “The New Unhistoricism in Queer Studies.” PMLA, vol. 128, no. 1, Jan. 2013, pp. 21–39.Google Scholar
Ward, Adolphus William, and Waller, Alfred Rayney, editors. The Cambridge History of English Literature: The End of the Middle Ages. G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1908.Google Scholar
Warton, Thomas. “The History of English Poetry.” Edwards, pp. 78–83.Google Scholar
Weheliye, Alexander G. Phonographies: Grooves in Sonic Afro-Modernity. Duke UP, 2005.Google Scholar
Will, George F. “America's Slide into the Sewer.” Newsweek, 29 July 1990, www.newsweek.com/americas-slide-sewer-206924.Google Scholar
Wimsatt, W. K., and Beardsley, Monroe C.. “The Concept of Meter: An Exercise in Abstraction.” PMLA, vol. 74, no. 5, Dec. 1959, pp. 585–98.Google Scholar
Wood, Brent. “Understanding Rap as Rhetorical Folk-Poetry.” Mosaic: An Interdisciplinary Critical Journal, vol. 32, no. 4, 1999, pp. 129–46.Google Scholar
Woodbridge, Linda. Women and the English Renaissance: Literature and the Nature of Womankind, 1540–1620. U of Illinois P, 1984.Google Scholar
Wordsworth, William. Letter to Allan Cunningham, 23 Nov. 1823. Edwards, pp. 89–90.Google Scholar