In a preface to the 1674 edition of Paradise Lost John Milton refers to the “troublesome and modern bondage of rhyming”, yet at the start of the century Samuel Daniel could present rhyme as a thing of liberty and deplore unrhymed Latin verse as a “prison-house”. My paper will explore what was at stake, as well as what was not at stake, in early modern writers’ figuring of rhyme in terms of imprisonment. I will attempt to understand the genealogy of the comparison between rhyme/non-rhyme and imprisonment, and particularly how opposing sides of the debate about rhyme could take up the same carceral metaphor (as well as wondering whether the metaphor is at all apt). I will conclude by considering some of the ironies of this subject: not only that Paradise Lost goes on to rhyme at least a hundred times (we can hear premonitions of rhyme in Milton’s assonant phrase: “troublesome and modern bondage of rhyming”), for example, but that Milton’s exile and then readmittance of rhyme serves as a sort of typology of Adam and Eve’s banishment from Eden.
Prison/Exile: Controlled Spaces in Early Modern Europe 