Stuff your sonnets with one or two extra alliterations each and you become one of the stone-footed poets mocked by Shakespeare’s fellow Elizabethan George Gascoigne: “Many writers indulge in repeticion of sundrie wordes all beginning with one letter, the whiche (beyng modestly used) lendeth good grace to a verse; but they do so hunt a letter to death, that they make it Crambe, and Crambe bis positum mors est.” The Latin phrase means “Cabbage served twice is death.”
