Under the null hypothesis, the frequency with which initial sounds appeared multiple times in the same line would be unchanged if the words were put in a sack, shaken up, and laid out again in random order. And this is just what Skinner found in his sample of a hundred sonnets. Shakespeare failed the significance test. Skinner writes: “In spite of the seeming richness of alliteration in the sonnets, there is no significant evidence of a process of alliteration in the behavior of the poet to which any serious attention should be given. So far as this aspect of poetry is concerned, Shakespeare
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