Shakespeare and Mozart

When I listen to Mozart, what strikes me most is his use of dissonance. It seems so modern, unexpected. In poetry, the analogue to dissonance is assonance—the imperfect rhyme. But poetry is trickier than music. Musical notation allows us to reproduce quite well what a composition sounded like hundreds of years ago. We can’t say the same about poetry, for which we must rely on what contemporary authors wrote about how words were pronounced and on whatever clues we can gather from spellings, rhymes and puns. But in Shakespeare’s day, spelling was very variable, and pronunciation was almost certainly at least as variable as it is now. Complicating things further is the question of how much variation was considered allowable as a matter of poetic license. We know that at least some of Shakespeare’s contemporaries considered it acceptable to change the way a word was accented or the way its vowels were sounded. What we don’t know is how far Shakespeare was willing to go with this. To put it another way, we don’t know how willing Shakespeare was to allow imperfect rhymes. I think it’s clear he was quite lenient about allowing irregular meter (even adding a sixth foot to the usual five to the occasional line in the plays). Did he feel the same way about rhymes? If so, that leaves us with a problem of circular reasoning: if we base our knowledge of Shakespeare’s pronunciation partly on his rhymes but we’re not sure if he changed the way a word was pronounced to suit a rhyme, how much do we know about his pronunciation?

There are different scenarios to consider. Take the rhymes be : posterity and die : posterity. Is the last syllable of posterity pronounced ē in both cases, or is it pronounced ī in the second case? If the latter, is it because of contemporary usage that varied (like tomayto and tomahto), or was it just poetic license? Then there is a rhyme like love : prove. Today, these words do not rhyme. Were they a perfect rhyme in Shakespeare’s day? Did they rhyme more closely? Or were they as imperfect then as they are now? But I’m really not so interested in what Shakespeare’s pronunciation was like (what is now called Original Pronunciation). I’m more interested in how tolerant Shakespeare was of assonance. Was he like Mozart? Did he deliberately use assonance to play off perfect rhymes to keep them from becoming too much? Or did he just not mind if the rhyme wasn’t quite right? Or was it a combination of both? With meter, my sense is that both types of processes were at work. He often used irregular lines to get specific effects or to balance regular lines. At other times, I think he was just fine with a line with an extra syllable or two, as long as it sounded ok. I suspect it may have been the same for him with rhyme. I don’t imagine him changing vowel sounds to make a rhyme work. I think he would have liked assonance and allowed it to provide balance. But I also think that if a rhyme was a bit off it wouldn’t bother him if it worked. I will admit, I have no basis for my supposition, it’s just the feeling I get.

I think the comparison to Mozart is apt, though, don’t you?