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William Shakespeare's O Mistress Mine, Feste's song from Twelfth Night, seems to have the rhyming scheme AABCCB. However, the first two lines are problematic for that scheme with modern pronunciation:

O Mistress mine, where are you roaming? / O, stay and hear! Your true love's coming,

How is roaming and coming supposed to be pronounced? I suppose the rhyme is intended there!? Recently recording a version I did, I sang with a pronunciation like roaming / "combing" (which may make the song a bit amusing). Should it be "roming" / coming instead? I note that others just ignore the rhyme altogether and sing with modern pronunciation, e.g., David McCoul's Roger Quilter version.

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    The rhymes worked in Shakespeare's time because much of English was pronounced very different from nowadays. David and Ben Crystal put out a CD which recreates many of Shakespeare's most famous parts of his plays in what they feel is the best approximation of OP, or Original Pronunciation. Well worth listening to.
    – michael_timofeev
    Commented Nov 29, 2015 at 13:05
  • I think you can find a lot of it on You Tube too -> youtube.com/playlist?list=PLWm2MsHUHUk6xc4NJm5gqsxZvLgaq1aWW
    – Roaring Fish
    Commented Nov 29, 2015 at 16:18

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You really want to open that can of worms here again? No one knows the exact answer; there are approximations. Some people go so far as to claim Shakespeare used sight rhymes (!!), which, of course, is nonsense. Another intriguing theory is that pronunciation in Shakespeare's times was so unstable that a poet, and especially a dramatist, could play fast and loose with it to his heart's content.

Anyway, if you dig a bit deeper into Shakespeare (or any poet up until the middle of the 19th Century, for that matter, even though the Great Vowel Shift was supposed to be long over by then), you'll find dozens of rhymes that are, well, intriguing. To wit:

move/love/cove
blood/good
but/put
war/afar
eye/Italy (my personal favorite)
taste/last (this one comes directly from Shakespeare)
on/groan (ditto)
river/Guadalquiver

and so forth.

Very few people are actually aware of this, and a lot of them tend to get resentful when the problem is pointed out to them.

The same goes for scansion. Three syllables or four? Is ambitious am-bi-shus or am-bi-shuh-es? (in Antony's speech, Julius Caesar, act III, if I recollect aright).

I hope this helps.

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  • Have you checked out David and Ben Crystals OP work?
    – michael_timofeev
    Commented Nov 29, 2015 at 13:08
  • I did not know there was a can of warms. :-) If it is "just" GVS would the first vowel then be somewhere around /ɔː/ and /oː/? I.e., "roming" / coming is better?
    – Finn Årup Nielsen
    Commented Nov 29, 2015 at 13:09
  • I suspect most of these were true rhymes back then. If you look at Wikipedia's Great Vowel Shift page, it shows lots of changes that happened after 1600. And they also say "The changes that happened after 1600 are not usually considered part of the Great Vowel Shift proper." So vowels kept on shifting (they still are today), but the vowel shifts after 1600 are by definition not the Great Vowel Shift but "post"-Great Vowel Shift.
    – Peter Shor
    Commented Nov 29, 2015 at 13:10
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    @FinnÅrupNielsen: My guess would be "rohm-ing / cohm-ing."
    – Ricky
    Commented Nov 29, 2015 at 13:13
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    Blood/good and but/put are perfect rhymes in my accent, so I'm not sure why you're intrigued by them.
    – David Richerby
    Commented Nov 29, 2015 at 17:09
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Roaming would probably have been pronounced as a monophthong using a close-mid back rounded vowel sound [o:] similar to an extended no. Coming would have used a close-mid back unrounded vowel, similar to the 'rams horns' [ɤ] similar to errr.

This is still not a great rhyme, but maybe closer than in modern pronunciation.

Hear the sounds, here if you can't play .ogg files, and a written discussion here.

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  • No, roaming and coming might have been an exact rhyme. There were two different pronunciations of come in Middle English, as can be seen from the spellings com/come/comme/cum/cumme in the OED. The cumme pronunciation eventually won, while the come spelling won. But I suspect Shakespeare intended the actors to use the pronunciation that rhymed with roam.
    – Peter Shor
    Commented Nov 29, 2015 at 13:47
  • There were probably more than two, given that ME is characterised by a high degree of variation. But, bearing in mind that pronunciation of ME is basically speculative, I would need something more substantial than spelling variation listed in the OED to be convinced. Do you have some sources you could share? I would be interested in seeing them if you have.
    – Roaring Fish
    Commented Nov 29, 2015 at 14:09
  • While spelling variation in Middle English was enormous, it generally reflected pronunciation (sometimes the original spelling for foreign words, but come isn't foreign); comme would not have been spelled with an "o" unless it had been pronounced with an "o" at some time and place—although I don't know whether you can tell if that "o" was short or long. Pupple deedont poot rundam vewls un thur spalling. Why on earth would they have done that?
    – Peter Shor
    Commented Nov 29, 2015 at 14:37
  • Orthography does not map to phonology. Never has and probably never will. It is easy too say "pronounced as an "o", but pronounced by who? People in London, or people in York, or people in Glasgow? Are these the rich, educated people or the poor, uneducated people? Do you think they all pronounced "o" the same way? Asserting that "come" was pronounced two ways because there are two spellings in the OED is not a strong argument.
    – Roaring Fish
    Commented Nov 29, 2015 at 15:24
  • That is really splitting hairs. It was pronounced the way that other words with an "o" in their spelling were pronounced, by whoever was doing the spelling and pronouncing. The fact that people in London and York pronounced the vowel in foam and roam differently doesn't mean that the words didn't rhyme in both cities.
    – Peter Shor
    Commented Nov 29, 2015 at 15:36

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