Shakespeare’s Musical Time Signatures

This chapter considers the ways in which Shakespeare incorporates a sense of musical time into his plays and poetry. While scholars have often considered how poetic ideas might inform Shakespeare’s deployment of music in his works, less attention has been given to the possibility that musical conventions also inform Shakespeare’s experiments with verse. Unlike poetic verse, musical time structures do not easily accommodate pentameter or the metric irregularities that Shakespeare and his contemporaries liked to create in poetry. However, musical time does allow for the possibility of measurable, meaningful silence. Renaissance music theorists in particular were concerned with notational systems that could reliably indicate intervals of performed silence. This chapter first considers how Renaissance musicians such as Morley and Dowland theorized and defined the musical ‘rest’. It then considers Shakespeare’s prosodic experiments in Richard II and Hamlet, arguing that Shakespeare attempts to incorporate intentional, measured silence by alluding to musical terms and taking advantage of metric irregularities. By applying musical rules to printed verse, Shakespeare effectively prompts his audience to hear silence not as meaningful, but as scripted.