Music, mystique and Shakespeare’s sonnets

This is an English version of a paper that has been published in the Russian journal, Ideas and Ideals (2019, pp. 11-30). Shakespeares\nSonnets (1609) contains several rhyming patterns that were\nregarded at the time as ‘anomalies’. In a list of ‘Rules’ for poetry published\nin 1585, the very first prohibition laid down by King James VI of Scotland was\nthat a syllable should never be rhymed with itself.\nIn 1603 James VI of Scotland became James I of England. And yet, in\nShakespeare’s sonnets, the very first of King James’s prohibitions is broken \nrarely, but repeatedly. If Shakespeare’s successive sonnets are\naligned with the successive notes in musical scales for the canonical series of\nthe Renaissance ‘modes’, then the locations of Shakespeare’s rhyme-anomalies\ncoincide reliably with the locations of the notes that are significantly\ndiscordant with the tonic according to a musical theory that was published in\n1619 by the astronomer Johannes Kepler. Kepler’s\nmaster-work The Harmony of the World (1619)\nwas dedicated to King James I of England. This work opens with a Dedication to\nKing James, in which King James’s celebrated political successes were credited\nto his understanding of the ‘celestial harmonies’. It is argued here that Shakespeare’s sonnet\nsequence constitutes a ‘microcosm’ that formally echoes Kepler’s theory of the\n‘macrocosm’ and ‘the harmony of the spheres’. If Shakespeare could somehow have\nbrought the formal patterning in this ‘microcosm’ to the attention of potential\npatrons in the Jacobean Court, then he could reasonably have hoped that this\nmight curry favour with those among them who shared ‘Platonic’ interests like\nthose of Kepler.