The late plays feel almost obsessively reiterative. A conspicuous source of this impression is the reappearance of many of the stories, character types, and ideas that had occupied Shakespeare's imagination from the early 1590s. A long-time Jacobean playgoer attending the first performances of the romances would have recognized the playwright's abiding concerns: the separated family, the fraternal struggle for power, the slandered heroine, political usurpation and its consequences, the Virgilian concern with dynasty, an interest in familial reproduction, the destructive and redemptive sea, the restoration of that which was lost. In modern critical treatments, such structural and thematic repetition is a commonplace. Equally prominent, however, are the reiterative qualities of the poetry from which these familiar topoi emerge. The aural repetition characteristic of the late style creates a complex, artificial surface that gives these plays a distinctive sonic texture, one that delights the ear and excites the mind. To listen carefully to the reiterative patterns that resound everywhere in these late texts is to perceive one of the primary sources of their poetic power. The insistent repetition of vowels and consonants, words, phrases, syntactical forms, and other verbal effects makes the dramatic texts uncommonly musical. These sounds also witness to an exceptional self-consciousness consistent with Shakespeare's turn from the representational to the presentational.

I begin with an elementary demonstration of some musical effects contributed by auditory combinations.