Methodology · Last verified 2026-08-01
What rhyme can and cannot prove
How rhyme supplies evidence while leaving room for variation, performance, and scholarly disagreement.
What the evidence supports
How rhyme supplies evidence while leaving room for variation, performance, and scholarly disagreement. Original Pronunciation Folio treats Original Pronunciation as a transparent scholarly reconstruction: it is useful because it makes the evidence inspectable, not because it replaces the range of speech available in early modern England.
Our working window is late Tudor and early Jacobean English, c. 1600–1615. The tool applies a small, source-cited rule set and lexical exceptions; it does not ship a copied proprietary dictionary. Where a value is contested, the methodology records the limitation rather than presenting a single accent as fact.
Use this page with the tool
Paste a short passage, inspect the IPA alongside the modern spelling, then test the line endings as a group. Treat a match as a prompt to read the cited reasoning and the surrounding verse—not as an instruction to flatten performance into notation.
Further reading
- David Crystal, Pronouncing Shakespeare (2005).
- Helge Kökeritz, Shakespeare’s Pronunciation (1953).
- Original Pronunciation Folio editorial standards and source policy.