A Comparative Analysis of Rhyme in the Works of William Shakespeare and Alisher Navoi (With Reference to Romeo and Juliet and Layli and Majnun)

The article compares the use of rhyme in William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet and Alisher Navoi’s Layli and Majnun (1484). The material consists of the Folger Shakespeare online text of the play and the 1992 academic edition of Navoi’s poem (Complete Works in 20 volumes, vol. 9). Passages were selected where rhyme is structurally marked: the sonnet Prologue, the shared sonnet of Act 1, scene 5, rhymed couplets of antithesis and the closing couplet of the play, and bayts of the poem identified by its editors as instances of tajnis and tarse’ or containing the lovers’ names in rhyme position. The passages were compared by close reading according to the same criteria: the unit of rhyme, the scheme, the words that carry rhyme, and the function of rhyme. In the examined passages Shakespeare uses rhyme as a marked frame that delays closure and distributes rhyme between speakers, while Navoi closes rhyme in every bayt (aa, bb) and extends it through radif, homonymic rhyme and word-by- word parallelism. In both works the lovers’ names are placed at the rhyme end, but in the play the names close the action once, whereas in the poem they recur and become the rhyme material itself.