Dividing Lines

This idea of “division” as one thing broken into many appears throughout Shakespeare’s extensive catalogue, even beyond explicit musical references. Firstly, there is metrical variation. Shakespeare rarely ever sticks to a single rhythmic pattern for a long time, as his usual Iambic pentameter splinters into fragments of stressed and unstressed syllables when emotion spikes, just as a musical line fractures into divisions to achieve greater effect on the listener.  Secondly,

What unites Shakespeare’s division with modern musical division is, in part, technical complexity. Division seems to appear most when artists attempt to represent something complicated, desire mixed with fear, unity mixed with separation, or identity with contradictions. Juliet's line works with this because the lark’s “sweet division” is both beautiful and unbearable. The melody is lovely, but the consequence is tragic. Similarly, in modern music, layered rhythms or sampled

If in the Renaissance, division meant breaking one note into many, modern music does something strikingly similar under different names. Consider polyrhythm in modern rap and hip-hop. Multiple rhythmic patterns coexist, such as the beat, a high hat, the flow of a rapper, and internal rhyme schemes. Similar tothe  Elizabethan division, this creates density, but now it also conveys urgency, internal conflict, or complexity of thought. Then, there is sampling, a phenomenon where