Roaming and Coming in William Shakespeare's O Mistress Mine

You really want to open that can of worms here again? No one knows the exact answer; there are approximations. Some people go so far as to claim Shakespeare used sight rhymes (!!), which, of course, is nonsense. Another intriguing theory is that pronunciation in Shakespeare's times was so unstable that a poet, and especially a dramatist, could play fast and loose with it to his heart's content.

Anyway, if you dig a bit deeper into Shakespeare (or any poet up until the middle of the 19th Century, for that matter, even though the Great Vowel Shift was supposed to be long over by then), you'll find dozens of rhymes that are, well, intriguing. To wit:

move/love/cove
blood/good
but/put
war/afar
eye/Italy (my personal favorite)
taste/last (this one comes directly from Shakespeare)
on/groan (ditto)
river/Guadalquiver

and so forth.

Very few people are actually aware of this, and a lot of them tend to get resentful when the problem is pointed out to them.

The same goes for scansion. Three syllables or four? Is ambitious am-bi-shus or am-bi-shuh-es? (in Antony's speech, Julius Caesar, act III, if I recollect aright).

I hope this helps.

Roaming would probably have been pronounced as a monophthong using a close-mid back rounded vowel sound [o:] similar to an extended no. Coming would have used a close-mid back unrounded vowel, similar to the 'rams horns' [ɤ] similar to errr.

This is still not a great rhyme, but maybe closer than in modern pronunciation.

Hear the sounds, here if you can't play .ogg files, and a written discussion here.