It might seem on the face of it to be impossible to know how people spoke 400 years ago, before the invention of sound recordings, but in fact there has been considerable research in this area and we can be pretty certain about some aspects of the way that Shakespeare or Jonson or Dowland would have pronounced their texts.
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Listening to lute recordings of the last 50 years, it is rare to find any ornaments at all played in “pre-baroque” music. The consensus seems to be that it wasn’t until the 17th century that cadential trills and other kinds of ornaments became an essential part of lute playing. When playing the beautiful polyphonic music of the early 16th century,
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