RSC Shakespeare's Language - Prose

Prose

The convention in Shakespeare's time was to write plays in verse. His extensive use of prose is yet another sign of his inventiveness and capacity to break with custom when it served his plan.

He uses prose for a variety of purposes. Often lower class or comic characters speak prose while the more socially or morally elevated characters speak in verse, but this is far from always the case. Some of Hamlet's most important speeches, such as his advice to the players, are in prose. In Julius Caesar, Brutus chooses prose over verse when he sets out to convince the citizens that the conspirators were right to murder Caesar.

Why does Shakespeare shift from verse to prose? The conversational tone of prose can make a character seem more natural at a particular moment or it can indicate the degeneration of a noble nature as it does with Othello. A swift movement from prose to poetry or the reverse is always an indication that a change is taking place. Shakespeare is remarkably skillful in his flexible use of verse forms and prose.

While verse is more formally structured than prose, prose is not necessarily more free from rules. In fact, prose can be more subtly and sometimes more artificially structured than verse. Shakespeare regularly uses a number of rhetorical devices to give his prose form and coherence. Important among these are alliteration, assonance, repetition, antithesis, lists and puns. These are described briefly below. These also appear in verse. Most of them are employed in Brutus's speech, which begins:

BRUTUS

Romans, countrymen, and lovers, hear me for my cause and be silent

that you may hear. Believe me for mine honour, and have respect to

mine honour, that you may believe. Censure me in your wisdom, and

awake your senses that you may the better judge. If there be any in

this assembly, any dear friend of Caesar's, to him I say that Brutus'

love to Caesar was no less than his. If then that friend demand why

Brutus rose against Caesar, this is my answer: not that I loved Caesar

less, but that I loved Rome more..