Search results
VERSE AND PROSE. What is prose, and how is it different to poetry? The short answer is that prose is the form of writing that I’m using now, and the form we most commonly use in speech with each other. Prose is the term for any sustained wodge of text that doesn’t have a consistent rhythm.
Shakespeare preferred to use verse when he was tackling serious themes, and prose when he was writing comedy, so in Hamlet he switches often, sometimes in the middle of a scene. Hamlet’s frequent switching between verse and prose is part of what makes the style of the play feel evasive.
Prose vs. Verse. Shakespeare intermingles verse and prose frequently in Othello. In a general sense, Shakespeare uses prose as an expression of debasement, as in the cases of Cassio’s drunkenness (Act II, scene iii), the Clown’s bawdiness (Act III, scene i), and Othello’s rage (Act IV, scene i).
Prose and Verse. Like all of Shakespeare’s tragedies, Romeo and Juliet is written mostly in blank verse. Shakespeare preferred to use verse when he was tackling serious themes, like the themes in Romeo and Juliet of doomed love, feuding, suicide, and death.
What is prose? How does it differ from verse? The difference between them is central to appreciating Shakespeare's writing, but understanding prose vs. verse is not as difficult as you might think.
Shakespeare's prose is as masterly as his verse, and often even more dense with meaning (check the footnotes of a passage of prose, and see if there are fewer than for verse). Prose is the vehicle for many of Shakespeare's wittiest characters: Falstaff, Beatrice, Rosalind, the Porter in Macbeth, Autolycus in The Winter's Tale, and many others.
includes a number of shifts between verse and prose in key scenes. A quick search on Google shows that many scholars and teachers of Shakespeare adhere to the idea that high status characters speak in verse while low status characters speak in prose.
