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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.
In Hamlet five kinds of prose may be distinguished: (i) The prose of formal documents, as in Hamlet's three letters, II, ii, 120-124; IV, vi, 12-26; IV, vii, 43-47. In Shakespeare, prose is the usual medium for letters, proclamations, and other formal documents.
In some scenes, Hamlet switches between verse and prose, altering the sound and character of his communication to indicate a shift in his mental state. An example of this from Act 3, Scene 1 concerns Hamlet’s most famous soliloquy.
One idea that may help is to remember that his plays are written in two forms: prose and verse. Prose. Prose is the form of speech used by common, and often comic, people in Shakespearean drama. There is no rhythm or meter in the line. It is everyday language. Shakespeare’s audiences would recognize the speech as their language. When a ...
In addition, Shakespeare as a playwright did not simply use prose— the usual style of writing and speech, in which, for example, this information (apart from quotations) is written — but also rhyme. Blank verse. This is usually defined as ‘unrhymed iambic pentameter'.
These supplementary episodes will discuss the building blocks of what makes a Shakespeare play. Always through the lens of Hamlet, we’ll discuss verse, prose, and many of the other key elements of Shakespearean drama. If you have a topic you’d like to hear discussed, by all means get in touch!
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.
