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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.
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 moved between prose and verse in his writing to vary the rhythmic structures within his plays and give his characters more depth.
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.
Shakespeare switches between prose and verse often in his plays, with lower class characters generally speaking prose, and upper class characters speaking verse, though characters frequently speak both, sometimes switching in the middle of a speech.
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).
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.
The verse of the drama falls naturally into two parts: (a) blank verse, that is, unrhymed lines in iambic pentameter; (b) rhymed lines in various metres.
