Shakespeare’s Use of Prose

In Shakespeare’s plays, the switch from verse to prose is never accidental. It is one of the most reliable signals the plays contain — about character, status, psychological state, and what a scene is actually doing beneath its surface.

The Basic Distinction

Shakespeare writes in three modes: blank verse (unrhymed iambic pentameter), rhymed verse (couplets and songs), and prose. Blank verse is the dominant mode of serious dramatic speech — kings, nobles, tragic heroes, and significant dramatic moments. Prose is the mode of everyday exchange, comic scenes, practical information, letters, and the worlds of people who exist below or outside the vertical hierarchy that verse represents.

The distinction is not absolute, and the exceptions are always significant. But as a working principle: verse marks elevation, formality, and consequence; prose marks informality, comedy, and the ordinary texture of life. When a character moves between them, something is happening.

Who Speaks Prose

The clearest use of prose is social. Falstaff speaks almost entirely in prose across the Henry IV plays — not because he is uneducated (he is remarkably quick-witted) but because prose is the language of the tavern, the everyday, and the world he inhabits. Dogberry and the Watch in Much Ado About Nothing speak prose because they are comic constables whose malapropisms and confused reasoning would lose their texture in verse. Bottom and his fellows in A Midsummer Night’s Dream speak prose until they attempt to perform a play, at which point the collision between their prose selves and their verse aspirations is part of the joke.

The groundlings in the yard at the Globe spoke prose. The play reflects that social reality: the characters who most closely resemble the audience’s everyday speech get prose.

What Happens When Noble Characters Drop into Prose

The most dramatically significant uses of prose are the switches — moments when a character who habitually speaks verse moves into prose, or vice versa. These transitions are almost always legible as statements about what is happening to the character.

Hamlet is the most discussed example. He speaks verse in most of his soliloquies and in serious confrontations — with the Ghost, with Horatio, with Gertrude, with Claudius in formal settings. He speaks prose with Polonius, with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, and with the players. The prose with Polonius is pointed: Hamlet is performing madness, or something adjacent to it, and prose is the mode of the performance — loose, digressive, wrong-footed, difficult to pin down. The “fishmonger” exchange with Polonius works because Hamlet’s prose moves too fast and too oddly for Polonius’s verse-trained assumptions to keep up.

Lear begins the play in verse — he is the king, the world is ordered. By Act III on the heath, he has moved through rage into something more fractured, and the prose passages in that section track the dissolution of his royal self. The verse does not disappear entirely, but it is interrupted and destabilised by prose in ways that the early Lear would not have permitted.

Lady Macbeth sleepwalks in prose. In every scene before this one she speaks in verse — ambitious, controlled, rhetorically commanding. The sleepwalking scene’s prose is the form of breakdown: the speech is fragmented, circular, returning obsessively to “out, damned spot,” unable to sustain the verse that expressed her will and control. The Doctor watches her and says “unnatural deeds / Do breed unnatural troubles” — in verse, from the outside, observing what the prose-speaking patient cannot contain.

Comedy and the Freedom of Prose

Prose dominates comic scenes because it allows the specific energies of comedy — interruption, digression, rapid exchange, the tangent that becomes funnier than the main line — to develop without the constraints of meter. Benedick and Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing conduct their verbal warfare in prose; the speed and spontaneity of their wit would be impossible to sustain in verse without the rhythm overwhelming the joke.

The Falstaff scenes in Henry IV are almost entirely in prose — Falstaff’s monologue on honour (“What is honour? A word. What is that word honour? Air”), his exchanges with Hal, his running commentary on the world. The prose is comic but also philosophically alive: Falstaff uses the informal register of prose to make arguments that the formal register of verse would not accommodate. His rejection of honour is funnier and more troubling in prose than it would be in verse because prose claims to speak plainly, and what Falstaff says plainly is uncomfortable.

Letters and Documents

Correspondence in the plays is almost always in prose. Letters are read aloud — Malvolio reading the forged letter in Twelfth Night, Lear’s daughters reading his letters, the letter in Hamlet that Horatio reads after Hamlet’s escape from the ship — and prose gives them the quality of actual documents, of things that exist outside the theatrical world and carry the weight of practical reality.

The comedy of the Malvolio letter scene depends on the contrast between the letter’s prose (pretending to be from Olivia, adopting a slightly elevated but still distinctly prose register) and Malvolio’s response to it — his immediate, eager interpretation, his transition from suspicious prose-reading to delighted self-imaging, finally exploding into comic fantasy.

Prose and the Evolution of Shakespeare’s Style

In the early plays, the division between prose and verse is relatively stable: noble characters verse, comic and common characters prose, with departures marking clear dramatic moments. The Comedy of Errors and Love’s Labour’s Lost follow this pattern fairly consistently.

By the middle period — Much Ado, Hamlet, Measure for Measure, Othello — the transitions become psychologically charged in ways the early plays do not attempt. Iago speaks both verse and prose, shifting between them depending on whom he addresses and what he wants from them; his prose with Roderigo is manipulative and intimate, his verse with Othello more formally invested. The shift between modes is part of Iago’s character — his capacity to inhabit different registers is part of what makes him so dangerous.

In the late plays — The Winter’s Tale, The Tempest, Cymbeline — the prose and verse relationships are again different. Autolycus in The Winter’s Tale speaks prose — he is a rogue, a peddler, a marginal figure — but his prose has a verbal richness that the simpler prose of the earlier comedies did not attempt. The late prose is not merely the lower register; it has absorbed some of the late verse’s complexity without losing its informality.

What to Listen For

In performance, the shift from verse to prose is audible even before the words become legible. The rhythm changes, the breath changes, the pace tends to accelerate. When watching or reading Shakespeare, attending to these shifts is one of the most reliable guides to what a scene is actually about.

The key questions are always: who has just shifted, in which direction, and why now? A noble character dropping into prose is either performing informality, losing control, or revealing something they cannot express in the formal mode verse requires. A lower-status character moving into verse is being elevated — by emotion, by the moment’s seriousness, by their own unexpected depth.

The Blank Verse Guide covers the verse side of this in more detail, including how the meter’s variations carry psychological information. Prose and verse are most fully understood in relation to each other — each one defined partly by what it is not.

Share This Page