Shakespeare’s supremacy as a dramatist has always been recognized as stemming from a mastery of language. At one extreme he is the dramatic poet above all, so much so that ‘Shakespearian’ has become a tag to describe any poetry of richness and complexity, while at the other his proverbs have passed into the common speech. Of course much of his particular greatness is not to be limited to purely linguistic effects, and we have to neglect the detail of his language to consider such things as the whole meaningful development of an action, the adaptation of sources to make structures in every way superior to the original, the creation of characters, the representation and analysis of human motives and feelings, and the confrontation of varying emotional states: all these elements of a play go beyond its language. But nevertheless (and it is the constant paradox of a literary work) these larger elements are only created and apprehended through the language, and it seems reasonable to say that if we approach the words with a keen imaginative sympathy we should best be able to appreciate what lies behind them. The study of its language is indisputably a valid way of entry into any literary work – some would say the most valuable – but I think it should be used in harness with our response to the work as a whole, and in conjunction with all other profitable critical methods. Yet this is an approach which has been little applied to Shakespeare.
One of the critical revolutions of the last age was a reaction away from the excessive interest in Shakespeare’s characters back to ‘the words on the page’. Given this general interest in such things as imagery, poetic textures, ambiguity, irony, it may seem that by now the study of Shakespeare’s language would be exhausted. But in fact there has been less detailed and intelligent study of Shakespeare’s style since this movement than there was before it, and the lasting work that has been done has occurred outside the movement.1 For these critics (and I refer to the work of Wilson Knight, L. C. Knights, D. A. Traversi, J. F. Danby and a host of followers) approached plays as if they were lyric poems, abstracting ‘themes’ and ‘symbols’ from the whole complex development of drama. Furthermore, if they were interested in imagery, it was not essentially because of the poetic value of the image but rather for the idea behind it: they looked for image-patterns, as revealing thematic meaning. In addition to the principal dangers2 inherent in extracting a theme (which often turns out to be a moral commonplace) from the living tissue of a play, and implicitly suggesting that Shakespeare was offering a discussion of Appearance and Reality, or the effects of Time and Mutability, this approach does not recognize two characteristic features of Shakespeare as a dramatist. One is his remarkable self-awareness, his propensity to comment on what he is doing: if a play involves within its action the mounting of another play (as in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, say, or Hamlet) there will be discussions of the art and styles of acting, the role of imagination, the nature of illusion – these discussions hardly constitute a ‘theme’ in the accepted meaning of the word.
Similarly if the plot involves a disguise, or a failure in trust, then there will inevitably be a comment on the discrepancy between appearance and reality (but how inadequate it is to describe Much Ado About Nothing as ‘a play about Appearance and Reality’).
Secondly we should consider how his characters react to their situation with comparable awareness: if the plot involves total confusion about identity, as does The Comedy of Errors (though not about ‘identity’ in a modern psychological sense) then it is perfectly natural for characters to say that they are bewitched, and thus some recent discussions of this play in terms of its ‘witchcraft’ or ‘loss of identity’ themes are not only heavy-handed but misleading, in that they mistake accident for essence. Again such a remark as that in 2 Henry IV that ‘We are time’s subjects, and time bids be gone’ (I, iii) ends a scene with the message ‘we must really get a move on’ (which is not altogether inappropriate for men of business such as rebels are). But it is not to be taken as evidence of ‘the Mutability-theme’: similar stock remarks are found in many plays (e.g. Coriolanus) where they are as functionally relevant but as thematically irrelevant as they are here. In both these latter examples there may be more to it than this, but critics must be more careful than they have been so far about how they extract their ‘themes’.
I am not suggesting that Shakespeare’s comments are not sometimes so frequent or so important that they amount to a thematic status, nor that one cannot still gather valuable insights from The Wheel of Fire or Some Shakespearean Themes, but I think that this is a critical approach which is almost fully worked out, and which – more to the point – is not very helpful to the understanding of Shakespeare’s style in the context of drama. Shakespeare’s plays are not ‘dramatic poems’ but ‘poetic dramas’, and although that seems a small readjustment much is involved in it. Our starting-point must be the simple principle, stated with clarity by A. S. Downer, that
The drama is a unique form of expression in that it employs living actors to tell its story; its other aspects – setting, characters, dialogue, action and theme – it shares with others forms of communication. But the fact that the dramatist is not dealing with characters merely, but with three-dimensional persons is paralleled by the fact that he is not dealing with a setting verbally described but three-dimensionally realized, with action that actually occurs in time and space, with dialogue which is spoken by human voices for the human ear.3
It follows that the critic must consider the physical representation of the drama – such things as visual imagery, significant groupings or stage-movement – and that the student of Shakespeare’s style must try to relate these and such other factors as ‘setting, characters, dialogue, action and theme’, to the language of the plays. Shakespeare’s language is an increasingly subtle medium for reflecting the differences and interactions between characters, situations and moods, thus we must approach the words not as abstractable entities but as the expression of the particular attitudes of quite distinct characters in equally distinct dramatic situations. The nature of Shakespeare’s language is organically related to the development of each play.
Within the plays as a whole Shakespeare makes considerable use of prose, and before studying this aspect of his art it is as well to remind ourselves of the extent of his usage. In terms of quantity, we can observe a steady growth4 in the amount of prose through the early comedies and histories, reaching a peak in The Merry Wives of Windsor, which is largely a prose comedy, but having the dominant part in Much Ado, As You Like It and Twelfth Night, being almost equal in bulk (and in excellence possibly superior) to the verse of Henry IV parts I and 2, Henry V, and All’s Well, while playing a very significant part in three other comedies, Love’s Labour’s Lost, Troilus and Cressida and Measure for Measure. From those elementary statistics we can deduce two points: that prose is largely the vehicle of comedy and the comic parts of the histories, and (although this would involve extensive argument) that Shakespeare’s prose came to maturity before his poetry. But at once we must make an important qualification, for the prose does not go into a decline in quality as it does in quantity in the period of the great tragedies; it is now applied with increasing skill to the whole design of the play, and in many ways the prose of the tragedies is Shakespeare’s greatest achievement. On first thought we might connect tragic prose with a few isolated clown scenes, but in fact prose occupies roughly a quarter of the whole in Hamlet, Lear, Timon of Athens and Coriolanus, while its importance for Mercutio or Iago bulks far larger than the statistics would suggest. To mention these two essentially prose characters (although of course both are also given verse) is to think of others whose very existence depends on prose: Bottom, Shylock, Falstaff, Shallow, Mistress Quickly, Beatrice and Benedick, Dogberry and Verges, Rosalind and Touchstone, Sir Toby Belch, Thersites, Parolles, Autolycus and the clown in The Winter’s Tale. And to think of the variety of character-creation shown here, and the importance that each has in the play as a whole, may help to justify this study of Shakespeare’s prose by itself (though I will approach each play as a structure, and in practice will have to consider some of the verse too). Obviously the detailed study of the prose will result in a limited vision of some plays – The Comedy of Errors, say, or Romeo and Juliet, or The Tempest, for the dominant life of the play is elsewhere. But nevertheless prose provides a viewpoint which Shakespeare created and shared for some parts of the play, and although these parts may be limited in themselves they are not to be ignored, in the way that so many modern accounts of Measure for Measure or The Winter’s Tale just do not mention the lower worlds of Pompey and Mistress Overdone, or Autolycus and the clowns. And if sometimes of restricted value, in other plays the study of the prose will reveal a central aspect of the action (as in the middle-period comedies and histories), or a vital phase in the development of characters and motifs shown elsewhere mainly in verse (Iago, Hamlet, Edgar). I think that on balance the advantages of this detailed study of one medium outweigh its obvious limitations – and I hope that it could be used as a basis for the much harder but more rewarding analysis of the poetry.
Indeed this relative ease in studying Shakespeare’s prose compared to his verse (but it is only relative) has produced a number of useful studies5 (especially those by Richard David and Elizabeth Tschopp), which are also probably more searching than anything yet done on the poetry in its dramatic context, with the exception of Wolfgang Clemen’s admirable book on the imagery. Happily I can say at the outset that whatever virtues or faults that they have, these studies all limit themselves to general considerations of how Shakespeare used prose in the plays, and not to the specific nature of that prose. However, a number of valuable guiding principles have been exposed which must be the basis of any more detailed analysis. Some of the principles on which Shakespeare used prose have been so long recognized as to be common property, such as, for example, the general conventions in Elizabethan drama which determined the suitable occasions for prose. These can be grouped under two main heads: first, letters and proclamations, which enter into the play from the outside world, have their separateness marked off by being in prose: in Shakespeare such are the letters of Armado, Falstaff, Hamlet and others (Verdi in his setting of Macbeth duplicates the effect of Lady Macbeth reading her husband’s prose letter by making her do it in a dry recitative on one held note), and such formal pronouncements as the peace-contract between Henry VI and the French King (2 H VI, I, i), Edgar’s Challenge, or the accusation of Hermione. Secondly, a much larger group which is also based on the sense of the ‘otherness’ of prose, conveying information about particular characters who are below the dignity and norm of verse, for a variety of reasons: in Elizabethan drama generally prose is the vehicle of an inferior class, such as servants and clowns – this is so in Shakespeare for most of the time, though many of his noblemen speak prose too (the categories are not exclusive). Similarly prose is used for those below dignity and seriousness generally, such as the clowns, who have a peculiar brand of clowns’ prose, ‘exuberant and original’ as Richard David describes it (p. 81). Some clowns (the bumbling type) also come into the next category, that of those below the normal level of human reason, such as drunks (the porter in Macbeth, characters in the drinking-scenes in Henry IV, Antony and Cleopatra, and Othello), and lastly madmen, the use of prose showing both the feigned madness of Hamlet and the real madness of Ophelia, a contrast which is repeated with still greater intensity between Edgar and Lear.
This last category raises a very important point about the alternation between prose and verse. Given that the norm of the plays, with some few exceptions, is blank verse, then prose must always have been felt as a deviation from it, and one made for a particular reason, such as for these elementary categories which we have been considering. This sense of the otherness of prose is exceptionally strong in the case of madness, and everyone sees the significance of the degeneration of Othello into a frenzy or Lady Macbeth into her sleepwalking being matched by a parallel decline from blank verse into prose, thus echoing on the stylistic level the falling-off from reason so evident in the action. But it does not seem to be commonly appreciated that the historical significance of this extreme contrast is the same as that of the more general alternation between verse and prose, namely that the Elizabethan audience must have been aware of the difference between the media in a way that no modern audience is. Miss Tschopp has finely analysed the scene in As You Like It (IV, i) where Jaques and Rosalind have been sparring in witty prose when Orlando, entering, is given one decasyllabic line:
Good day and happiness, dear Rosalind.
Jaques’ response is sardonic and instantaneous:
Nay then God b’wi’you, an you talk in blank verse. [Exit.]
Miss Tschopp’s conclusion is that ‘the audience must obviously be sensitive to the change from verse to prose and must react to it quickly’ (p. 4), for indeed the whole point of that exchange is lost if we do not at once spot the difference. I think that the same principle applies for the distinction between prose and verse (if seldom so urgently) in all Elizabethan drama. The importance of this principle is largely stylistic, but it has a significant by-product for our knowledge of Elizabethan acting, which must in any case have used a fairly formalized style given the enormous pressure of their repertory system,6 and would thus seem to have employed a more stylized delivery for verse and a more relaxed one for prose.7 A confirming detail for this deduction comes from Marston’s Malcontent, where Milton Crane notes that ‘At one point in the opening scene of the play, Malevole, left alone with a trusted friend, drops his disguise and speaks verse in his own character of Altofronto; when a third person enters, he returns to prose. The change is strikingly emphasized by the stage direction: Malevole shifteth his speech’ (p. 156).
The stylistic implication of this difference in the tone or speed of enunciation is that we must accept the alternations between prose and verse as being not accidental but deliberate on the part of the author, and with a definite aesthetic intent which would have been perceived by the audience. An analogy prompts itself from another art, for we could compare the switch from verse to prose with that from a major to a minor key in classical music: the analogy is not exact, of course, but it does suggest that in both cases we are dealing with an alternation of media according to certain definite artistic conventions (and in both arts the changes have emotional connotations). The distinction must have been noticeable, then, otherwise those departures from the norm of our first simple categories for prose would not have been appreciated. So Falstaff the prose-speaking clown par excellence is occasionally given verse – but only to mock it (Crane, p. 5). In the drinking-scene in Othello, amid the general prose, ‘Iago’s verse asides reveal him still completely self-possessed’ (David, p. 88). Lear mad is brought down to prose but is returned to verse during his madness when given royal dignity, or perhaps the superior authority of moral perception.8 Again in Merry Wives, the first time that Ford reaches a mood of dignity after his jealous madness, he is given verse (IV, iv, 6). One might also suggest, if it does not make Shakespeare too consistent, that the fact that Leontes in his apparent madness is not given prose is yet another sign that his is a serious or a tragi-comic but not a tragic situation (in none of the tragedies are we as unsympathetic to the hero as we are to Leontes and his insane jealousy, and in none is a tragic hero so humiliated by other characters as he is by the nobility of Hermione and the scolding of Paulina) – certainly Shakespeare preserves him from the final collapse. At all events we must look at the points of change from prose to verse with some care, and both Mr David and Miss Tschopp have made some valuable suggestions.
But before going on to discuss the consequences for Shakespeare’s prose of it being in an inferior position to verse, it may be as well to show these conventions of prose-verse allocation at work, so I will briefly consider the early plays up to Love’s Labour’s Lost9 (I will describe the alternation of media without much quotation here, for many of these scenes will be discussed later). The relegation of the clown-servant to prose, on part-social part-intellectual grounds, is seen in them all, as is the normal convention for Shakespeare that when a person from a superior class talks with the clown then he too descends to prose, as if to show the pervasive effect of clownish wit. So the use of the clown in Titus Andronicus, though only faintly prefiguring that in later tragedies, is characteristic, for in the brief scenes in which he appears (IV, iii, 80–120, IV, iv, 4–50), the Roman nobility are made to speak prose in some but not all of their speeches to him (this inconsistency within a scene is typical of the early work). A similar confusion of the appropriate form is seen in The Comedy of Errors, where the entry of Dromio of Ephesus reduces both Adriana and Luciana to prose as one would expect (II, i, 44–54), only for all three to revert to verse at once. Another inconsistency comes in the following scene between master and servant (both of Syracuse, this time) which begins in verse and continues thus for nearly forty lines before suddenly descending to prose. At this point in the scene, with the entry of Adriana and a romantic topic, the medium rightly ascends to verse, and – by giving way to the law of dominant mood – now the Dromio also speaks verse, so as to preserve the dignified tone. A similar transition from serious verse to comic prose and back to verse which involves both Antipholus and Dromio is seen later (III, ii, 71–151), and for the third time the entry of the clown reduces the medium to prose in a scene in which the courtezan arrives (IV, iii, 12 ff.). Here, however, we see a more consistent piece of decorum: the courtezan speaks verse throughout, while both Antipholus and Dromio speak prose when they taunt her but move up to verse for more serious or objective matters (similarly IV, iv, 22 ff.). There is again some confusion in the final scenes, the Dromios speaking prose and verse without distinction, although the fact that they are given verse for the last words of the play may be significant, in that very few plays end on the low level of prose (excepting the witty epilogues of As You Like It and 2 Henry IV) – dignity and ceremony must be restored.
Despite some confusions we can at least detect Shakespeare’s method, by which the normal allegiance of a, character to one medium can in some circumstances be broken according to the dramatic mood being stressed. So we have to take two factors into account, the nature of the individual characters, and the tone of the particular context. This duality of reference is illustrated again in Richard III in the brief prose scene for the murder of Clarence: the two murderers speak prose, and at first bring Brakenbury down from verse to their level, only for him to recover the dignity of his office as he surrenders the keys (I, iv, 86–98). They then continue in prose together, with their uneasy quibbles, until Clarence awakes (99–171), at which point they ascend to verse. Clearly, if they spoke prose it would lower the intensity and pathos of Clarence’s last appeal, so they must be raised to his level (at the possible cost of some dramatic credibility). Significantly, once the more brutal First Murderer breaks the spell and kills Clarence, his more sensitive partner continues in verse (278–80), which is the further accentuated by the murderer returning in callous prose. It would have been possible for Shakespeare to give Clarence verse and the murderers prose, but this sort of separation, although it can devalue the prose-speaker, inevitably produces a discordant tone. This we see from the mob scenes in 2 Henry VI, where a variety of effects is produced. Jack Cade and his mob are naturally presented in semi-realistic prose, so that when Cade, awaiting Sir Humphrey Stafford and having just knighted himself (‘To equal him I will make myself a knight presently. [Kneels]. Rise up Sir John Mortimer. [Rises]. Now have at him!’) ascends to verse to try and boast a royal descent the dissimulation inevitably rings false:
It is to you, good people, that I speak,
Over whom, in time to come, I hope to reign;
For I am rightful heir unto the crown.
(IV, ii, 136–9, 149–54, 163, 192–7.)
In the later scenes Cade remains in character with a coarse colloquial prose, and Shakespeare consistently devalues him by contrasting his prose with some nobler character who continues to speak verse and thus dominates the stage: first with Lord Say, whom the mob cruelly murders (IV, vii, 59 ff.), then with Buckingham and Clifford, whose patriotic verse succeeds in winning away the fickle mob from Cade (IV, viii – so prefiguring the triumph of verse over prose in the twin orations of Julius Caesar); and lastly with the sturdy Man of Kent, Alexander Iden, who is only of good bourgeois stock but is shown to be superior to Cade by his verse before he kills him with his sword (IV, x). By being restricted to prose Cade is shown to be limited, and by contrast with the verse-speakers, contemptible.
Earlier in the play Shakespeare used prose for a very different effect, in constructing the little mirror-scene in which the good Duke Humphrey exposes the false miracle of Simpcox’s restoration to sight. This scene begins in verse (II, i, 75 ff.) but is gradually reduced to prose (as if stripping off pretence) by the Duke’s penetrating questions, culminating in the final accusation, for which Gloucester puts aside his dignity and the fake’s pretence in order to push home the charge in prose. In the circumstances of Gloucester’s final downfall prose is used for a new effect, in the scene where his wife employs black magic to discover the secrets of the future (I, iv): the preliminary discussion between the conjurer Bolingbroke and his attendant witches is in prose, but as the Duchess appears and the ceremonies begin, the emotional level rises with the ominous verse:
Patience, good lady, wizards know their times.
Deep night, dark night, the silence of the night,
The time of night when Troy was set on fire,
The time when screech owls cry, and bandogs howl.…
(it is worth noting that none of Shakespeare’s many omens is delivered in prose). In this example prose is a kind of springboard, from which verse attains greater power and resonance, a sensitive use of style typical of the intelligent application of prose in this play. In the two other early comedies not yet considered, the transitions from verse to prose are also imaginative, if on a smaller scale. In The Two Gentlemen of Verona the arrival of the clown again reduces the master to prose, who, when left alone, either bobs up to verse (Proteus and Speed, I, i, 70 ff.); or, like Antipholus or any romantic hero, despite the presence of the clown, reverts to verse at the entry of his beloved (Speed, Valentine, and Silvia, II, i). The other clown Launce (the bumbling type), unlike the more versatile Speed, is given prose throughout (II, iii; II, v; III, i; IV, iv). But in this play for the first time characters from the upper stratum come down to prose when clowns are not present, in the flyting between Valentine and Thurio for the love of Silvia (II, iv), and in that between Proteus and Thurio for Julia (V, ii). Here prose is needed because of the lower tone of these scenes, and already it is associated by Shakespeare with sardonic wit. Another prophetic use of prose here which is less derogatory is that associated with disguise: when Julia disguises as a boy to overhear the infidelities of Proteus (IV, iv) she steps down into prose too, only returning to character and verse for the final direct admission (after some defensively indirect quibbling with the Host) of her pain and foreboding:
| HOST. | Trust me, I think ’tis almost day. |
| JULIA. | Not so; but it hath been the longest night |
| That e’er I watched, and the most heaviest. |
In The Taming of the Shrew we find such expected movements as that by which a master is reduced to prose by the arrival of a servant only to regain the norm after his exit (Baptista and Biondello, III, ii; Lucentio and Biondello, IV, iv), and the contrary state where the needed mood prevails and the servant, having naturally spoken prose, moves up to verse (Grumio for Petruchio and Kate, IV, i – Petruchio is consciously exerting his privileges as a master here). But we also find prose being apparently used by characters meeting each other, as if to give a warmer and more natural welcome (I, ii; III, ii). Again Shakespeare uses prose for an inset dissimulation, if briefly, for the scene in which Lucentio disguised as a school-master tries to woo Bianca under cover of a grammar lesson in which they construe two verses from Ovid’s Heroides (III, i). A new and sensitive use of prose is for relaxation: in the first scene of the play Baptista is trying to marry off his shrewish daughter Katharine before he will part with the pleasant one, Bianca, and he presents them both to the potential suitors Hortensio and Gremio. Katharine just about manages to keep to verse to placate her father, but as soon as Baptista leaves she bursts out in angry prose, and also leaves. Left alone (as they think but they are in fact overheard by Lucentio and Tranio) the two suitors also drop into prose (– ‘You may go the devil’s dam. Your gifts are so good there’s none will hold you.’) and do so with some relief, as the tension of this discordant ceremony passes. Their relaxation is shown again retrospectively, as at the end of their conversation and departure Lucentio and Tranio step forward and comment in the norm of verse, and in this case in a romantic mood. The relaxing step down into prose is used to a very different effect at the end of the play, where Petruchio has finally won Kate (V, i): they come forward at the close of a very crowded and confused scene, now being alone on the stage, and for the first time are given prose to each other, which after the preceding verse, shows as it were their separateness (in love, and as we are about to see, in loyalty) from the rest of the people:
| KATHARINE. | Husband let’s follow, to see the end of this ado. |
| PETRUCHIO. | First kiss me Kate, and we will. |
| KATHARINE. | What, in the midst of the street? |
| PETRUCHIO. | What art thou ashamed of me? |
| KATHARINE. | No sir, God forbid, but ashamed to kiss. |
| PETRUCHIO. | Why then let’s home again. Come sirrah, let’s away. |
| KATHARINE. | Nay, I will give thee a kiss; now pray thee love, stay. |
| PETRUCHIO. | Is not this well? Come my sweet Kate. |
| Better once than never, for never too late.[Exeunt. |
That is the first piece of tenderness in the play, and her answer completing the couplet rhyme is in its way as appropriate a symbol of their union as is the sonnet which contains the first meeting of Romeo and Juliet.
This example also shows the speed and fluidity with which Shakespeare can modulate from one medium to the other as his dramatic intention requires. We see this ability to modulate across media very finely demonstrated in the Induction to this play, which seems to be all that is left of the surrounding framework of The Taming of a Shrew. In the first scene the dispute between Christopher Sly and the Hostess is expressed in appropriately vigorous prose:
Y’are a baggage, the Slys are no rogues. Look in the Chronicles, we came in with Richard Conqueror. Therefore paucas pallabris, let the world slide. Sessal
Sly thereafter falls into a drunken sleep and is discovered by the neighbouring Lord out hunting, who decides to play a trick on him by dressing him up and treating him like a nobleman when he awakes, being aided by the convenient arrival of a troupe of players with a boy to play the maid’s part. Sly duly awakes, and his first cry (like Langland’s Gluttony) is ‘For God’s sake a pot of small ale’. The servants now begin to play the part in verse to his prose:
Will’t please your honour taste of these conserves?
At first he refuses the identity and asserts himself in ever more insistent folk prose:
Ask Marian Hacket the fat ale-wife of Wincot, if she know me not. If she say I am not fourteen pence on the score for sheer ale, score me up for the lying’st knave in Christendom.
But under the pressure of the sensuous verse of the Lord:
Wilt thou have music? Hark, Apollo plays,
And twenty caged nightingales do sing.
– verse which is replete with Marlovian classical myth as a further temptation – the metamorphosis is suddenly made and Sly, now responsive to this sensuous world, speaks blank verse:
Am I a lord, and have I such a lady?
Or do I dream? Or have I dreamed till now?
I do not sleep. I see, I hear, I speak.
I smell sweet savours, and I feel soft things.
That would be a crucially revealing change of media to an Elizabethan audience, and could only be echoed on the modern stage by, say, compressing the emergence of Eliza Doolittle’s ‘Received Standard English’ into five minutes. And having achieved this step up to an assumed dignity and style Shakespeare exploits it by inserting into this new frame fragments of the old Sly that we used to know:
Well, bring our lady hither to our sight,
And once again a pot o’th’smallest ale.
– and on being told that he’s slept fifteen years,
These fifteen years! By my fay, a goodly nap.
The incongruity between style and subject-matter is now so marked that it re-creates on the plane of language the visual effect of Sly sitting up in bed, newly washed and nobly attired. The comedy so produced is pushed still further in the language, as within the decorum of a blank-verse line he responds to the news that he has been absent from his wife’s bed all these years:
’Tis much. Servants, leave me and her alone.
Madam undress you, and come now to bed.
The odd politeness of these lines (contrasting with their meaning) is a decorum which he can no longer maintain, and as his ‘wife’ begs off on doctor’s orders he catches up her last words (‘I hope this reason stands for my excuse’) and puns on them, relapsing into the norm of clown’s bawdy and prose:
Ay, it stands so that I may hardly tarry so long. But I would be loth to fall to my dreams again. I will therefore tarry in despite of the flesh and the blood.
So despite the promise of his beginning Sly has not been able to keep up the part, and the oscillations between prose and verse have sensitively recorded the progress of this ‘waking dream’. Appropriately enough, he is left at the end of the scene in prose, having recaptured his initial insouciance (‘let the world slide’), and looking forward like us to this ‘comonty’:
Well, we’ll see’t. Come madam wife sit by my side, and let the world slip, we shall ne’er be younger.
[Flourish.
Nature asserts itself, and the variations between the two media can reflect this and many other transitions.
From that brief excursus into the early plays we see already the imaginative speed with which Shakespeare can move between prose and verse according to the dramatic effect, a fluidity which is not to be summed up by any categories, and which throughout his career, after some early confusion, is used with such skill as to seem deliberate art. I realize that this is to beg the question of whether Shakespeare is consciously aware of the conventions within which he works, but I can hardly think that the degree of control shown in his fitting of style to character and mood is accidental. Some critics hesitate to even suggest that Shakespeare was a deliberate artist: R. A. Foakes, for instance, after a useful discussion of the complex functions of Shakespeare’s imagery, recoils from any hint that Shakespeare could ever have been aware of this complexity: ‘There is no suggestion here that Shakespeare used conscious artifice in building his play upon word-or-image patterns; rather that these patterns naturally occur in all good poetry or drama whether consciously or unconsciously we can never know’; C. L. Barber is more convinced still: ‘No doubt Shakespeare did not think out what he was doing systematically; had he needed to he could not have done what he did’.10 Of course the defence there is slightly loaded (‘conscious artifice’, ‘systematically’), but I for one do not find it abhorrent to think of Shakespeare obeying his creative imagination while still working within a plan: masterpieces like the Missa Solemnis or the ‘Jupiter’ Symphony do not just happen, and any study of Shakespeare’s sources in the major plays will reveal with what deliberate art he constructed situations of maximum dramatic meaning. The whole tenor of Elizabethan rhetorical and literary theory (of which the conclusion to Puttenham’s Arte is the most memorable statement) was that the writer must use ‘artifice’ assiduously, but must transform it until it looks natural: this Shakespeare understood supremely, for character as for language, and the world has for so long been convinced of his ‘nature’ that we are still dimly aware of the art which gave this nature form. A related fallacy, as I see it, though not so condescending towards him, is to treat Shakespeare’s characters as if they existed and spoke in propria persona: this is to flatter him by conceding (rightly) that he has created remarkably convincing people; but on the other side, to say for example that ‘Hamlet now descends to prose’, or that ‘Othello persistently uses images from the elements’ is to make a simple confusion between character and author such as we are all prone to – yet if it becomes a habit of thought, as it does all too frequently in critical discussions, the poet gets left out. While still being immersed in the play, I should always like to remain aware of Shakespeare’s controlling hand forming it, and in terms of the media considered here, moving back and forth from verse to prose with a flexible artistry matching style to content.
But if we are unable to form categories for the use of prose or verse in the early plays, two general conclusions are, I think, legitimate, which have both been noticed separately by previous critics, but not connected. First, the relation of prose to the structure of the plays. As prose is used initially to give a dramatic contrast to verse it becomes connected with an action which is contrasted with the main action, and therefore we find prose as the typical medium for the sub-plot;11 there will of course be exceptions, but this is the norm. And as critics continually demonstrate, Shakespeare balanced his sub-plot in an increasingly meaningful relationship to the main plot: thus we may find reflected in the prose of the lower action elements which shed a meaningful light on the main play. So, from the early plays briefly considered, the second murderer’s fascination with ‘conscience’ is a burlesque of Richard Ill’s long denial of the commodity, and the crook’s ultimate recognition of its power parallels his master’s final surrender to it on the eve of Bosworth. Again, both the deception and rebellion scenes in 2 Henry VI stand in a significant light compared to the main events. In the earliest comedies the clown scenes are often tenuously related (I cannot see much organic connection in The Comedy of Errors), but one important function is for the clown to mock his master’s pretence to Romance, either by satirizing the symptoms of Romantic Love, or by juxtaposing it with the realities of lower-class desire. In later comedies this parallel action will be much more subtle.
The second conclusion to that brief analysis of prose up to Love’s Labour’s Lost is directly related to its role in the sub-plot: because the lower worlds of the plays are necessarily concerned with inferior social or intellectual or even moral states, then prose will inevitably be connected with a lower level of existence. We think of the murderers and rebels in the history-plays: at this level the distinction villain/hero is met by that of prose/verse; we think of all those clowns and servants, good comic butts as they are, and we conclude – summarily, perhaps, but I think rightly – that Shakespeare relegates prose to an inferior capacity. There is wit and gaiety, and an increasing humanity in the prose, and we love many of the essentially prose characters, but it cannot be denied that the vision and emotions of such people (and also their temporal power) is limited by prose: in this medium we find no heroes, no counsellors, and lovers who are realistic but not romantic. Even where characters of higher social rank speak prose, (setting aside for the moment the multiple reasons of the immediate dramatic context), they are often degraded by (or in advance of) the process. Richard David has singled out the use of prose for all those characters ‘who, though ostensibly of a higher order, are yet denied the dignity of verse: Pandarus and Thersites whose minds are essentially beastly, Roderigo who has no mind at all; Enobarbus the blunt soldier, Kent and Casca who assume bluntness, the one as a disguise, the other merely as an affected pose; Cloten and Parolles whom Nature made buffoons, Lucio and Menenius who are themselves responsible for their own deliberate buffoonery’ (p. 81). One might disagree with some of the identifications there on the grounds of their dramatic function (Enobarbus and Menenius), but we must agree that Shakespeare (working within a shared convention, as Miss Eichhorn has shown), consistently uses prose for this kind of person, and Milton Crane has even argued that Shakespeare’s greatest triumph as a prose-writer was in ‘the prose of denigration’ (p. 187). The most comprehensive statement of the division is that by Miss Tschopp, in the careful conclusion to her work which deserves to be quoted in full:
So, in general, in the division between prose and verse, to verse is allotted the noble, eminent, and heroic-romantic sphere; the concentrated state of affairs; the purposeful, momentous, and tragic action; truth, dignity, order; the poetic word; the universally applicable generalization; the official, solemn occasion; passionate and demoniacal feelings. To prose, on the other hand, is given the world of sober realism and robust comedy; witty entertainment; playful diversion; delay; dissimulation, degradation, chaos; colloquial speech and uncorrect pronunciation. From this, verse appears as the speech belonging to the great dimension and intensity, of high worth.
(pp. 116–17; my translation)
That series of antitheses sums up Shakespeare’s view of prose quite accurately (I can think of few cases where prose is given those attributes proper to verse, and perhaps a few more where verse has prose qualities, but those mainly in the early plays). Shakespeare places prose in an inferior position, and though he uses it frequently and with increasing art, there are many important effects which he does not attempt to create in prose. I would insist that this limitation is not due to the nature of prose in the Elizabethan or any other age – indeed all the qualities which Miss Tschopp lists as being characteristic of Shakespeare’s verse are to be found used with great artistry in Sidney’s Arcadia. Nor does the differentiation show that Shakespeare regarded prose as a less expressive tool, for he uses it with a flexible virtuosity surpassing most of the writers of his age who applied it to definitely positive or serious purposes. It is largely for reasons of dramatic contrast that Shakespeare relegates prose to an inferior position, for a great range of meaningful juxtapositions with verse. But although inferior it is not negligible. The nature of Shakespeare’s prose is always controlled by the dramatic situation in which it is used, and our task as readers is to try to reconstruct in our appreciation of this medium that sensitivity which he and his audience so obviously shared.