ABSTRACT
Practically all of Shakespeare’s plays are comprised of two very different stylistic patterns: verse and unverified speech. We can make a number of reasonably straightforward observations about the reason for using blank verse and prosaic speech in the same text. Often the distinction between blank verse and prose mirrors the distinction between the social status and behavioural patterns of the characters. Those characters who hold an executive role both in the narrative and as representatives of their counterparts in the real world tend to communicate with one another more in blank verse than in prose. We might thus conclude that Shakespeare maintains the status of poetry as part of a complex series of sign systems-including dress, demeanour, names, occupations-that allow us to recognize strata within a particular social hierarchy. Poetry is culture: it is a linguistic form which disposes a collective identity on its users-and we should here recall that the speaker of ‘The Relic’ foregrounds his self-conscious sophistication in the claim that he has by this ‘paper [poem] taught’. In sharing a certain code they can be seen as sharing a particular set of privileges, responsibilities, intellectual and moral concerns. Spoken, prose discourse does not even demand literacy. It is a means of exchange, dependent upon circumstances, and in the plays it occurs frequently in the exchanges between the low-life characters of the sub-plot.
