ABSTRACT
On the face o f it, the primary distinguishing feature o f a passage from Shakespeare might seem to be whether it is written in prose or in verse. But it is not quite so simple. There is no prose at all in Richard I I or in K ing Jo h n . T h e M erry Wives o f Windsor contains the most prose (and its language may well be the nearest to Elizabethan colloquial English), followed by Much A do, Tw elfth N ight and As You L ik e It. Other plays with marked comic elements - I and 2 H enry IV , for example, in which Falstaff speaks only about a dozen lines of verse - also contain a good deal o f prose.1 Prose, therefore, is most prominent in the middle comedies and some o f the histories o f about the same date. The earlier comedies, as we have seen, sometimes use patterned euphuistic prose in the manner o f Lyly who wrote six prose comedies and only one verse play, and we have to wait for T he Merchant o f Venice (1596) before a major character, Shylock, speaks serious prose. Only in the earliest comedy, and once or twice later (for example where Hal uses prose to Falstaff and his cronies but verse to the nobles) will we find such a clear division as in T he Taming o f the Shrew where the high life is in verse and the low life in prose. Henry V, on the night before Agincourt, speaks prose to his soldiers as he moves amongst his army in disguise. He later woos Katherine in prose; the soldier has become the lover. Yet in neither o f these scenes does the prose seem natural: brief exchanges, characteristic o f conversation, are interspersed with longer, more balanced, rhetorical passages:
Some, peradventure, have on them the guilt o f premeditated and con trived murder; some, o f beguiling virgins with the broken seals o f perjury; some, making the wars their bulwark, that have before gored the gentle bosom o f peace with pillage and robbery.
