David Bevington, Introductory Matter to The Complete Works of Shakespeare

David Bevington, Editor: The Complete Works of Shakespeare. Updated Fourth Edition, Longman, New York (et al) 1997

One is from the Duke of Clarence’s description of his dream in Richard III (1.4.21-33), written in about 1591-1594, near the start of Shakespeare’s career: … The second is Prospero’s description of his magic in The Tempest (5.1.33-50), from about 1610-1611 when Shakespeare was on the verge of retirement: … Put side by side, they reveal a stylistic shift that we can observe in other less formal poetry and even in prose. The shift is away from rhetorical balance toward a freedom from verse restraint, a deliberate syncopation of blank verse rhythms, and a complication of syntax. / Completely regular blank verse…soon becomes monotonous…Extra syllables, accented and unaccented, can be added to the line, or a line may occasionally be short by one or more syllables. The regular alternation of accented and unaccented…can be interrupted by the occasional inversion of a foot. Pauses, or caesuras, may occur at several points in the line. Most importantly, the line can be “end-stopped”…or “run on”… Variations of this sort can transform blank verse from a formal rhetorical vehicle into one that is highly conversational. (lxxviii)

Shakespeare increasingly abandons formal end-stopped verse for a fluid and more conversational style. … A corollary of Shakespeare’s increased use of feminine line endings and nonstopped blank verse is that the lines of his later verse are more apt to end in conjunctions, prepositions, auxiliary verbs, possessive pronouns, and other lightly stressed words. (lxxix)

Earlier plays have low percentages of run-on lines in relation to the total number of lines: 1 Henry VI has 10.4 percent, …The Comedy of Errors 12.9 percent…whereas Cymbeline has 46.0 percent and Henry VIII 46.3 percent …Femine …run from a total of 9 in LLL… and 1,195 in Henry VIII. (lxxix)

Shakespeare increasingly divides a verse line between two or more speakers. The Comedy of Errors and 1 Henry VI do so hardly at all, whereas do so hardly at all, whereas in Cymbeline the figures rise to a remarkable 85 percent of all instances in which one speaker stops speaking and another begins… (lxxix)

Shakespeare’s use of prose in his plays depends, to a significant extent, on genre, especially in his early work. At the start of his career, Shakespeare seldom uses prose, except in speeches of clowns, servants, and rustics, whereas blank verse is his common vehicle of expression in speeches of heightened oratory or dramatic seriousness. …Prose is more common in the early comedies because of the presence of the Dromios, Christopher Sly, and Bottom Weaver, but the love scenes are generally in verse. Poetry is important to the lyric plays of the mid-1590s, such as The Merchant of Venice, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Romeo and Juliet. Prose assumes a major function, on the other hand, in plays of comic wit in the later 1590s, including 1 Henry IV (45 percent), Much Ado… (74 percent) and The Merry… (81 percent), and here we see that comedy is used not for wisecracking servants so much as for Falstaff, Beatrice, and Benedick. Thereafter, prose is essential to Shakespeare’s comic world. … Although the mixture of prose and blank verse is thus hard to quantify in any steady progression of percentages, the patter of increased versatility is undeniable. (lxxix)

Early plays and those of the lyric period, such as A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Romeo and Juliet, use a great deal of rhyme, whereas late plays, such as The Tempest, use practically none. … Doggerel lines of verse appear in some of the early plays. (lxxix)

Apart of this convention [of using couplets to end scenes], however, use of rhyme in Shakespeare is normally indicative of early style. His lovers in the early plays often speak in rhyme; later, they tend to use prose.

The early Shakespeare uses figures of speech for decoration and amplification, and learns only gradually to integrate these figures into a presentation of theme, subject, and individual character. In Shakespeare’s later work, simile is often transformed into metaphor and assumes an organic function in relation to the entire play. By the end of his career, virtually every aspect of his style has been transformed from one of formal and rhetorical regularity to one of vast flexibility and range. (lxxx)