General Characteristicsof Shakespeare's Prose

Historically, Shakespeare’s prose is more or less in that ‘pre-classical’ style which had its roots in the medieval period and survived until the middle of the seventeenth century. Among its characteristics are redundancy, a love of epithets, emphasis and inversion, lengthy periods, a certain preference for nouns and abstracts before verbs, and finally a liking for ‘architectural’ patterns of expression.

About the middle of the sixteenth century the first signs of new tendencies appeared. This was the age which saw the birth of modern science. The new spirit of analysis tended to create a new prose style; the old clumsy periods became articulated into short, clear sentences; antithesis, the main instrument of intellectual clarification, became omnipresent; and the architectural patterns assumed a new form of almost mechanical rigidity. Metaphor, nearly non-existent before, symbolized the increasing intellectuality in its task of bringing together remote ideas. 'Wit' rapidly became the watchword of the new age; euphuism is only the culmination of a tendency apparent since 1550 or even earlier.

In Shakespeare's writings, it is true, we can readily trace the influence of the new intellectuality, but side by side with this remain the persisting qualities of the older style. Redundancy, the main feature of the old style, is already absent in Shakespeare, except where it is used for intentional comic effects. Thus we miss the characteristic tautologies, such as “intention and meaning”, or “support and maintain”, which figure in every paragraph of Spenser and Hooker. But his prose is still full of semipoetic emphasis, emphatic particles and short clauses, “faith”, “pray”, “by my troth”, “I assure you”, epithets in the superlative, exclamations of all sorts. Exaggeration or hyperbole is a feature common to all levels of Shakespeare's comic prose.