Учебное пособие 4 unit I. The renaissance 1485-1649

particularly in his early plays. Rhymed couplets occur frequently at the end
of a scene, punctuating the dramatic rhythm and perhaps serving as a cue to
the offstage actors to enter for the next scene.
As Shakespeare’s dramatic skill developed, he began to make greater use
of prose, which became as subtle a medium in his hands as verse. Although
prose lacks the regular rhythms of verse, it is not without its own rhythmical
aspect, and Shakespeare came to use the possibilities of prose to achieve
effects of characterization as subtle as those he accomplished in verse. In the
early plays, prose is almost always reserved for characters from the lower
classes. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, for example, the weaver Bottom
speaks in prose to the fairy queen Titania, but she always responds in the
verse appropriate to her position. Shakespeare, however, soon abandoned this
rigid assignment of prose or verse on the basis of social rank. Although The
Merry Wives of Windsor is the only play written almost entirely in prose,
many plays use prose for important effects. Examples include Ophelia’s mad
scenes in Hamlet, Lady Macbeth’s sleepwalking scene in Macbeth, and
Falstaff’s wonderful comedy in Henry I V, Parts 1 and 2.

---

59
UNIT XIV.
 SHAKESPEARE TEXTS
So far as is known, Shakespeare had no hand in the publication of any of
his plays. In any event, he did not own his plays once he had supplied the
scripts to the theatrical company. Except when the plague closed the London
theaters, acting companies normally did not consider it in their own interest
to allow their popular plays to be printed. However, in whatever manner they
reached their publishers, 18 of Shakespeare’s plays were printed during his
lifetime in pamphlets (known as quartos, from the format in which they were
printed), which sold for sixpence. Publishers secured these plays in various
ways, some perhaps from the acting company, and some from lines taken
down in shorthand during performances or reconstructed from memory by
actors. The plays that reached print, therefore, had various degrees of
reliability, but what is of interest is that Shakespeare seemed not to care one
way or the other.