Prose took over storytelling (both in narrative and dramatic form) beginning in the 17th century. The prose shift in full-scale narrative commences with Quijote, which is why critics have dubbed Cervantes, quite rightly, the “father of the modern novel.” It’s not that great narrative poetry would not be born after Cervantes. It’s more that, unlike Don Quijote, works like Paradise Lost died without issue. The Miltonic would survive a while as a stylistic tic, as the inspiration of Blake’s (now nearly unreadable, in my opinion) windy epics, as the model of Keats’s unfinished Hyperion; the serious narrative poem would see sporadic 19th-century revivals in Byron’s Romances (The Giaour—heard of that one?), Sir Walter Scott, Longfellow, Tennyson’s atavistic Idylls. These poems, notice, have few if any descendants in subsequent literature. Dickens was Victorian England’s true storyteller, not Tennyson. The historical trend toward the prose novel is clear.
The prose shift in drama would take place slightly after Shakespeare; France, later in the 17th century, would still produce a Racine (1632-1699). Again, verse drama would not die instantly: The deaths of cultural forms are lingering ones, full of rallies and turns for the worse. So we can cite 19th-century examples like Goethe’s Tasso and Faust, Pushkin’s Boris Godunov, the plays of the Italian Romantic poet Vittorio Alfieri, all the way through to 20th-century poets like Maeterlinck and Yeats. Here, too, we are seeing experiments in the age of prose. We find attempts at a new verse drama (Yeats and Eliot) or attempts at reviving the old verse drama (Byron and Tennyson, both of whom wrote failed blank verse plays). The sum total of contemporary dramatic prose proves that the shift has been, esssentially, complete: Statistically, the number of new verse plays written and performed today is negligible; as a fraction of our culture’s total dramatic output (stage plays, teleplays, screenplays), it approaches zero. This state of affairs shows no sign of changing.
Shakespeare himself is a hybrid, embodying the transition. Formally, his plays flicker kinetically between verse and prose. We think of him so reflexively as Elizabethan England’s greatest poet that we forget he was also Elizabethan England’s greatest prose writer. Some of the most powerful plays—King Lear comes to mind—use prose precisely in their most powerful scenes; there is nothing in English prose to match Lear’s mad scenes until a few scattered passages in Melville.
The transformation of Shakespeare’s iambic line, too, shows some very telling changes as we progress from the early plays to the late ones. Witness how serial endstopped lines—as in Richard III or Romeo and Juliet—give way to Hamlet’s heavily enjambed verse paragraph, which wraps relentlessly around the right margin, like a prose paragraph. Milton would adopt this technique, too, speaking of the “sense drawn out variously from line to line.” We are so used to this, this is so much in our poetic groundwater, that we forget, perhaps, what a radical shift Shakespeare’s tragic and Milton’s Latinate verse represent in post-classical European poetry. You will not find so relentless and indeed systematic a use of enjambement in Chaucer or Spenser or Marlowe, in Dante or Petrarch; you don’t even find it in Shakespeare until he enters that crucial 17th century. By Coriolanus, he has developed the purest hybrid—oxymoron is the only way to express it—the purest hybrid of prose and verse we have. We call it poetry because it is not prose; considered against the post-Classical European verse that came before it, it hangs on to verse by a fraying iambic tether. The poetry has been infected with prose and has come through the infection stronger.
