Verse in plays

Although a play is a different thing from a poem, it may still be written wholly or partly in what we call "dramatic verse". That is, instead of the characters talking to one another in prose, they address each other or the audience in verse. The verse may be rhymed or it may be "blank verse" where the lines are unrhymed but have a consistent length and meter. Most of Shakespeare's plays are in blank verse. In either case, the audience is expected to suspend their disbelief and accept these speeches as the "normal" mode of speaking for the characters concerned. In other words, just because a speech is in verse, it doesn't mean it is a poem. A poem is an independent ontological unit, whereas a speech in a play--even if written in rhyming couplets--is just a constituent unit of a much larger thing: the play is the independent ontological unit.

However, just as you can have a poem or song inside a novel, so you can have a poem or song inside a play--and this has nothing to do with whether any of the speeches are in verse or not. By poem or song in this context we mean a group of verse lines, almost always in stanzas, that seems capable of having a life of it's own outside the play. In other words, the kind of thing that could be put in an anthology of poems without looking odd. (One of the best known examples is the song sung by Feste the jester at the end of Shakespeare's Twelfth Night.) Look for it having a separate title (in Cavendish plays they have titles like "Song" or "The song"), or being referred to in a stage direction (eg. "She recites the following poem."; "He sings an old song."; etc.).

When in doubt, err on the side of it being a speech in verse, rather than a poem or song.

Whichever you decide it is, if it is being spoken by a character, the enclosing tag is <SP>.

Now,

If you think it's a speech in verse, go here
If you're sure it's a poem or song, go here

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