Are Shakespeare's plays poetry?

Carmelina Enoch: no..it's a play

Delphine Cajka: tricky thing. try searching onto yahoo or google. that can assist!

Kenneth Thuesen: yes they are in verse.

Nicolas Cooley: problematic point. try searching over yahoo or google. it might help!

Cedric Grimstead: It is metered, all of it iambic pentameter.With the exception of Hamlets dialogue among those he doesn't trust when he is feigning madness, then it loses all form. But it returns once with Horatio on his own, or the time he tries to convince his mother it is an act.

Providencia Serpe: The characters in Shakespeare's plays frequently speak in blank verse, unrhymed iambic pentameter. That is the most common type of poetry you'll find in his plays. Sometimes, his characters speak in rhymed couplets or other types of rhyming verse. (For example, characters in "Romeo and Juliet" speak several sonnets.) Although iambic pentameter is Shakespeare's preferred meter, Puck in "A Midsummer Nigh! t's Dream" is one character who sometimes speaks in tetrameter (four beats to a line instead of five), and uses both iambic and trochaic meter. Puck's famous "If we shadows have offended" speech at the end of the play is one example. There are occasional song and bits of poetry in some the plays that use other varieties of meter and rhyme, and many characters speak in prose, with no meter or rhyme....Show more

Adrian Sherlin: In Shakespeare's plays, you can find unrhymed iambic pentameter (for the greatest part), prose (quite a lot) and some other types of verse, sometimes with rhymes. The proportion varies in each play.