What Is a Prologue?
- Melchior Antoine
- 6 days ago
- 3 min read
A prologue is a separate introductory section of a literary work that provides context into events that occur before the beginning of the main narrative. The point of the prologue is to give a proper introduction to the larger story so as to ensure that the reader is not confused about the narrative that they are getting into.
It has existed since the dawn of literature, and may be seen as a kind of relic of ancient storytelling. Nonetheless, there are modern stories that still make use of the prologue. A good example of an ancient prologue is the epic poem, The Odyssey, by Homer.
The prologue helps give the frame story for The Odyssey, which is the end of the Trojan War:
TELL ME, O MUSE, of that ingenious hero who traveled far and wide after he had sacked the famous town of Troy. Many cities did he visit, and many were the nations with whose manners and customs he was acquainted; moreover he suffered much by sea while trying to save his own life and bring his men safely home; but do what he might he could not save his men, for they perished through their own sheer folly in eating the cattle of the Sun-god Apollo; so the god prevented them from ever reaching home.
Shakespeare, with most of his plays, is into the habit of just jumping into the action. However, with Romeo and Juliet, he provided us with a prologue in the form of a sonnet:
Two households, both alike in dignity
(In fair Verona, where we lay our scene),
From ancient grudge break to new mutiny,
Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean.
From forth the fatal loins of these two foes
A pair of star-crossed lovers take their life;
Whose misadventured piteous overthrows
Doth with their death bury their parents’ strife.
The fearful passage of their death-marked love
And the continuance of their parents’ rage,
Which, but their children’s end, naught could remove,
Is now the two hours’ traffic of our stage;
The which, if you with patient ears attend,
What here shall miss, our toil shall strive to mend.
The prologue more or less sums up the outcome of the play, that is, the death of Romeo and Juliet: “A pair of star-crossed lovers [who] take their life.” It also provides the background of the tragedy, which is the feudal conflict between the Capulets and the Montagues.
Curiously, Shakespeare makes use of the chorus, that is, a group of actors who speak collectively throughout certain parts of the play, including the introduction. This was a relic of ancient Greek theater and is not typically used in Shakespeare.
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One of the most famous prologues in the history of literature is that from Charles Dickens’ novel A Tale of Two Cities (published in 1859):
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way—in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.
This is the first paragraph in the first chapter of the novel. Dickens makes extensive use of anaphora (or repetition at the beginning) throughout the paragraph to convey the chaos and anarchy that resulted from this political event. The chapter goes on to explain the background of the tale, namely, the political conditions in France that led to the French Revolution.
Cite this EminentEdit article |
Antoine, M. (2025, November 25). What Is a Prologue? EminentEdit. https://www.eminentediting.com/post/what-is-a-prologue |
