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Prose?. refers to ordinary speech with no regular pattern of rhythm. Lines of text do not all have the same number of syllables nor is there any clear pattern of stresses.
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Prose? • refers to ordinary speech with no regular pattern of rhythm. • Lines of text do not all have the same number of syllables nor is there any clear pattern of stresses. • If you are unsure if a passage is in prose or in blank verse, look for the following visual clue: a long passage in prose is typically printed in your text like an ordinary paragraph with right and left justification. The lines of print extend from left to right margin with no "hard return" in the middle of a sentence. • Prose suits the earthy realism of the principal wits, Beatrice and Benedick – reflecting their pragmatic and realistic attitude to love.
Rhymed Verse • Rhymed verse in Shakespeare's plays is usually in rhymed couplets, i.e. two successive lines of verse of which the final words rhyme with another. (A single rhymed couplet may also appear at the end of a speech or scene in blank verse, in which case it is called a capping couplet.) • Because rhyme is easy to hear, typically no visual clue is needed for you to recognize that a passage is in rhyme; however, note often that: • 1) the line of print does not extend to fill the whole page (there is a "hard return" after every rhyme word, so that the text appears as a column that does not fill the whole page); and • 2) the first word of every line is capitalized without regard to standard rules of capitalization. These two printing conventions are a visual clue that a speech is in verse rather than in prose.
Blank Verse • Blank Verse refers to unrhymed iambic pentameter. Blank verse resembles prose in that the final words of the lines do not rhyme in any regular pattern (although an occasional rhyming couplet may be found). • Unlike prose, there is a recognizable meter: most lines are in iambic pentameter, i.e. they consist of ten syllables alternating unstressed and stressed syllables
Identify: What fire is in mine ears? Can this be true? Stand I condemned for pride and scorn so much? Contempt, farewell, and maiden pride, adieu, No glory lives on the back of such. • Who is the speaker? • Where about in the play does this speech occur? • Identify the type of language used? (Prose, blank verse, rhymed verse?) • Why is this significant?
Speaking in blank verse The ways that characters speak reflects status, attitudes and as you noted in the previous side changes in style of speech are particularly important. • Hero and Claudio tend to speak in verse, underlining by contrast with Benedick and Beatrice the artificiality and sentimentality of their love. • Hero’s reticence to speak creates her mystique – she connives in Claudio’s idealisation of her. However, out of the public eye, she speaks in verse with a refined wit indicative of her beauty and intelligence which her social role as Claudio’s fiancée forces her to suppress. The dignity of her verse exacerbates the injustice of her disgrace and darkens the comedy. • Deepest and highest sentiments are expressed in blank verse, in 4.1 Claudio switches from prose to verse once he has begun Hero’s denunciation. Whereas Beatrice and Benedick had shown off their wit, the formality and complexity of Claudio’s speech underlies the discrepancy between illusion and reality and the pain deception causes. • Leonato’s tirade and the Friar’s consolations are also in verse and only when Beatrice and Benedick are on stage alone is there a return to prose, where the simplicity of their language conveys an honesty of their feelings. Lady Beatrice, have you wept all the while?
Language notes • Beatrice, unlike Benedick is so transformed from Lady Disadain by love that after the eavesdropping in her soliloquy she does dedicate herself to requiting Benedick in verse of alternating lines of iambic pentameter. • Benedick attains verse briefly when he pledges to support the Friar’s scheme • He fails miserably to produce a love sonnet • The entire gulling of Beatrice in verse, unlike Benedick’s in prose, highlights implicit gender differences. • Exaggeration, imaginative vitality and prolixity are the signal features of Beatrice and Benedick’s prose. It is also classically and proverbially allusive, indicative of a broad experience and education and abounds in imagery. They trade insults with animal imagery. Benedick adopts images of the hunt as sexual aggression. Beatrice references to age, death and decay. Clothing imagery identifies the importance of deception in the play.
