Is As You Like It in verse?

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Is As You Like It in verse?

Shakespeare’s As You Like It is partly written in verse and partly written in prose. Shakespeare often puts the speech of higher class characters in verse while that of lower class characters is in prose, but he makes exceptions for the sake of character development.

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Shakespeare’s As You Like It is about half in verse and half in prose, and Shakespeare actually plays with his use of prose and verse, breaking some dramatic conventions in order to develop his characters. Let’s look at this in more detail.

In the drama of Shakespeare’s day, and often…

Shakespeare’s As You Like It is about half in verse and half in prose, and Shakespeare actually plays with his use of prose and verse, breaking some dramatic conventions in order to develop his characters. Let’s look at this in more detail.

In the drama of Shakespeare’s day, and often in Shakespeare’s own plays, higher class, courtly characters speak in verse while lower class characters tend to express themselves in prose. This is somewhat true of As You Like It, where Shakespeare sets the speeches of his noble characters is unrhymed iambic pentameter (blank verse). Iambic pentameter features five stressed syllables per line following an unstressed-stressed pattern. Look, for instance, at Rosalind’s monologue in act 3, scene 5. The first line (with stresses in bold) scans like this: “I pray you, do not fall in love with me.” Other noble characters like Duke Senior and Orlando also speak in verse.

Many of the lower-class characters, however, like Audrey, speak in prose with the cadences of normal speech. In act 5, scene 1, for instance, Audrey declares, “Faith, the priest was good enough, for all the old gentleman’s saying.” This is simple prose rather than verse.

However, Shakespeare disrupts the convention by sometimes casting Rosalind’s words in prose even though she is of the nobility, and by this, he shows us something important about her character. When Rosalind is talking to Celia about Orlando, the two speak in prose. Rosalind is showing herself to be a sensible young woman who, no matter how much she loves Orlando, refuses to get caught up in romantic pondering and let go of her common sense. Further, the two young women do not have to speak formally here, so they simply do not. This helps us better relate to Shakespeare’s characters, bringing them down to the level of normal people with normal feelings and struggles.

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