You are viewing a free preview of this lesson.
Subscribe to unlock all 10 lessons in this course and every other course on LearningBro.
Understanding Shakespeare's use of verse and prose is fundamental to any close reading on Paper 1 Section A. Shakespeare did not make arbitrary choices about form: the shift between verse and prose is always dramatically significant, revealing character, status, emotional state, and thematic intention. This lesson equips you with the technical vocabulary and analytical skills to write about Shakespeare's language with the precision that A-Level examiners reward.
Paper 1, Section A: Shakespeare (AQA A-Level English Literature A, 7712). Set text: Othello (with reference to Measure for Measure, The Winter's Tale and The Taming of the Shrew).
AO Focus in this lesson Weight here AO1 Building a coherent argument about form, using accurate metrical and prosodic terminology Developed AO2 Dominant. Analysing how meaning is shaped by language, form and structure — metre, line, rhyme, the verse/prose boundary Dominant AO3 The verse culture of the Elizabethan/Jacobean playhouse and its attuned audience Supporting AO5 How form sustains rival readings (e.g. of Katherine's final speech) Supporting Section A assesses AO1, AO2, AO3 and AO5. AO4 (connections across texts) is not assessed in this section — it is examined in Section B and in the coursework. The dominant objective here is AO2: form is meaning, and the candidate who can read the metre reads the play.
This lesson trains the single most under-used skill at A-Level: hearing the line. Most candidates can spot a metaphor; very few can hear a trochee land on a stressed first syllable and explain what it does to a moment. That gap is exactly where Mid-band responses become Top-band ones.
The dominant verse form in Shakespeare's plays is iambic pentameter — a line of five metrical feet (pentameter), each foot consisting of an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable (an iamb):
da-DUM / da-DUM / da-DUM / da-DUM / da-DUM
For example, Othello's line:
"She loved me for the dangers I had passed" (Othello, 1.3.168)
scans as regular iambic pentameter, reflecting Othello's composure and rhetorical control at this point in the play. The regular rhythm mirrors the ordered confidence of a man secure in his love and his public identity.
| Reason | Explanation |
|---|---|
| Natural speech rhythm | English naturally tends toward iambic patterns, so iambic pentameter sounds elevated but not artificial |
| Associations with status | Verse is the language of nobility, authority, and serious emotion — it marks the speaker as worthy of attention |
| Musical quality | The regularity creates a kind of musical expectation, which Shakespeare can then disrupt for dramatic effect |
| Flexible enough for variation | Unlike a rigid form like a sonnet, blank verse allows Shakespeare to stretch, compress, and break the line |
Key Definition: Blank verse is unrhymed iambic pentameter. It is the standard verse form of Shakespeare's drama and should not be confused with free verse (which has no regular metre at all).
The power of iambic pentameter lies partly in what happens when it breaks down. Examiners reward candidates who can identify and analyse metrical irregularities.
A trochee (stressed-unstressed) replacing an iamb at the start of a line creates emphasis and urgency:
"Put out / the light, / and then / put out / the light" (Othello, 5.2.7)
The opening trochee ("Put out") disrupts the expected rhythm, enacting Othello's inner turmoil as he prepares to murder Desdemona. The line also demonstrates epizeuxis (immediate repetition), reinforcing the terrible finality of what he is about to do.
An extra unstressed syllable at the end of a line (an eleventh syllable) is called a feminine ending. It often creates a sense of incompleteness or emotional overflow:
"To be, or not to be: that is the question" (Hamlet, 3.1.56)
The line has eleven syllables, the final unstressed "-tion" trailing off — formally enacting the irresolution the line describes.
Shakespeare sometimes writes lines shorter than ten syllables, creating pauses and silences. He also uses shared lines (or split lines), where two speakers complete a single line of pentameter between them:
LEONTES: "Is whispering nothing?"
The Winter's Tale, 1.2.286
Leontes' questions in Act 1 Scene 2 are jagged, fractured, and often metrically incomplete — the broken verse formally represents his disintegrating mind as jealousy takes hold. Compare this with Hermione's measured, rhetorically balanced verse at her trial (3.2), which signals her innocence and composure.
While blank verse is the norm, Shakespeare uses rhyming couplets (pairs of rhymed lines in iambic pentameter) for specific dramatic purposes:
| Function | Example |
|---|---|
| Closing a scene | Couplets create a sense of resolution and finality — they signal to actors and audience that a scene is ending |
| Sententious wisdom | Characters deliver general truths or moral maxims in couplets, giving them proverbial weight |
| Artifice and performance | Couplets can sound deliberate, polished, artificial — appropriate for characters who are performing rather than speaking naturally |
| Love declarations | The echo of the sonnet tradition links couplets with romantic and erotic language |
In The Taming of the Shrew, Katherine's final speech — "Thy husband is thy lord, thy life, thy keeper" (5.2.146) — builds toward couplets. Whether these signal genuine submission or ironic performance is one of the most debated questions in Shakespeare criticism. The formality of the couplet form can suggest sincerity (she has learned the conventional language of wifely duty) or subversion (the artifice is too neat, too polished, to be anything but parody).
AO5 — Critical Interpretations: Feminist critics such as Germaine Greer have argued that Kate's final speech is knowing parody, while more traditional readings (such as those by Harold Bloom) suggest Shakespeare presents a genuine mutual transformation. The verse form supports both readings — that is its brilliance.
Not all of Shakespeare's text is in verse. Prose — language without regular metre or line structure — is dramatically significant precisely because it departs from the verse norm.
| Convention | Explanation |
|---|---|
| Lower-status characters | Servants, clowns, and commoners typically speak prose (e.g., the porter in Macbeth, the gravediggers in Hamlet) |
| Comic scenes | Prose is associated with comedy, wit, bawdy humour, and informal exchanges |
| Madness or distraction | Characters who lose rational control may shift from verse to prose (e.g., Ophelia, Lady Macbeth) |
| Intimacy and informality | Private, relaxed, or conspiratorial exchanges may use prose even between high-status characters |
| Letters and documents | Letters read aloud on stage are almost always in prose |
In Measure for Measure, the low-life characters of Vienna — Pompey, Mistress Overdone, Elbow — speak prose. Their earthy, bawdy language contrasts with Angelo's austere verse and Isabella's passionate rhetoric. The juxtaposition is thematically loaded: the prose speakers represent the sexual reality that Angelo's law attempts to suppress but that his own desires embody.
In Othello, Iago frequently shifts between verse and prose. When manipulating others (Roderigo, Cassio), Iago often uses prose — its informality creates a sense of intimacy and conspiracy. When addressing the audience in soliloquy, he uses verse, claiming the linguistic register of the tragic protagonist. This code-switching is central to Iago's characterisation as a shape-shifter who adapts his language to his audience.
Exam Tip: Never simply identify prose or verse in isolation. Always explain the dramatic significance of the choice. Ask: why does this character speak in this form at this moment? What does the shift between verse and prose reveal about power, status, emotion, or deception?
The most analytically productive moments are often those where a character switches between verse and prose, or where the expected form is disrupted.
| Play | Moment | Significance |
|---|---|---|
| Othello | Othello's language degenerates from eloquent verse to fragmented, prose-like utterances as Iago poisons his mind (3.3 onwards) | The breakdown of verse enacts the breakdown of Othello's identity and self-possession |
| The Taming of the Shrew | Petruchio and Katherine's first meeting (2.1) mixes prose wit-combat with verse | The shifts register the power struggle between them; the move toward shared verse may signal growing connection — or domination |
| Measure for Measure | Isabella speaks verse in her pleas to Angelo; the low-life scenes are in prose | The form itself becomes a moral hierarchy that the play then interrogates and complicates |
| The Winter's Tale | The pastoral scenes of Act 4 mix prose and verse; Autolycus speaks prose, Florizel and Perdita speak verse | Genre and form intertwine: the aristocratic lovers inhabit verse even in a pastoral setting, while the rogue Autolycus belongs to the comic prose tradition |
Shakespeare occasionally embeds sonnet structures within his dramatic verse. The most famous example is Romeo and Juliet's first meeting (1.5), where their dialogue forms a shared sonnet — but traces of the sonnet's influence appear throughout the set texts.
In The Winter's Tale, Florizel's praise of Perdita (4.4.135–46) uses imagery and rhetorical patterns that echo the sonnet tradition's blazon (cataloguing the beloved's beauties). This connects the pastoral love plot with the literary conventions Shakespeare spent his career both celebrating and subverting.
AO3 — Context: The Elizabethan and Jacobean theatre was a verse culture. Audiences were attuned to metrical shifts in ways modern audiences often are not. Playgoers who had read Sidney's Astrophil and Stella or Shakespeare's own Sonnets would have recognised the sonnet echoes and understood their significance immediately.
When analysing an extract for Paper 1 Section A:
Key Definition: Enjambment is the running-on of a sentence from one line of verse to the next without punctuation. It creates pace, urgency, and a sense of thought overflowing its container. Caesura is a pause within a line, often marked by punctuation, which can create balance, hesitation, or dramatic emphasis.
The ability to write about Shakespeare's language with technical precision — integrating analysis of form with interpretation of character and theme — is what distinguishes a competent response from an excellent one.
Beyond the metrical foot, the line itself is an instrument. Where a sentence ends in relation to where a line ends is one of Shakespeare's most expressive resources, and candidates who attend to it open up a whole dimension of AO2 analysis that most miss entirely.
An end-stopped line — one whose grammatical unit closes at the line's end — produces a sense of control, completeness and deliberation. Enjambment, by contrast, runs the sense over the line-break, so that thought spills forward and the reader is pulled across the gap. Caesura — a pause within the line — can create balance, hesitation, or a sudden swerve of thought. These are not decorative observations: the relationship between syntax and line enacts states of mind.
Consider how Iago's verse uses the caesura to mimic spontaneous, honest deliberation, when in fact it is calculated. His apparent reluctance — the broken, hesitating line where he affects not to want to speak — uses mid-line pauses to perform a mind reluctantly arriving at a painful truth. The form sells the lie. Compare the enjambment of Othello's later speeches, where his thought overruns the line because he can no longer contain it: the run-on lines formally represent obsession, a mind unable to stop, to close a thought, to rest. Where Act 1 Othello speaks in self-contained, end-stopped units (the syntax and the line agreeing, like a man at one with himself), the jealous Othello's verse fractures — caesuras chop the line into fragments, enjambment drags one anguished half-thought into the next.
Key Definition: An end-stopped line closes its grammatical sense at the line-ending, usually with punctuation. Enjambment runs the sense over the line-break without pause. Caesura is a pause within the line. The interplay of these with the metre is where form becomes psychology.
The general principle is that Shakespeare can set the syntax (the shape of the sentence) against the metre (the shape of the line), and the friction between them is meaning. When sentence and line agree, we feel order; when they pull against each other, we feel strain. This is why a candidate should never describe verse as merely "flowing" or "smooth" — those words abdicate analysis. The question is always: does the line contain the thought, or does the thought break the line?
When two characters trade single lines of verse in rapid alternation, the technique is stichomythia. It is the verse-form of confrontation, wit-combat and erotic sparring — two speakers sharing the metrical space, each line a thrust or parry. Shakespeare uses it across the comedies and tragedies wherever two wills meet on equal terms.
In The Taming of the Shrew, the first meeting of Katherine and Petruchio (2.1) erupts into stichomythic exchange — a verbal duel in which neither will yield the line. The form itself is the argument: by matching Petruchio line for line, Katherine demonstrates an intellectual equality that the play's "taming" plot will then attempt to dismantle. Critics who read the relationship as a meeting of equals (Bloom) point to precisely this formal parity; critics who read it as domination (Greer) note that Petruchio increasingly controls the exchange, until by the final act Katherine's verse is no longer combative but submissive. The shift in who commands the shared line is a structural record of the shift in power.
Stichomythia also appears in moments of accusation and crisis. The technique forces an audience to hear two positions collide at speed, each line generating the next — and because the speakers share the pentameter, the form insists on their entanglement even as their words express opposition. Reading who controls the rhythm of a stichomythic exchange — who drives it, who follows, where it breaks down — is a sophisticated AO2 skill.
Exam Tip: When an extract contains rapid line-by-line exchange, name it (stichomythia) and then analyse the power dynamic: who initiates, who echoes, who breaks the pattern? The shared line is a contested space, and tracking its control reveals the relationship.
Let us slow down on a single line and demonstrate the kind of attention examiners reward. Take Othello at the moment he resolves to murder Desdemona:
"Put out the light, and then put out the light" (Othello, 5.2.7)
Read the line aloud. The expected pattern is da-DUM × five. But the line opens with a stressed syllable — "Put" — a trochaic substitution that throws the metrical weight onto the act of extinguishing before the sentence has even named what is to be extinguished. The line then settles, briefly, into regularity ("and then put out the light"), as if Othello is trying to compose himself, to ritualise murder into order. The repetition of "put out the light" is epizeuxis, but notice that the second "light" is not the first: the first is the candle, the second is Desdemona. The single monosyllabic phrase carries a metaphysical distinction — a thing that can be relit and a thing that cannot — without a single polysyllable to soften it. The plainness is the horror. A candidate who writes "Shakespeare uses repetition here" has seen nothing; a candidate who hears the trochee and tracks the shift in the referent of "light" has read the line.
Compare this with the long, flowing verse of his Senate speech earlier in the play:
"She loved me for the dangers I had passed,
And I loved her that she did pity them." (1.3.168–69)
Here the iambic pentameter is regular and the syntax is balanced — a subject-verb-object clause mirrored by its near-identical twin, the chiasmus of "She loved me" / "I loved her." The form enacts reciprocity: two people, two clauses, a love presented as symmetrical exchange. The structural confidence of the verse is itself an argument about the security of the relationship — which is precisely why its later collapse into the fragmentary prose of "Lie with her? lie on her?" (4.1.35) is so devastating. Form is the play's most reliable register of psychological truth.
Exam Tip: When you quote a line, do not merely gloss its content. Scan it. Ask: is the metre regular? Where does it break? What syntactic shape does the line take, and does that shape reinforce or fight against the metre? The candidate who treats verse as decoration will plateau; the candidate who treats verse as meaning will not.
If Othello's verse charts a descent, Iago's verse demonstrates control — and the contrast between the two men's relationship to form is one of the play's deepest ironies. Iago is the most metrically adaptable speaker in Othello, and his adaptability is itself a moral fact. He commands fluent, image-rich blank verse in soliloquy, where he addresses the audience as an equal; he drops into supple prose when conspiring with Roderigo, where informality breeds intimacy; and in the great temptation scene he modulates between the two with a fluency that mirrors his psychological mastery. Where Othello has a voice — grand, ceremonious, recognisably his own — Iago has voices, and the absence of a fixed register is the formal signature of a man with no fixed self. His own boast, "I am not what I am" (1.1.65), is a statement about form as much as identity: a speaker who can be anything in verse or prose is a speaker who is, finally, nothing.
Consider how the form operates in 3.3. Iago's most damaging insinuations are delivered in verse of deceptive smoothness — the "green-eyed monster" warning (3.3.165–67) is fluent, end-stopped, almost sententious, the rhythm of settled wisdom. The very regularity of the verse lends the lie an air of considered truth: a man who speaks in such balanced measures must, the rhythm implies, be speaking from honest reflection. This is the opposite of the way form works for Othello, whose breaking verse betrays his inner state; Iago's controlled verse conceals his. A candidate who notices that the smoothness of Iago's metre is part of his deception — that here, unusually, regular form is a mask rather than a window — is reading at a genuinely sophisticated level.
Exam Tip: Do not assume that regular verse always signals sincerity or calm. With Iago, metrical control is the instrument of deceit: the smoother the line, the more carefully crafted the lie. Form must always be read in relation to who is speaking and to what end.
Because the set text is Othello, candidates often neglect how verse and prose operate in the comparison plays — yet a single well-placed observation about the comedies can demonstrate the breadth the top band rewards. The general principle holds across all four: form encodes status, register and dramatic mode, and the richest moments lie at the boundary.
In The Taming of the Shrew, the Induction frames the entire play with a question about form and identity. Christopher Sly, a drunken tinker, speaks prose — the register of the low-status, the comic, the unpoetic. When the Lord's practical joke convinces him that he is a nobleman, the question of whether Sly can or should "speak" in a higher register dramatises the link between language and social rank. The play that follows — Kate's "taming" — is thus framed by a prior "taming" of a commoner into the belief that he is noble, and form is the medium of both transformations. The aristocratic wooing plot (Lucentio, Bianca) inhabits verse, with its Petrarchan posturing and Latin tags; the servants and the comic underplot tilt toward prose. Petruchio, tellingly, moves between both, commanding verse for his soliloquies of strategy and a brawling, prose-inflected energy in his wit-combat with Kate.
In Measure for Measure the verse/prose division is sharply moralised and then complicated. The low-life of Vienna — Pompey the bawd, Mistress Overdone, the muddling constable Elbow — speak prose, and their earthy, malapropism-strewn exchanges supply the comic underside of a play obsessed with sexual law. Against them, Isabella's verse soars into rhetorical grandeur and Angelo's into tortured self-examination. The form is the play's moral hierarchy — verse for the high questions of justice and chastity, prose for the bodily reality the law tries to police. But Shakespeare complicates the scheme: the prose speakers articulate truths about human sexuality that the verse speakers cannot suppress, so that the "low" form carries an insight the "high" form resists. Pompey's deadpan prose logic — that you cannot police desire out of a city without "geld[ing] and splay[ing] all the youth" — exposes the futility of Angelo's elevated severity. The form-hierarchy is established precisely so that the play can interrogate it.
In The Winter's Tale, the rogue Autolycus belongs wholly to the comic prose tradition — his patter, his ballads, his confidence-tricks are the verbal texture of the pastoral fourth act — while Florizel and Perdita, the aristocratic lovers, inhabit verse even amid the sheep-shearing. The coexistence of forms in Bohemia mirrors the play's generic doubleness: romance and comedy share a stage, and the verse/prose boundary marks the seam between them.
Exam Tip: A brief, accurate observation about form in the comparison plays (Sly's framing prose, the moralised verse/prose split in Measure for Measure, Autolycus's comic prose against the lovers' verse) signals the breadth examiners reward — provided it is analytical, not a mere catalogue. Always tie the formal observation to status, mode, or theme.
Paper 1, Section A (25 marks).
"Shakespeare uses the movement between verse and prose to chart the disintegration of Othello's mind."
Explore the significance of form in Othello in the light of this view.
[Assessed: AO1, AO2 (dominant), AO3, AO5]
Mid-band response (extract):
Shakespeare uses verse and prose in Othello to show Othello falling apart. At the start of the play Othello speaks in iambic pentameter, for example "She loved me for the dangers I had passed". This is regular verse and shows he is calm and in control. Later, when Iago has made him jealous, his language breaks down into prose: "Lie with her? lie on her?" This shows he is no longer calm. The change from verse to prose shows the change in his mind. This proves that Shakespeare uses form to show Othello's disintegration.
Stronger response (extract):
Shakespeare maps Othello's psychological collapse onto a collapse of poetic form. In Act 1, his self-possession is conveyed through balanced, regular blank verse: "She loved me for the dangers I had passed, / And I loved her that she did pity them" (1.3.168–69), where the symmetry of the two clauses enacts the reciprocity of the love he describes. By Act 4, this control has gone. "Lie with her? lie on her?" (4.1.35) is prose, broken into spasmodic questions; the obsessive punning on "lie" (recline / deceive) shows a mind unable to escape a single fixed idea. The descent from the elevated register of verse — the language of nobility and reason — into fragmented prose dramatises the loss of the rational, public self that the verse had represented.
Top-band response (extract):
The proposition is persuasive, but it risks treating form as a simple thermometer of feeling; Shakespeare's handling is subtler, because Othello's form does not merely register his disintegration — it resists it, and the friction is the tragedy. The balanced blank verse of the Senate speech, "She loved me for the dangers I had passed, / And I loved her that she did pity them" (1.3.168–69), offers a chiastic equilibrium that is itself a claim about the relationship: love as reciprocal exchange, each clause answering the other. When this gives way in Act 4 to the prose of "Lie with her? lie on her?" (4.1.35), the collapse is not just into prose but into compulsion — the punning circuit of "lie" enacts a mind that can no longer move forward in argument, only loop. Yet the most telling moment is neither pure verse nor pure prose. "Put out the light, and then put out the light" (5.2.7) is verse, and metrically it strains toward regularity, the opening trochee giving way to an iambic settling — as though Othello is using the order of the line to ritualise murder into justice. Here Leavis's charge of "self-approving self-dramatisation" finds its formal evidence: the very competence of the verse becomes suspect, an aestheticising of atrocity. A.C. Bradley, conversely, would hear in the line's plainness a genuine anguish too deep for ornament. The form sustains both readings, and that is Shakespeare's point: the verse is the last, doomed performance of a self the prose has already destroyed.
The Mid-band answer identifies the correct contrast and names the forms, but its analysis is assertive rather than demonstrated ("This shows he is no longer calm"). It does not scan a line, does not analyse how the prose works, and leans on "shows" and "proves" — the vocabulary of statement, not interpretation. It is accurate and relevant; it is not yet analytical.
The Stronger answer moves into genuine AO2: it reads the chiasmus, decodes the pun on "lie," and connects the register of verse to the idea of a "public self." Quotations are precise and embedded. What holds it back from the top is that it accepts the question's premise uncritically and does not bring AO5 debate or the harder case (the murder-soliloquy verse) into play.
The Top-band answer is conceptualised: it opens by qualifying the proposition, then uses the verse/prose/verse trajectory to complicate it, integrating close metrical analysis with the Bradley/Leavis debate (AO5) so that form becomes the ground on which the critical disagreement is fought. It does not list critics; it deploys them. This is the discriminator the mark scheme rewards.
| Misconception | Why it's wrong |
|---|---|
| "Prose is for unimportant moments." | Prose is dramatically loaded — it can signal madness, intimacy, conspiracy, or the collapse of a high-status character's identity. Othello's descent into prose is the opposite of unimportant. |
| "Iambic pentameter just means it sounds nice." | The metre is a meaning-making system. Its regularity and its disruptions both signify. Identifying the metre is the start of analysis, not the end. |
| "Every line that isn't a couplet is 'free verse'." | Shakespeare's unrhymed lines are blank verse — unrhymed iambic pentameter, a strict form. Free verse has no regular metre at all and is anachronistic for Shakespeare. |
| "Spotting a trochaic substitution earns the marks." | Feature-spotting earns nothing. The mark is for explaining what the substitution does at that dramatic moment. |
| "Characters always speak in their 'assigned' form." | The richest analysis lives at the boundary, where a character switches form against expectation. Track the switches, not the steady state. |
This content is aligned with the AQA A-Level English Literature A (7712) specification.