Scansion examples shakespeare5/10/2023 Prose is not any less rhetorical or full of poetic imagery, nor even less rhythmical: a famous example is Shylock's wonderfully powerful speech in The Merchant of Venice: Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? Fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge? If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that. Nearly everyone in The Merry Wives of Windsor-citizen wives and husbands, Justice, parson, servant, Falstaff, housekeeper, suitor-speaks prose, as do the knights Sir Toby Belch and Sir Andrew Aguecheek in Twelfth Night. Prose is not always associated with lower-class characters, although you may be told it is: the Gardener in Act III Scene iv of Richard II speaks in blank verse, as does the servant Caliban in The Tempest. This pragmatic distinction between prose and verse might seem unsatisfactory and there have been many attempts to elevate the division into something more sustained. Prose, by contrast, does not have a capital letter at the beginning of each line and continues to the right-hand margin. A verse line can be divided between speakers. Sometimes verse lines have punctuation at the end (they are end-stopped) and sometimes they do not (enjambement). Put simply, you can spot verse-even when it's only single lines-by the fact that the letters down the left-hand margin are capitalised and the line does not always reach the right-hand margin.
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