ABSTRACT
Shakespeare wrote his verse mostly in iambic pentameters. The use of the verse has the remarkable effect of making the whole more natural and believable. The French language needs more letters than English does to express the same idea as these famous lines from Twelfth Night show. When Shakespeare wrote in poetry, he made each line more or less the same length. If he put a half line in the middle of a speech, then he was instructing the actor to take a pause for some stage business. The original One Act version of A View from the Bridge, quite a lot of the speeches for different characters were written in verse. In particular, Alfieri the lawyer has many speeches written in modern blank verse. In the Two Act version of the play, there is some minor rewriting of the script, but the main difference is that the many bits of poetry are printed word for word as prose.
