Student Question
As is often the case with Shakespeare's comedies, much of As You Like It is in prose. The verse is predominantly blank verse, unrhymed iambic pentameter, and is generally spoken by the higher-class characters. The most common use of rhyme in Shakespeare's plays, comedies and tragedies alike, is to provide a rhetorical flourish at the conclusion of a scene, as when Celia says at the end of act 1, scene 3:
Now go we in content
To liberty and not to banishment.
There is a variation on this usage at the end of act 2, scene 3, when Orlando, having praised Adam's loyalty, concludes with these lines:
And ere we have thy youthful wages spent,
We'll light upon some settled low content.
The audience would expect this to signal the end of the scene, but Adam continues:
Master, go on, and I will follow thee,
To...
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the last gasp, with truth and loyalty.
From seventeen years till now almost fourscore
Here lived I, but now live here no more.
At seventeen years many their fortunes seek;
But at fourscore it is too late a week:
Yet fortune cannot recompense me better
Than to die well and not my master's debtor.
The continuation of the rhyme here reinforces the meaning of the words: that Adam will never leave Orlando, come what may. He finally signals that the scene is well and truly over with a feminine (two-syllable) rhyme, varying the iambic meter. This variation in both meter and theatrical convention creates a sense of Adam's independence, even as he subordinates himself and his fortunes to Orlando.
The meter is generally very smooth, fitting the lyrical, pastoralatmosphere of the play. Sometimes internal rhymes appear within the blank verse, as when Duke Senior says,
And this our life exempt from public haunt
Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,
Sermons in stones and good in every thing.
I would not change it.
Here, the internal rhyme of "books" and "brooks" complements the alliteration of "tongues in trees" and "Sermons in stones" to show the contradictions of polished pastoral poetry, in which nature is always juxtaposed with civilization.