Introduction: verse and prose Discussions of versification and prosody tend (as in this Companion) to be tucked away in discrete chapters or sections, as if these were purely technical subjects without wider relevance. In fact, metre is a central entry point to questions of performance, theme, style, and cultural context. Verse form naturally shapes thought and expression; it also reveals the poet's sense of belonging – his ideas about the kind of work he was writing and the performance he envisaged – and gives us clues about the date, provenance, and reliability of the texts in which poems have come down to us. For all these reasons, metrical analysis should not be as tedious as it often is.

The topic is especially relevant to Middle English romance, for which verse appeared until the very end of the Middle Ages to be the only viable option. In France, romance writers discovered prose in the late twelfth century but, centuries later, English writers remained wedded to verse even while adapting French prose. For example, the prose romances L’estoire del saint graal, Merlin, Lancelot, and the Mort Artu, which form part of the monumental Vulgate Cycle (c. 1215–35), were all initially translated into verse: into four-beat couplets in Arthour and Merlin (c. 1250–1300), into loose alliterative verse in Joseph of Arimathie (c. 1350), into an extended ballad stanza (a4b4a4b4a4b4a4b4) in the Stanzaic Morte Arthur (c. 1400), and into more four-beat couplets in Henry Lovelich's History of the Holy Grail (c. 1440) and Merlin (c. 1445). The first translation of Arthurian matter into prose, the Prose Merlin, dates from the middle of the fifteenth century, and only at this late stage was there a widespread shift from verse to prose. Another example of the lateness of prose is furnished by the various adaptations of Hue de Rotelande's Anglo-Norman Ipomedon (c. 1185, in octosyllabic couplets). The earliest translation, Ipomadon A (late fourteenth century), is in tail-rhyme; early in the fifteenth century it was translated again into couplets in Ipomydon B; yet only around 1460 did an English adapter finally opt for the (to us) obvious medium of prose in Ipomedon C.