s
or phrases as, _unho'/ly_, _forgive' /me_, _benight'/ed_. Notice the
difference between them in the following passage:--

"Our revels now are ended. These our actors [feminine]
As I foretold you, were all spirits, and [masculine]
Are melted into air, into thin air; [masculine]
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision, [feminine]
The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces, [feminine]

{81}

The solemn temples, the great globe itself, [masculine]
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve, [masculine]
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, [feminine]
Leave not a rack behind."
--_Tempest_, IV, i, 147-166.

In the main, although with some exceptions, the number of feminine
endings, like the number of run-on lines, increases as the plays become
later in date.

A third form of ending, which practically does not appear at all in the
early plays, and which recurs with increasing frequency in the later
ones, is what is called a 'weak ending.'[4] This occurs whenever a
run-on line ends in a word which according to the meter needs to be
stressed, and according to the sense ought not to be. Here there is a
clash between meter and meaning, and the reader compromises by making a
pause before the last syllable instead of emphasizing the syllable
itself. Below are two examples of weak endings:--

"It should the good ship so have swallowed, and
The fraughting souls within her."

"I will rend an oak
And peg thee in his knotty entrails _till_
Thou hast howled away twelve winters."

Lastly, we have the evidence of rime. Run-on lines, feminine endings,
and weak endings constantly increase as Shakespeare grows older. Rime,
on the other hand, in general decreases. The early plays are {82} full
of it; the later ones have very little. It does not follow that the
chronological order of the individual plays could be exactly determined
by their percentage of riming lines, for subject matter makes a great
difference. In a staged fairy story, like _A Midsummer Night's Dream_,
the poet would naturally fall into couplets. But, other things being
equal, a large amount of rime is always a sign of early work. This is
especially true when the rimes occur, not in pairs, but in quatrains or
sonnet forms, or (as they sometimes do in the first comedies) in scraps
of sing-song doggerel.

Such is the internal evidence from the various changes in
versification.