A second form of metrical evidence is found in the proportion of 'masculine' and 'feminine' endings in the verse. A line has a masculine ending when its last syllable is stressed; when it ends, for example, on words or phrases like behold', control', no more', begone'. On the other hand, if the last stressed syllable of the line is followed by an unstressed one, the two together are called a feminine ending. Instances of this would be lines ending in such words 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]
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 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. Its value, as must always be remembered, lies in the fact that the results of these different tests in the main agree with each other and with such external evidence as we have.