When the dramatic feeling warrants it, the humblest rise to the highest poetry. The renaissance was an age of deeper, mightier feelings than our own, and this intense life speaks in verse, for only thus can it adequately express itself.
All this is romantic enough. But it is to be doubted if the men of the renaissance were so different from us that they felt an instinctive need of bursting into song. The causes of the efflorescence of Elizabethan dramatic poetry are not, I think, to be sought in such subtleties as these.
Collin further insists that the only way to understand Shakespeare's versification is to understand his situations and his characters. Rules avail little. If we do not feel the meaning of the music, we shall never understand the meaning of the verse. Shakespeare's variations from the normal blank verse are to be interpreted from this point of view. Hence what the metricists call "irregularities" are not irregularities at all. Collin examines the more important of these irregularities and tries to account for them.
1. Short broken lines as in I, 1-5: I am to learn. Antonio completes this line by a shrug of the shoulders or a gesture. "It would be remarkable," concludes Collin, "if there were no interruptions or pauses even though the characters speak in verse." Another example of this breaking of the line for dramatic purposes is found in I, 3-123 where Shylock suddenly stops after "say this" as if to draw breath and arrange his features. (Sic!)
2. A verse may be abnormally long and contain six feet. This is frequently accidental, but in M of V it is used at least once deliberately—in the oracular inscriptions on the caskets:
"Who chooseth me shall gain what men desire."
"Who chooseth me shall get as much as he deserves."
"Who chooseth me must give and hazard all he has."
Collin explains that putting these formulas into Alexandrines gives them a stiffness and formality appropriate to their purpose.
3. Frequently one or two light syllables are added to the close of the verse:
Sit like his grandsire cut in alabaster.
or