CHAPTER XXI

THE METRICAL TESTS — II
Wetk'Cndiiig, Double-ending, and Rhythmic Accent Tests ; Complete List of Limiting Forms
§N the last lecture we had some account of two of the five proposed Metrical Tests, namely, the Rime Test and the Run-on and End-stopped Line Test. Let us now study the three remaining ones : the Weak-ending, the Double- ending, and the Rhythmic Accent Tests. Aweak-cndinglineisoncwhich ends in some merely connective word, such as a conjunction or a preposition or an auxiliary verb, instead of ending, as is most natural and as a large majority of lines do end, in a noun or a verb or some such important vocable. Words like and, for, that, if, upon, be, could, or, and the like, are specimens of weak endings. For example, take these lines from The Tempest :
Some food wc had, and some fresh water, that A noble Neapolitan, Gonzalo, ... did give us.
where that is a weak endi
ng;
232 SHAKSPERE AND HIS FORERUNNERS
I find my zenith doth depend upon A most auspicious star,
where upon is a weak ending ;
A freckled whelp hag-born — not honour'd with A human shape,
where with is a weak ending ;
Weigh'd between loathness and obedience, at Which end o' the beam she'd bow,
where at is a weak ending.
These examples will be sufficient to make you recog- nise the weak ending without difficulty : it is always some merely relational word which would leave the thought incomplete without the word in the next line. Weak end- ings have been divided into two classes, one called the Light Ending and one the Weak Ending proper, a Light Ending being a word such as am^ be^ couldy an auxiliary verb in general, or a pronoun, /, they^ etc. ; while a Weak End- ing proper is any one of the still less important words, such as andy ify or, but, and the like. For the purpose of the present account, however, we can conveniently and accu- rately include both these classes under the general term of Weak Endings.
Now the weak-ending line as a metrical test differs in an interesting particular from the others. You observe that the weak-ending line is indeed only a species of run- on line ; in the lines last quoted, for example,
Weigh'd between loathness and obedience, at Which end o' the beam she'd bow,
one sees immediately that the preposition at inevitably runs the mind and the voice on to find its regimen end in
THE METRICAL TESTS 233
the next line. Since, then, the weak-ending line is only one sort of run-on line, there would be no necessity for erecting it into a special class if it were not for the pecu- liarity that while Shakspere's use of the run-on line increased (as we saw) gradually on the whole from his first plays to his last ones, his use of the weak-ending line may be said to begin abruptly, far on in his career, at Mac- betlu To reduce this statement to numbers, according to the table of Professor Ingram, with whose name we may specially associate the weak-ending test, in the Comedy of ErrorSy which is an early play, there is not a single weak- ending line ; in ^he ^wo Gentlemen of Verona not one ; in A Midsummer Night^s Dream there is one ; in As Tou Like It there are two ; in T'welfth Night there are four : but when we get to Macbeth we find suddenly twenty-three, and then in Antony and Cleopatra the number jumps up to ninety-nine, while in ^he Tempest^ with only about half the whole number of verse-lines in Antony and Cleopatray we have sixty-seven weak endings, equivalent to about one hundred and thirty as compared with the other play.
This numerical exhibit — without going into more details of it, which any of you who may desire can find in Professor Ingram's Table of Weak Endings, published in