subject to check or acceleration by the nature of the material he was working on. It is natural that in a fairy play like A Midsummer Night’s Dream Shakespeare should use more rime than we should expect him to use in a psychological play of the same period; just as it is natural for him to use much more prose in Coriolanus, which deals largely with the Plebeians’ view of life than in Antony and Cleopatra, where the tone is epic and aristocratic. There can, however, be no question about the validity of the general conclusions established by the metrical tests.
The net result of the changes which Shakespeare’s manner of writing went through was the evolution of a type of blank verse uniquely expressive and powerful. The greatest development was made during the period of the great tragedies, from about 1601 till 1608. In this time he came to restrict himself practically solely, except in songs, to prose and blank verse, and his blank verse became steadily more independent of conventional patterns and more fluid in its movement. At the same time Shakespeare’s diction grew bolder and more compressed, heavier with thought and more allusive. The contrast between his middle and his late style is aptly illustrated by two short passages, in Julius Cæsar and Coriolanus respectively, where the poet happens to describe the same scene, viz. a mob of vulgar Romans pressing to see the triumphant return of a successful general. This is in the style of 1599, workmanlike, very lucid, but still a little conventional:
Knew you not Pompey? Many a time and oft
Have you climb’d up to walls and battlements,
To towers and windows, yea, to chimney-tops,
