it would bear no
indubitable mark of Shakespeare's authorship, not even in the phrase
'the primrose way to the everlasting bonfire,' which Coleridge thought
Shakespeare might have added to an interpolation of 'the players.' And
if there were reason (as in my judgment there is not) to suppose that
Shakespeare thus permitted an interpolation, or that he collaborated
with another author, I could believe that he left 'the players' or his
collaborator to write the words of the passage. But that anyone except
the author of the scene of Duncan's murder _conceived_ the passage, is
incredible.[247]

* * * * *

The speeches of the Porter, a low comic character, are in prose. So is
the letter of Macbeth to his wife. In both these cases Shakespeare
follows his general rule or custom. The only other prose-speeches occur
in the sleep-walking scene, and here the use of prose may seem strange.
For in great tragic scenes we expect the more poetic medium of
expression, and this is one of the most famous of such scenes. Besides,
unless I mistake, Lady Macbeth is the only one of Shakespeare's great
tragic characters who on a last appearance is denied the dignity of
verse.

Yet in this scene also he adheres to his custom. Somnambulism is an
abnormal condition, and it is his general rule to assign prose to
persons whose state of mind is abnormal. Thus, to illustrate from these
four plays, Hamlet when playing the madman speaks prose, but in
soliloquy, in talking with Horatio, and in pleading with his mother, he
speaks verse.[248] Ophelia in her madness either sings snatches of songs
or speaks prose. Almost all Lear's speeches, after he has become
definitely insane, are in prose: where he wakes from sleep recovered,
the verse returns. The prose enters with that speech which closes with
his trying to tear off his clothes; but he speaks in verse--some of it
very irregular--in the Timon-like speeches where his intellect suddenly
in his madness seems to regain the force of his best days (IV. vi.).
Othello, in IV. i., speaks in verse till the moment when Iago tells him
that Cassio has confessed. There follow ten lines of prose--exclamations
and mutterings of bewildered horror--and he falls to the ground
unconscious.

The idea underlying this custom of Shakespeare's evidently is that the
regular rhythm of verse would be inappropriate where the mind is
supposed to have lost its balance and to be at the mercy of ch