Wife, children, servants, all
That could be found:

but I do count such a speech (they are very rare) as

My lord, I do not know:
But truly I do fear it:

for the same reason that I count

You know not
Whether it was his wisdom or his fear.

Of the speeches thus counted, those which end somewhere within the line
I find to be in _Othello_ about 54 per cent.; in _Hamlet_ about 57; in
_King Lear_ about 69; in _Macbeth_ about 75.[285] The order is the same
as Koenig's, but the figures differ a good deal. I presume in the last
three cases this comes from the difference in method; but I think
Koenig's figures for _Othello_ cannot be right, for I have tried several
methods and find that the result is in no case far from the result of my
own, and I am almost inclined to conjecture that Koenig's 41.4 is really
the percentage of speeches ending with the close of a line, which would
give 58.6 for the percentage of the broken-ended speeches.[286]

We shall find that other tests also would put _Othello_ before _Hamlet_,
though close to it. This may be due to 'accident'--_i.e._ a cause or
causes unknown to us; but I have sometimes wondered whether the last
revision of _Hamlet_ may not have succeeded the composition of
_Othello_. In this connection the following fact may be worth notice. It
is well known that the differences of the Second Quarto of _Hamlet_ from
the First are much greater in the last three Acts than in the first
two--so much so that the editors of the Cambridge Shakespeare suggested
that Q1 represents an old play, of which Shakespeare's rehandling had
not then proceeded much beyond the Second Act, while Q2 represents his
later completed rehandling. If that were so, the composition of the last
three Acts would be a good deal later than that of the first two (though
of course the first two would be revised at the time of the composition
of the last three). Now I find that the percentage of speeches ending
with a broken line is about 50 for the first two Acts, but about 62 for
the last three. It is lowest in the first Act, and in the first two
scenes of it is less than 32. The percentage for the last two Acts is
about 65.

II. The Enjambement or Overflow test is also known as the End-stopped
and Run-on line test. A line may be called 'end-stopped' when the sense,
as well as the metre, would naturally make one pause at its close;
'run