Antonio appears, Shylock's emotions are roused to
their highest pitch, and his speech turns naturally to verse--even
though he is alone and his speech an aside. A storm of passions sets
his mind and speech in rhythmic motion. And from that point on, the
conversations of Shylock, Bassanio, and Antonio are in verse. In short,
rhythmic speech when there is a transition to strong, more dramatic
feeling."

The use of prose or verse depends, then, on the kind and depth of
feeling rather than on the characters. "In Act II Launcelot Gobbo and
his father are the only ones who employ prose. All the others speak in
verse--even the servant who tells of Bassanio's arrival. Not only that,
but he speaks in splendid verse even though he is merely announcing a
messenger:"

"Yet have I not seen
So likely an ambassador of love," etc.

Again, in _Lear_, the servant who protests against Cornwall's cruelty to
Gloster, nameless though he is, speaks in noble and stately lines:

Hold your hand, my lord;
I've served you ever since I was a child;
But better service have I never done you
Than now to bid you hold.

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