tions of a moral or esthetic
nature; for, though these are often powerful in their effect on the
individual reader, they are usually incapable of proof to another person
with different tastes and a different point of view. Of such tests,
those afforded by a study of the methods used in the treatment of plot
and in the development of character are perhaps the least subjective.
Somewhat more palpable are the changing characteristics of style. The
number and nature of classical allusions and Latin words and quotations;
the kind and degree of elaboration of figures of speech, puns, conceits,
and the like; diffuseness or concentration in the expression of thought;
artificiality or lifelikeness in the treatment of dialogue; the use of
prose or verse; the employment of oaths, checked by statute shortly
after the accession of James I: these are the main aspects of style
which can be used in determining, not exact dates, but the period of
Shakespeare's activity within which a given work falls. More capable of
mechanical calculation than the tests of either matter or style are
those derived from changes in versification, though here too there is
often a subjective element in the reckoning. The more important metrical
tests include the following: the frequency of rhyme, whether in the
heroic couplet or, as not uncommonly occurs in early plays, in
alternates and even such elaborate arrangements as the sonnet; doggerel
lines; alexandrines, or lines of twelve syllables; the presence of an
extra syllable before a pause within the line; short lines, especially
at the end of speeches; the substitution of other feet for the regular
iambic movement of blank verse; weak and light endings; and, most
valuable, the position of the pause in the line ("end-stopped" or "run
on"), and feminine endings or hypermetrical lines, such as

"These many summers in a sea of glor-y."

Many of these variable features were not consciously manipulated by the
author; and, even when a general drift in a certain direction is clearly
observable in his practice with regard to them, it is not to be assumed
that his progress was perfectly regular, without leaps forward and
occasional returns to an earlier usage. It is to be noted also that the
subject and atmosphere of a particular play might induce a metrical
treatment of a special kind, in which case the verse tests would yield
evidence not primarily chronological at all. Nevertheless, when all
allowances hav