To doubt the genuineness of the passage, then, on the ground that it is not humorous enough for Shakespeare, seems to me to show this want.  It is to judge the passage as though it were a separate composition, instead of conceiving it in the fulness of its relations to its surroundings in a stage-play.  Taken by itself, I admit, 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.