But how can the insertion of these passages possibly be explained on the hypothesis that Shakespeare meant the speech to be ridiculous?

3.  ‘Still,’ it may be answered, ’Shakespeare must have been conscious of the bombast in some of these passages.  How could he help seeing it?  And, if he saw it, he cannot have meant seriously to praise the speech.’  But why must he have seen it?  Did Marlowe know when he wrote bombastically?  Or Marston?  Or Heywood?  Does not Shakespeare elsewhere write bombast?  The truth is that the two defects of style in the speech are the very defects we do find in his writings.  When he wished to make his style exceptionally high and passionate he always ran some risk of bombast.  And he was even more prone to the fault which in this speech seems to me the more marked, a use of metaphors which sound to our ears ‘conceited’ or grotesque.  To me at any rate the metaphors in ’now is he total gules’ and ‘mincing with his sword her husband’s limbs’ are more disturbing than any of the bombast.  But, as regards this second defect, there are many places in Shakespeare worse than the speech of Aeneas; and, as regards the first, though in his undoubtedly genuine works there is no passage so faulty, there is also no passage of quite the same species (for his narrative poems do not aim at epic grandeur), and there are many passages where bombast of the same kind, though not of the same degree, occurs.

Let the reader ask himself, for instance, how the following lines would strike him if he came on them for the first time out of their context: 

                     Whip me, ye devils,
     From the possession of this heavenly sight! 
     Blow me about in winds!  Roast me in sulphur! 
     Wash me in steep-down gulfs of liquid fire!

Are Pyrrhus’s ‘total gules’ any worse than Duncan’s ’silver skin laced with his golden blood,’ or so bad as the chamberlains’ daggers ’unmannerly breech’d with gore’?[262] If ‘to bathe in reeking wounds,’ and ‘spongy officers,’ and even ’alarum’d by his sentinel the wolf, Whose howl’s his watch,’ and other such phrases in Macbeth, had occurred in the speech of Aeneas, we should certainly have been told that they were meant for burlesque.  I open Troilus and Cressida (because, like the speech of Aeneas, it has to do with the story of Troy), and I read, in a perfectly serious context (IV. v. 6 f.): 

                Thou, trumpet, there’s thy purse. 
     Now crack thy lungs, and split thy brazen pipe: 
     Blow, villain, till thy sphered bias cheek
     Outswell the colic of puff’d Aquilon: 
     Come, stretch thy chest, and let thy eyes spout blood;
     Thou blow’st for Hector.

‘Splendid!’ one cries.  Yes, but if you are told it is also bombastic, can you deny it?  I read again (V. v. 7): 

               bastard Margarelon

Hath Doreus prisoner,
And stands colossus-wise, waving his beam,
Upon the pashed corses of the kings.