(The figures for Macbeth and Timon in the last column must be borne in mind.  I observed nothing in the non-Shakespeare part of Timon that would come into the table, but I did not make a careful search.  I felt some doubt as to two of the four series in Othello and again in Hamlet, and also whether the ten-series in Coriolanus should not be put in column 7).

III. The light and weak ending test.

We have just seen that in some cases a doubt is felt whether there is an ‘overflow’ or not.  The fact is that the ‘overflow’ has many degrees of intensity.  If we take, for example, the passage last quoted, and if with Koenig we consider the line

The taints and blames I laid upon myself

to be run-on (as I do not), we shall at least consider the overflow to be much less distinct than those in the lines

                               but God above
     Deal between thee and me! for even now
     I put myself to thy direction, and
     Unspeak my own detraction, here abjure

And of these four lines the third runs on into its successor at much the greatest speed.

‘Above,’ ‘now,’ ‘abjure,’ are not light or weak endings:  ‘and’ is a weak ending.  Prof.  Ingram gave the name weak ending to certain words on which it is scarcely possible to dwell at all, and which, therefore, precipitate the line which they close into the following.  Light endings are certain words which have the same effect in a slighter degree.  For example, and, from, in, of, are weak endings; am, are, I, he, are light endings.

The test founded on this distinction is, within its limits, the most satisfactory of all, partly because the work of its author can be absolutely trusted.  The result of its application is briefly as follows.  Until quite a late date light and weak endings occur in Shakespeare’s works in such small numbers as hardly to be worth consideration.[289] But in the well-defined group of last plays the numbers both of light and of weak endings increase greatly, and, on the whole, the increase apparently is progressive (I say apparently, because the order in which the last plays are generally placed depends to some extent on the test itself).  I give Prof.  Ingram’s table of these plays, premising that in Pericles, Two Noble Kinsmen, and Henry VIII. he uses only those parts of the plays which are attributed by certain authorities to Shakespeare (New Shakspere Soc.  Trans., 1874).

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