It is easy to rewrite this without many such endings.
'As far as I can see, all the good our English
Have got by the late voyage is but slight,
A fit or two o' the face; but they are shrewd;
For when they hold 'em, you would swear at once
Their very noses had been counsellors
To Pepin or Clotharius, they so keep state.'
It is not the question whether one type of verse is better than the other,—in the passage selected, neither is particularly good,—the point is that whereas Shakespeare in his known works uses this extra syllable comparatively rarely, such frequent use of the extra syllable is the characteristic of the style of Shakespeare's great contemporary dramatist, John Fletcher. The reader can amuse himself by testing the lines. Spedding drew up the following table:
| Act | Scene | Lines | Red. Syll. | Proportion | Author | ||||
| 1 | 1 | 225 | 63 | 1 to 3.5 | Shakespeare | ||||
| 2 | 215 | 74 | 1 to 2.9 | Shakespeare | |||||
| 3 | & 4 | 172 | 100 | 1 to 1.7 | Fletcher | ||||
| 2 | 1 | 164 | 97 | 1 to 1.6 | Fletcher | ||||
| 2 | 129 | 77 | 1 to 1.6 | Fletcher | |||||
| 3 | 107 | 41 | 1 to 2.6 | Shakespeare | |||||
| 4 | 230 | 72 | 1 to 3.1 | Shakespeare | |||||
| 3 | 1 | 166 | 119 | 1 to 1.3 | Fletcher | ||||
| 2 | (to King's exit) | 193 | 62 | 1 to 3 | Shakespeare | ||||
| 3 | 257 | 152 | 1 to 1.6 | Fletcher | |||||
| 4 | 1 | 116 | 57 | 1 to 2 | Fletcher | ||||
| 2 | 80 | 51 | 1 to 1.5 | Fletcher | |||||
| 3 | 93 | 51 | 1 to 1.8 | Fletcher | |||||
| 5 | 1 | 176 | 68 | 1 to 2.5 | Shakespeare (altered) | ||||
| 2 | 217 | 115 | 1 to 1.8 | Fletcher | |||||
| 3 | almost all prose | Fletcher | |||||||
| 4 | 73 | 44 | 1 to 1.6 | Fletcher | |||||
To account for the conditions as shown in the table above there are only three possible explanations. (1) Shakespeare wrote the whole play but for some un-
