It was stated in Ch. I that the full measure of our blank verse is represented by lines which complete the last foot, as for instance,

and that our poets usually employ the ‘checked’ form, in which the last syllable is omitted. One result of this is that the end of the line at any rate gets an iambic rhythm, a fact that probably caused the adoption of an iambic base for our prosody, according to which the last syllable of the line just quoted is called “hypermetrical”:

Obviously the end of the checked line is stronger than that of the full measure, and accordingly the latter is commonly described as having a feminine or double ending. Shakespeare, like his predecessors, used the full line sparingly at first, but in proportion as he abandoned the single-line structure of his early work, carrying on the sense from verse to verse without a break, the number of lines having the full measure naturally increased. In such cases the last foot of the line is not in fact an end; for the ear it begins or occurs in the middle of a new measure which is independent of the division into verses, so that the objection felt to the multiplying of such line-endings disappears.