BLANK VERSE, the unrhymed measure of iambic deca syllable in five beats which is usually adopted in English epic and dramatic poetry. The epithet is due to the absence of the rhyme the ear expects at the end of successive lines. In the beginning of the i 6th century, however, certain Italian poets made the experiment of writing decasyllables without rhyme. The tragedy of So f onisba (1515) by Trissino (1478-155o) was the earliest work completed in this form; it was followed in 1525 by the didactic poem Le Api (The Bees), of Giovanni Rucellai 2 5) , who announced his intention of writing "Con verso Etrusco dalle rime sciolto," in consequence of which expression this kind of metre was called versi sciolti or blank verse. In a very short time this form was largely adopted in Italian dramatic poetry, and the comedies of Ariosto, the Aminta of Tasso and the Pastor Fido of Guarini are composed in it. The iambic blank verse of Italy was mainly hendecasyllabic, not decasyllabic, and under French influences the habit of rhyme soon returned.
Before the close of Trissino's life, however, his invention had been introduced into another literature, where it was destined to enjoy a longer and more glorious existence. Towards the close of the reign of Henry VIII., Henry Howard, earl of Surrey, translated two books of the Aeneid into English rhymeless verse, "drawing" them "into a strange metre." Surrey soon found an imitator in Nicholas Grimoald, and in 1562 blank verse was first applied to English dramatic poetry in the Gorboduc of Sackville and Norton. By the year 1585 it had come into almost universal use for theatrical purposes. In Lyly's The Woman in the Moon and Peele's Arraignment of Paris (both of 1584) we find blank verse struggling with rhymed verse and successfully holding its own. The earliest play written entirely in blank verse is sup posed to be The Misfortunes of Arthur (1587) of Thomas Hughes. Marlowe now immediately followed, with the magnifi cent movement of his Tamburlaine (1589), which was mocked by satirical critics as "the swelling bombast of bragging blank verse" (Nash) and "the spacious volubility of a drumming decasyllable" (Greene), but which introduced a great new music into English poetry. Except, however, when he is stirred by a particularly vivid emotion, the blank verse of Marlowe continues to be monotonous and uniform.
Shakespeare, after having returned to rhyme in his earliest dramas, particularly in The Two Gentlemen of Verona, adopted blank verse conclusively about the time that the career of Mar lowe was closing, and he carried it to the greatest perfection in variety, suppleness and fullness. He released it from the excessive bondage that it had hitherto endured; as Robert Bridges has said, "Shakespeare, whose early verse may be described as syllab ic, gradually came to write a verse dependent on stress." In com parison with that of his predecessors and successors, the blank verse of Shakespeare is essentially regular, and his prosody marks the admirable mean between the stiffness of his dramatic fore runners and the laxity of those who followed him. The ease and fluidity of his prosody were abused by his successors, particularly by Beaumont and Fletcher, who employed the soft feminine end ing to excess; in Massinger dramatic blank verse came too near to prose, and in Heywood and Shirley it was relaxed to the point of losing all nervous vigour.
The later dramatists gradually abandoned that rigorous differ ence which should always be preserved between the cadence of verse and prose, and the example of Ford, who endeavoured to re vive the old severity of blank verse, was not followed. But just as the form was sinking into dramatic desuetude, it took new life in the direction of epic, and found its noblest proficient in the person of John Milton. The most intricate and therefore the most interesting blank verse which has been written is that of Milton in the great poems of his later life. He reduced the eli sions, which had been frequent in the Elizabethan poets, to law; he admitted an extraordinary variety in the number of stresses; he deliberately inverted the rhythm in order to produce particular effects ; and he multiplied at will the caesurae or breaks in a line. Paradise Lost is full of instances of Milton's exquisite art in ring ing changes upon the metrical type of ten syllables, five stresses and a rising rhythm, so as to make the whole texture of the verse respond to his poetical thought. Writing many years later in Paradise Regained and in Samson Agonistes, Milton retained his system of blank verse in its general characteristics, but he treated it with increased dryness and with a certain harshness of effect.
Af ter the Restoration, and after a brief period of experiment with rhymed plays, the dramatists returned to the use of blank verse, and in the hands of Otway, Lee and Dryden, it recovered much of its magnificence. In the 18th century, Thomson and others made use of a very regular and somewhat monotonous form of blank verse for descriptive and didactic poems, of which the Night Thoughts of Young is, from a metrical point of view, the most interesting. With these poets the form is little open to licence, while inversions and breaks are avoided as much as pos sible. Since the 18th century, blank verse has been subjected to constant revision in the hands of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, Tennyson, the Brownings, Swinburne, E. A. Robinson, and Robert Frost, but no radical changes, of a nature unknown to Shakespeare and Milton, have been introduced into it.
See Ed. Guest, A History of English Rhythms (1882) ; J. Mothere, Les Theories du vers heroique anglais (1886) ; J. Schipper, Englische Metrik (1881-88) ; Robert Bridges, Milton's Prosody (1894) ; J. A. Symonds, Blank Verse (1895) ; Walter Thomas, Le Dscasyllabe romain et sa fortune en Europe (1904) ; G. Saintsbury, A History of English Prosody (1906—io).