BLANK VERSE, verse without rhyme. This was the invariable form of the poetry of the ancients, but it is now peculiar to the Italian, English and German languages. The poetry of the Anglo-Saxons and the earliest English poetry was not rhymed, yet it is not generally called blank verse, as their versifica tion had a peculiarity of its own called allitera tion. When rhyme, however, was once intro duced into English verse, it was for a long time regarded as the exclusive form of versi fication, and the Earl of Surrey, who was be headed by order of Henry VIII, in 1547, is said to have been the first to use blank verse in England, namely, in his translation of the sec ond and fourth books of Virgil's The most common form of blank verse in English poetry is the decasyllabic, such as that of Mil ton's 'Paradise Lost' and the dramas of Shakespeare. From the 16th century onward the unrhymed decasyllabic (also called the iambic pentametre or unrhymed heroic) has been the regular measure of English dramatic and epic poetry. Dryden, indeed, after the
Restoration, introduced rhyme into his trage dies, in imitation of the French rhymed plays; but after keeping the stage for a number of years, they became intolerable to the English ear, and the introduction of rhyme into the drama has never since been attempted in Eng land. Shakespeare not uncommonly ends a scene with a few lines of rhyme, although the rest of the scene is in blank verse and in the subordinate play interwoven with the action of Hamlet blank verse is used throughout. The first use of the term blank verse is said to be in Hamlet ii, 2: "The lady shall say her mind freely, or the blank verse shall halt