Blank verse is a type of unrhymed poetry with a regular pattern of rhythm, or meter. It is written in iambic pentameter, meaning that each line is made of five pairs of unstressed/stressed syllables, for a total of 10 syllables. Blank verse is a highly regarded dramatic and narrative verse form in English, and it is the standard form for dramatic verse in Italian and German.
Blank verse was adapted from unrhymed Greek and Latin heroic verse. It was introduced in 16th-century Italy along with other classical meters. The Italian humanist Francesco Maria Molza attempted to write unrhymed verse in 1514 in his translation of Virgil’s Aeneid. About the same time, Giovanni Rucellai experimented with the poem Le api (1539). He was the first to use the term versi sciolti, which became translated into English as “blank verse.” It soon became the standard meter of Italian Renaissance drama, and poets such as Ludovico Ariosto and Torquato Tasso used it in their works.
Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, introduced the meter, along with the sonnet and other Italian verse forms, to England in the early 16th century. Thomas Sackville, 1st earl of Dorset, and Thomas Norton used blank verse for the first English tragic drama, Gorboduc (first performed 1561). Shortly thereafter Christopher Marlowe developed the form’s musical qualities and emotional power in his plays Tamburlaine the Great, Doctor Faustus, and Edward II. This blank-verse passage is from Tamburlaine (performed 1587):
Nature, that fram’d us of four elements
Warring within our breasts for regiment,
Doth teach us all to have aspiring minds:
Our souls, whose faculties can comprehend
The wondrous architecture of the world,
And measure every wandering planet’s course,
Still climbing after knowledge infinite,
And always moving as the restless spheres,
Wills us to wear ourselves and never rest,
Until we reach the ripest fruit of all,
That perfect bliss and sole felicity,
The sweet fruition of an earthly crown.
Likewise, William Shakespeare used blank verse to create some of the greatest poetry in English drama. In his early plays, he combined it with prose and a 10-syllable rhymed couplet; he later employed a blank verse dependent on stress rather than syllable length. Here is an example of blank verse from Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice (written about 1596–97):
How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank!
Here will we sit and let the sounds of music
Creep in our ears. Soft stillness and the night
Become the touches of sweet harmony.
Sit, Jessica. Look how the floor of heaven
Is thick inlaid with patines of bright gold.
There’s not the smallest orb which thou behold’st
But in his motion like an angel sings,
Still quiring to the young-ey’d cherubims;
Such harmony is in immortal souls;
But whilst this muddy vesture of decay
Doth grossly close it in, we cannot hear it.
The next great blank-verse practitioner was John Milton, who wrote the epic poem Paradise Lost (1667). In the 18th century, James Thomson used blank verse in his long descriptive poem The Seasons, and Edward Young used it in The Complaint; or, Night Thoughts, a long poem on death. Later authors to use blank verse include William Wordsworth in his autobiography of the poetic spirit, The Prelude (completed 1805–06; published 1850). Percy Bysshe Shelley used blank verse in his drama The Cenci (1819), and John Keats employed it in his epic poem Hyperion (1820). The extreme flexibility of blank verse can be seen in its range from the high tragedy of Shakespeare to the low-key conversational tone of Robert Frost in A Masque of Reason (1945).
Blank verse was established in German drama by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s Nathan der Weise (1779). Examples of its use are found in the writings of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich Schiller, and Gerhart Hauptmann. It was also used extensively in Swedish, Russian, and Polish dramatic verse.