There were, indeed, several features of classical poetry which invited imitation, and the introduction of which produced the chief differences between Modern English and Middle English versification. These features are:
First, the quantitative character of the ancient rhythms as opposed to the accentual character of English verse. Secondly, the strict separation of rising and falling rhythms. In Middle English we have only the rising rhythm, which, however, sometimes becomes a falling one if the first thesis is wanting. Finally, the absence of rhyme in the poetry of the ancients, whereas in late Middle English poetry—apart from some North-English and Scottish productions written in the conservative, rhymeless form of the alliterative line—rhyme is all but universal.
§ 161. The heroic couplet, the most popular and most important metre in later Middle English poetry, was, naturally, first of all influenced by the new classical movement.
It was the Earl of Surrey who, by dispensing with the rhyme, first transformed this metre into what is now known as Blank Verse. He adopted the unrhymed decasyllabic line as the most suitable vehicle for his translation of the second and fourth books of the Aeneid, written about 1540. In so doing, he enriched modern literature with a new form of verse which was destined to take a far more important place in English poetry than he can have foreseen for it. In its original function, as appropriate to the translation of ancient epic poetry, it has been employed by many late writers, e.g. by Cowper in his version of Homer; but this is only one, and the least considerable, of its many applications. Shortly after Surrey’s time blank verse was used for court drama by Sackville and Norton in their tragedy of Gorboduc (1561), and for popular drama by Marlowe in Tamburlaine the Great (1587).
From the latter part of the sixteenth century onwards it has continued to be the prevailing metre for dramatic poetry, except for a short time, when its supremacy was disputed by the heroic couplet used by Lord Orrery, Davenant, Dryden, and others. Meanwhile blank verse had also become the metre of original epic poetry through Milton’s use of it in his Paradise Lost; and in the eighteenth century it was applied to descriptive and reflective poetry by Thomson and Young.
It is uncertain whether Surrey invented it himself on the basis of his studies in classical rhymeless poetry, or whether he was influenced by the example of the Italian poet Trissino (1478–1550), who, in his epic Italia liberata dai Goti and in his drama Sofonisba, introduced into Italian poetry the rhymeless, eleven-syllabled verses known as versi sciolti (sc. della rima, i.e. freed from rhyme). There are at least no conclusive grounds for accepting the latter view, as there are some peculiarities in Surrey’s blank verse which are not met with in Trissino, e.g. the occurrence of incomplete lines, which may have been introduced after the model of the unfinished lines found occasionally amongst Vergil’s Latin hexameters.
Blank verse being in its origin only heroic verse without rhyme,[154] we may refer for its general rhythmical structure to what we have said on this metre. The rhythmical licences of this and the other iambic metres discussed in §§ [82–8] are common also to blank verse. But in addition to these, blank verse has several other deviations from the normal rhymed five-foot iambic verse, the emancipation from rhyme having had the effect of producing greater variability of metrical structure. It is for this reason it has been thought advisable to treat heroic verse and blank verse in separate chapters.
At first, it is true, the two metres are very similar in character, especially in Surrey; with the further and independent development of blank verse, however, they diverge more and more.
§ 162. In conformity with Surrey’s practice in his heroic verse, which, as we have seen, usually had masculine rhymes, his blank verse has also as a rule masculine endings, and is thus distinguished not only from Chaucer’s heroic verse, which frequently had feminine endings, but from the blank verse of later poets like Shakespeare and some of his contemporaries.