B.—BLANK VERSE
Unrimed five-stress verse early became the accepted form for English dramatic poetry, and in the modern English period has become the favorite form for long continuous poems, narrative and reflective as well. In general, as will appear from the specimens, it is marked not only by the absence of rime but by a prevalent freedom of structure rarely found in the couplet.
The impetus toward the writing of blank verse seems to have been given by the influence of classical humanism, the representatives of which grew sceptical as to the use of rime, on the ground that it was not found in classical poetry. In Italy Giovanni Trissino wrote his Sophonisbe and Italia Liberata (1515-1548) in rimeless verses, and was looked upon as the inventor of versi sciolti, i.e. verses "freed" from rime. (See Schipper, vol. ii. p. 4.) See also below, in the notes on Surrey, and later under Imitations of Classical Verse, for notes on the same movement.
On the nature of English blank verse, see J. A. Symonds's Blank Verse (1895), a reprint of essays in the Appendix to his Sketches and Studies in Southern Europe. In his Chapters on English Metre (chap. iv.), Mr. J. B. Mayor criticises what he calls Mr. Symonds's "æsthetic intuitivism."
On the early history of English blank verse, see the article by Schröer, Anfänge des Blankverses in England, Anglia, vol. iv. p. 1, and Mr. G. C. Macaulay's Francis Beaumont, pp. 39-49.
Of Mr. Symonds's remarks on the general nature of blank verse the following are especially interesting: "English blank verse is perhaps more various and plastic than any other national metre. It is capable of being used for the most commonplace and the most sublime utterances.... Originally instituted for the drama, it received in Milton's hands an epical treatment, and has by authors of our own day been used for idyllic and even for lyrical compositions. Plato mentions a Greek musical instrument called panharmonion, which was adapted to express the different modes and systems of melodious utterance. This name might be applied to our blank verse; there is no harmony of sound, no dignity of movement, no swiftness, no subtlety of languid sweetness, no brevity, no force of emphasis, beyond its scope." (Blank Verse, pp. 16, 17.)
"It seems adapted specially for thought in evolution; it requires progression and sustained effort. As a consequence of this, its melody is determined by the sense which it contains, and depends more upon proportion and harmony of sounds than upon recurrences and regularities of structure.... Another point about blank verse is that it admits of no mediocrity; it must be either clay or gold.... Hence, we find that blank verse has been the metre of genius, that it is only used successfully by indubitable poets, and that it is no favorite in a mean, contracted, and unimaginative age. The freedom of the renaissance created it in England. The freedom of our century has reproduced it. Blank verse is a type and symbol of our national literary spirit—uncontrolled by precedent or rule, inclined to extravagance, yet reaching perfection at intervals by an inner force and vivida vis of native inspiration." (Ibid. pp. 70-72.)
The earliest use of the term "blank verse," noted in the New English Dictionary, is in Nash's Preface to Greene's Menaphon, 1589: "the swelling bumbast of bragging blanke verse." Some ten years later Shakspere used it in Much Ado about Nothing, V. ii., where Benedick speaks of those heroes "whose names yet run smoothly in the even road of blank verse," but will not rime easily. In Chapman's All Fools (1605) the young gallant, in describing his manifold accomplishments, says he could write
"Sonnets in Dozens, or your Quatorzains
In any rhyme, Masculine, Feminine,
Or Sdruciolla, or couplets, or Blank Verse."
Sdruciolla is the Italian term for triple-rimed endings.