For a specimen of the blank verse of Gascoigne's Steel Glass (1576, the earliest didactic poem in English blank verse), see p. [18], above.
Paris, King Priam's son, thou art arraigned of partiality,
Of sentence partial and unjust, for that without indifferency,
Beyond desert or merit far, as thine accusers say,
From them, to Lady Venus here, thou gavest the prize away:
What is thine answer?
Paris's oration to the Council of the Gods:
Sacred and just, thou great and dreadful Jove,
And you thrice-reverend powers, whom love nor hate
May wrest awry; if this, to me a man,
This fortune fatal be, that I must plead
For safe excusal of my guiltless thought,
The honor more makes my mishap the less,
That I a man must plead before the gods,
Gracious forbearers of the world's amiss,
For her, whose beauty how it hath enticed,
This heavenly senate may with me aver.
(George Peele: The Arraignment of Paris, IV. i. 61-75. 1584.)
This specimen shows the new measure introduced into the drama in connection with the earlier rimed septenary. Peele's verse in general is characterized by sweetness and fluency, but there is still no hint of the possibilities of the unrimed decasyllabics.
Schröer, in the article cited from Anglia, enumerates the following additional specimens of blank verse before the appearance of Marlowe's Tamburlaine; Grimald's Death of Zoroas and Death of Cicero, in Tottel's Songs and Sonnets, 1557; Jocasta, by Gascoigne and Kinwelmarshe, 1566; Turberville's translation of Ovid's Heroical Epistles, 1567; Spenser's unrimed sonnets, in Van der Noodt's Theatre for Worldlings, 1569; Barnaby Rich's Don Simonides, 1584; parts of Lyly's Woman in the Moon, 1584; Greene's "Description of Silvestro's Lady," in Morando, 1587; The Misfortunes of Arthur, 1587;—the last two appearing probably in the same year with Tamburlaine, whether earlier or later is uncertain. Most of these specimens are short, and all are comparatively unimportant.
Now clear the triple region of the air,
And let the Majesty of Heaven behold
Their scourge and terror tread on emperors.
Smile stars, that reigned at my nativity,
And dim the brightness of your neighbor lamps!
Disdain to borrow light of Cynthia!
For I, the chiefest lamp of all the earth,
First rising in the East with mild aspect,
But fixed now in the Meridian line,
Will send up fire to your turning spheres,
And cause the sun to borrow light of you.
My sword struck fire from his coat of steel
Even in Bithynia, when I took this Turk;
As when a fiery exhalation,
Wrapt in the bowels of a freezing cloud
Fighting for passage, makes the welkin crack,
And casts a flash of lightning to the earth.
(Marlowe: Tamburlaine, Part I, IV. ii. 30-46. pub. 1590.)
Ah, Faustus,
Now hast thou but one bare hour to live,
And then thou must be damned perpetually!
Stand still, you ever-moving spheres of Heaven,
That time may cease, and midnight never come;
Fair Nature's eye, rise, rise again, and make
Perpetual day; or let this hour be but
A year, a month, a week, a natural day,
That Faustus may repent and save his soul!
O lente, lente, currite noctis equi!
The stars move still, time runs, the clock will strike,
The Devil will come, and Faustus must be damned.
O, I'll leap up to my God! Who pulls me down?
See, see where Christ's blood streams in the firmament!
One drop would save my soul—half a drop: ah, my Christ!
Ah, rend not my heart for naming of my Christ![27]
Yet will I call on him: O spare me, Lucifer!