(Marlowe: Doctor Faustus, sc. xvi. ll. 65-81. Printed 1604; written before 1593.)
Marlowe is universally and rightly regarded as the first English poet who used blank verse with the hand of a master, and showed its possibilities. With him it became practically a new measure. Mr. Symonds says: "He found the ten-syllabled heroic line monotonous, monosyllabic, and divided into five feet of tolerably regular alternate short and long. He left it various in form and structure, sometimes redundant by a syllable, sometimes deficient, enriched with unexpected emphases and changes in the beat. He found no sequence or attempt at periods; one line succeeded another with insipid regularity, and all were made after the same model. He grouped his verse according to the sense, obeying an internal law of melody, and allowing the thought contained in his words to dominate their form.... Used in this fashion, blank verse became a Proteus. It resembled music, which requires regular time and rhythm; but, by the employment of phrase, induces a higher kind of melody to rise above the common and despotic beat of time.... It is true that, like all great poets, he left his own peculiar imprint on it, and that his metre is marked by an almost extravagant exuberance, impetuosity, and height of coloring." (Blank Verse, pp. 22-27.) In the earlier verse of Tamburlaine, while showing these new qualities of a metrical master, Marlowe yet kept pretty closely to the individual, end-stopped line; in his later verse, as illustrated in the fragmentary text of Faustus, he seems to have attained much more freedom, resembling that of the later plays of Shakspere.[28]
Is it mine eye, or Valentinus' praise,
Her true perfection, or my false transgression,
That makes me, reasonless, to reason thus?
She's fair, and so is Julia that I love,—
That I did love, for now my love is thawed,
Which, like a waxen image 'gainst a fire,
Bears no impression of the thing it was.
Methinks my zeal to Valentine is cold,
And that I love him not, as I was wont:
O! but I love his lady too too much;
And that's the reason I love him so little.
How shall I dote on her with more advice,
That thus without advice begin to love her?...
If I can check my erring love, I will;
If not, to compass her I'll use my skill.
(Shakspere: Two Gentlemen of Verona, II. iv. 196-208; 213, 214. ab. 1590.)
Ay, but to die, and go we know not where;
To lie in cold obstruction and to rot;
This sensible warm motion to become
A kneaded clod; and the delighted spirit
To bathe in fiery floods, or to reside
In thrilling regions of thick-ribbed ice;
To be imprisoned in the viewless winds,
And blown with restless violence about
The pendant world; or to be worse than worst
Of those that lawless and incertain thoughts
Imagine howling,—'tis too horrible!
The weariest and most loathed worldly life,
That age, ache, penury, and imprisonment
Can lay on nature, is a paradise
To what we fear of death.
(Shakspere: Measure for Measure, III. i. 118-132. ab. 1603.)
This Mr. Symonds cites as "a single instance of the elasticity, self-restraint, and freshness of the Shaksperian blank verse; of its freedom from Marlowe's turgidity, or Fletcher's languor, or Milton's involution; of its ringing sound and lucid vigor.... It illustrates the freedom from adventitious ornament and the organic continuity of Shakspere's versification, while it also exhibits his power of varying his cadences and suiting them to the dramatic utterance of his characters." (Blank Verse, p. 31.)
Ye elves of hills, brooks, standing lakes, and groves;
And ye that on the sands with printless foot
Do chase the ebbing Neptune, and do fly him
When he comes back; you demi-puppets, that
By moonshine do the green-sour ringlets make,
Whereof the ewe not bites; and you, whose pastime
Is to make midnight mushrooms; that rejoice
To hear the solemn curfew; by whose aid
(Weak masters though ye be) I have bedimm'd
The noontide sun, called forth the mutinous winds,
And 'twixt the green sea and the azur'd vault
Set roaring war: to the dread rattling thunder
Have I given fire, and rifted Jove's stout oak
With his own bolt: the strong-bas'd promontory
Have I made shake; and by the spurs pluck'd up
The pine and cedar: graves, at my command,
Have wak'd their sleepers, op'd, and let them forth
By my so potent art.
(Shakspere: The Tempest, V. i. 33-50. ab. 1610.)