BLANKENBURG. (1) A town and health resort of Germany, in the duchy of Brunswick, at the N. foot of the Harz Mountains, 12 m. by rail S.W. from Halberstadt. Pop. (1901) 10,173. It has been in large part rebuilt since a fire in 1836, and possesses a castle, with various collections, a museum of antiquities, an old town hall and churches. There are pine-needle baths and a hospital for nervous diseases. Gardening is a speciality. In the vicinity is a cliff or ridge of rock called Teufelsmauer (Devil’s wall), from which fine views are obtained across the plain and into the deep gorges of the Harz Mountains.
(2) Another Blankenburg, also a health-resort, is situated in Schwarzburg-Rudolstadt, Thuringia, at the confluence of the rivers Rinne and Schwarza, and at the entrance of the Schwarzatal. Its environs are charming, and to the north of it, on an eminence, rise the fine ruins of the castle of Greifenstein, built by the German king Henry I., and from 1275 to 1583 the seat of a cadet branch of the counts of Schwarzburg.
BLANKETEERS, the nickname given to some 5000 operatives who on the 10th of March 1817 met in St Peter’s Field, near Manchester, to march to London, each carrying blankets or rugs. Their object was to see the prince regent and lay their grievances before him. The Habeas Corpus Act was suspended, and the leaders were seized and imprisoned. The bulk of the demonstration yielded at once. The few stragglers who persisted in the march were intercepted by troops, and treated with considerable severity. Eventually the spokesmen had an interview with the ministers, and some reforms were the result.
BLANK VERSE, the unrhymed measure of iambic decasyllable in five beats which is usually adopted in English epic and dramatic poetry. The epithet is due to the absence of the rhyme which the ear expects at the end of successive lines. The decasyllabic line occurs for the first time in a Provençal poem of the 10th century, but in the earliest instances preserved it is already constructed with such regularity as to suggest that it was no new invention. It was certainly being used almost simultaneously in the north of France. Chaucer employed it in his Compleynte to Pitie about 1370. In all the literatures of western Europe it became generally used, but always with rhyme. In the beginning of the 16th century, however, certain Italian poets made the experiment of writing decasyllabics without rhyme. The tragedy of Sophonisba (1515) of G.G. Trissino (1478-1550) was the earliest work completed in this form; it was followed in 1525 by the didactic poem Le Api (The Bees), of Giovanni Rucellai (1475-1525), who announced his intention of writing ”Con verso Etrusco dalle rime sciolto,” in consequence of which expression this kind of metre was called versi sciolti or blank verse. In a very short time this form was largely adopted in Italian dramatic poetry, and the comedies of Ariosto, the Aminta of Tasso and the Pastor Fido of Guarini are composed in it. The iambic blank verse of Italy was, however, mainly hendecasyllabic, not decasyllabic, and under French influences the habit of rhyme soon returned.
Before the close of Trissino’s life, however, his invention had been introduced into another literature, where it was destined to enjoy a longer and more glorious existence. Towards the close of the reign of Henry VIII., Henry Howard, earl of Surrey, translated two books of the Aeneid into English rhymeless verse, “drawing” them “into a strange metre.” Surrey’s blank verse is stiff and timid, permitting itself no divergence from the exact iambic movement:—
| “Who can express the slaughter of that night, Or tell the number of the corpses slain, Or can in tears bewail them worthily? The ancient famous city falleth down, That many years did hold such seignory.” |
Surrey soon found an imitator in Nicholas Grimoald, and in 1562 blank verse was first applied to English dramatic poetry in the Gorboduc of Sackville and Norton. In 1576, in the Steel Glass of Gascoigne, it was first used for satire, and by the year 1585 it had come into almost universal use for theatrical purposes. In Lyly’s The Woman in the Moon and Peek’s Arraignment of Paris (both of 1584) we find blank verse struggling with rhymed verse and successfully holding its own. The earliest play written entirely in blank verse is supposed to be The Misfortunes of Arthur (1587) of Thomas Hughes. Marlowe now immediately followed, with the magnificent movement of his Tamburlaine (1589), which was mocked by satirical critics as “the swelling bombast of bragging blank verse” (Nash) and “the spacious volubility of a drumming decasyllable” (Greene), but which introduced a great new music into English poetry, in such “mighty lines” as
| “Still climbing after knowledge infinite, And always moving as the restless spheres,” |