The name Christopher Marlowe is inextricably linked with a particular metrical manifestation, blank verse. Marlowe neither rediscovered it, nor introduced it into English poetry, and certainly did not invent it. What he did, however, was to perfect and establish this metre.
The blank verse is a rhymeless iambic pentameter. Verse is the part of a bound speech that is structured by a certain metrical rhythm. The beginning of Marlowe’s most famous soliloquy is used as an example.
The number of words in each line is different, but the number of syllables is always the same. The rhythm can be determined by the stress on the syllables. When unstressed and stressed syllables alternate regularly, as in the present case, one speaks of an iamb. It consists of an offbeat (ᴗ) and a beat (–). Now, in iambic verse, each offbeat is followed by a beat and each beat by an offbeat. The iambic scheme of the monologue looks like this. ᴗ – ᴗ – ᴗ – ᴗ – ᴗ –
There are five offbeats and five beats per line. The verse thus consists of five verse feet, or as the ancient Greeks said "pentamer". However, the actual pentameter is a six-beat verse with a break (caesura) after the third beat, which consists of two 2 ½ dactyls (- ᴗ ᴗ). The scheme – ᴗ ᴗ – ᴗ ᴗ – // – ᴗ ᴗ – ᴗ ᴗ differs significantly from that of blank verse, which is why it is important to always speak of iambic pentameter. Each line of the monologue ends with a stressed syllable. This is called a male cadence. The blank verse can also have a feminine cadence, but then it has an odd number of syllables.
Blank verse first appeared in ancient Greek and Roman poetry. They didn’t know any rhymes. In the Middle Ages, these were of great importance and blank verse was hardly used. Where it appeared, it did not happen in a conscious imitation of ancient poetry. The poets of the early modern period could refer to numerous medieval examples. Writers who devoted themselves to other text genres were unable to do so. They turned their attention to classical Antiquity.1
Francesco Maria Molza took up the eleven-syllable with unstressed verse ending again in 1514 for his translation of the Aeneid, which brought the metre to the attention of the Italian humanists. Annibal Caro’s translation of the same epic (posthumous 1581) definitively established blank verse. Soon after its successful reintroduction, it came into contact with the theatre. Gian Giorgio Trissino used it in 1515 for his tragedy Sofonisba.2 It owes its name to Giovanni Rucellai, who first spoke of "verso sciolto" (unforced verse). Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, who introduced not only the sonnet into English literature but also a number of other achievements of Italian Renaissance literature, brought the "verso sciolto" to England. Surrey translated the second and fourth books of the Aeneid into English, relying on the Italian translations by Hippolito de' Medici and Bartolomeo Piccolomini, who had also used blank verse. It is interesting to note that verse did not take hold in English epics for the time being, but went to the theatre. It was there that Thomas Sackville, Lord Buckhurst and Thomas Norton first used it for Gorboduc in 1561. Tamburlaine 1 was the first play in blank verse to reach a large audience in England. The term "blank verse" has been used since 1589 thanks to Thomas Nashe and his preface to Robert Greene’s Menaphone. Thanks to Marlowe, blank verse is a constant in English literary history. After being disregarded for a while, John Milton gave it a new shine in 1667 with Paradise Lost, establishing it in epic poetry as well. Today it is the most important metre in English.3
Marlowe’s blank verse is very regularly constructed.
"[…] durchgehender Auftakt und stumpfe Ausgänge, Übergreifen in verhältnismäßig engen Grenzen, Wechsel von Rede und Gegenrede meist am Versende."4
The great exception is the final monologue in Doctor Faustus. Never again will Marlowe deal with verse as freely as he does at this point.
