The Cambridge History of English and American Literature in 18 Volumes (1907–21).
Volume IV. Prose and Poetry: Sir Thomas North to Michael Drayton.
§ 15. Creation of Blank Verse as a dramatic instrument
To Marlowe’s literary instinct rather than to his faculty as a playwright the Elizabethan drama was indebted for the further gift of blank verse. Though the development of the instrument in his hands is the outcome of an experience which, unlike Milton’s, was exclusively dramatic it is easy to note that the phases of change, the discoveries of new effects do not arise, as might be expected, from dramatic necessity. The plasticity of Marlowe’s line, which is its most remarkable characteristic, is the direct expression of his varying poetic mood, the ebb and flow of metaphor, the organ and pipe music of word and phrase. The differences are apparent when we pass from such lines as in the great apostrophe to Helen to these:
It is scarcely possible, without giving much space to illustration, to measure the differences in technical accomplishment between Marlowe and the earlier practitioners in blank verse. It matters not whether we take Surrey’s rendering of the second and fourth Aeneid, which has the historical interest of being the first example of the naturalisation of the “straunge meter,” or Gorboduc, also historically interesting as the “first document” of dramatic blank verse in English: in these, it is hard to foresee the finding of a new prosodic instrument as in the experiments of Drant and his circle. Indeed, in both, there is only a violation of English sentiment; and nothing is given by way of compensation. In the confusion of accent and quantity, the life of the verse has gone out; the quantitative twitchings never suggest vitality; each line is cold and stiff, laid out with its neighbours, in the chance companionship of a poetic morgue. These conditions are not entirely wanting in Marlowe: we see them when we institute a close comparison with Shakespeare and Milton. Nevertheless, his blank verse is, for the first time in English, a living thing: often as full-veined and vigorous as anything in the later masterpieces. This verse (if it be described in general terms) discloses greater variety in the accentuation of the line, greater regularity in the use of equivalence in the foot, an occasional shaking of the caesura from its “classical” pose, the frequent employment of feminine endings even in exaggerated form, as