Blank verse

The blank verse is a rhyming iambic verse fünfhebiger loose iambic pentameter or consisting of ten, in the female from eleven syllables in the male verse.

The German word is shipping a takeover from the English blank. The adjective is actually called blank, empty 'or' unadorned ' and here means non-rhyming '.

As an example, the beginning was called by Goethe's Iphigenie:

The development of blank verse

The blank verse is, presumably developed after an Italian model, in the middle of the 15th century in England and used for the first time in the drama in Gordobuc ( 1561) of Sackville and Norton. He is quickly becoming the Standardversmaß of the English drama, and the great dramatists of the 16th and 17th centuries, including Christopher Marlowe, Ben Jonson and especially William Shakespeare, develop it and refine it. It is often used in England in the 17th, 18th and 19th century in the poetry of thought and narrative poetry, among other things, by John Milton in Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained.

In Germany, the blank verse, based on translations from the English literature since the end of the 17th century - first only sporadically - using, among others, Christoph Martin Wieland ( Lady Jane Gray, 1758 ) and Joachim Wilhelm von Brawe ( Brutus arose 1757/1758, published 1768). For the final breakthrough him Gotthold Ephraim Lessing helps with his " dramatic poem" Nathan the Wise ( 1779). The German dramatist of the classical and the 19th century ( Friedrich Schiller, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Heinrich von Kleist, Franz Grillparzer, Friedrich Halm, Friedrich Hebbel and others) write their verse dramas mostly in blank verse.

In the poem, and epic poem, the blank verse, however, can not prevail in Germany. A notable exception is Friedrich Schiller's ballad The veiled image at Sais.

The blank verse as a poetic medium

The popularity of blank verse as a poetic medium is because it is extremely flexible and variable. He has no fixed caesura and breaks are possible after each word. The verses are quite clear in the sequence of unstressed and stressed syllables and they can strip the default iambic scheme almost completely and approach the prose. The syntactic units can adapt to the Verseinheit or even effortlessly through Enjambements ( interlaced ) skip this schema, create tension, accelerate the rate of speech or slow. Several - often up to four - speakers can share a verse and create drama. Lessing uses these options already out fully. On the other hand, the blank verse, for example in the monologue, even effortlessly over switch to a rhyming pentameter and, for example, spread a solemn mood, which is the usual practice in the drama of Shakespeare time.

Shakespeare has passed through the whole spectrum in the course of his dramatic development. While largely coincide in his early dramas set unit and Verseinheit and prosody somewhat monotonous follows the metrical scheme, often build his verses in the later works by bold Enjambements and breaking through the standard metric dramatic tension.

Avoid the blank verse in the dramas of Goethe and Schiller, following the classical ideal, a greater deviation from the predetermined metric scheme. August Wilhelm Schlegel follows them partly therein at his translation of Shakespeare dramas. Schiller animates his blank verse primarily by enjambment. The given example at the beginning of Goethe's Iphigenie shows how closely Goethe adheres to the prescribed metric rule.

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