What Is Blank Verse?

Blank verse is unrhymed verse with a rhythmic pattern or "metre". This metre is called "iambic pentameter": and iamb is a metrical foot (fixed arrangement of strong and weak syllables) with a weak-strong pattern. A pentameter is a line containing five iambs.
This is much easier than it sounds – try saying this line aloud:
The west yet glimmers with some streaks of day
and you can hear that it naturally falls into five two-syllable feet, each with a weak-strong stress:
The WEST yet GLIMmers WITH some STREAKS of DAY.
The bulk of Shakespeare's plays are written in blank verse; it's so close to the natural rhythms of English speech that we hardly notice it, but if you listen to a passage from Shakespeare you can hear a steady, underlying rhythm –what Kenneth Branagh described as a heartbeat. Of course, not all blank verse conforms to the iambic pattern as exactly as the above example, but the "heartbeat" is always there.

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