ENGLISH LITERATURE (CBSE/UGC NET)

Detailed explanation-1: -Christopher Marlowe was the first English author to achieve critical fame for his use of blank verse.

Detailed explanation-2: -But in blank verse, there are no end-rhymes: lines of metered verse – usually iambic pentameter–simply follow one after another without being connected by rhyming words. Blank verse is not a recent invention: Christopher Marlowe and Shakespeare, among others, popularized the use of blank verse in their plays.

Detailed explanation-3: -Despite the brevity of his career, Marlowe made an indelible mark on English literature. He is considered by many to have established blank verse as the preferred meter of Elizabethan and Jacobean writing, and he was also a major influence on William Shakespeare, who was born in the same year.

Detailed explanation-4: -Writing style Christopher Marlowe was the first writer to prove how effective and expressive blank verse could be when used for drama. Before Marlowe, plays strictly used rhymed verse instead. Finding it too stiff and formal, he completely changed the way writers wrote plays and used blank verse.

Detailed explanation-5: -Blank verse first appeared in sixteenth-century Italy during the Renaissance, an adaptation of unrhymed poetry from ancient Greece and Rome. It was later introduced to England in the 1550s by Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey with his translation of Virgil’s The Aeneid.