ENGLISH LITERATURE (CBSE/UGC NET)

Detailed explanation-1: -Believed by many scholars to be Marlowe’s greatest success, Tamburlaine was the first English play written in blank verse and, with Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy, is generally considered the beginning of the mature phase of the Elizabethan theatre.

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: -Blank verse, the basic pattern of language in Shakespeare’s plays, is (in its regular form) a verse line of ten syllables with five stresses and no rhyme (hence “blank"). It was first used in England by Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey* in his translation of the Æneid (c. 1554).

Detailed explanation-4: -The first known use of blank verse in English was by Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey in his translation of the Aeneid (composed c. 1540; published posthumously, 1554–1557).

Detailed explanation-5: -Christopher “Kit” Marlowe (1564-1593) Scholars recognize Marlowe as the first English dramatist to reveal the full potential of blank verse poetry, and as one who made significant advances in the genre of English tragedy through keen examinations of Renaissance morality.