Which English poet and playwright is credited with first popularizing blank verse on the public stage before Shakespeare?
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Correct answer: Christopher Marlowe, playwright of Doctor Faustus
Marlowe's 'mighty line' established blank verse as the dominant medium for Elizabethan tragedy. Shakespeare inherited this form and further refined its flexibility and psychological depth.
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More Blank Verse questions
- What is a 'feminine ending' in a line of blank verse?
- In Shakespeare’s plays, which group of characters is most likely to speak in prose rather than blank verse?
- What is the term for a pause or break in the middle of a line of blank verse?
- When a character's speech continues from one line of verse to the next without a grammatical pause, it is called:
- Which metrical substitution involves reversing the stress of an iamb to a stressed-unstressed pattern, usually at the start of a line?
- What is an 'end-stopped' line in Shakespearean verse?