Which short-lived dramatist is regarded as the first great exponent of blank verse?
Blank verse not use rhyme; or possibly he was inspired by the Ancient Greek verse or the Italian verse form of "versi sciolti", both of which also did not use rhyme. The play "Arden of Faversham" (around 1590 by an unknown author) is a notable example of end-stopped blank verse. The 1561 play "Gorboduc" by Thomas Norton and Thomas Sackville was the first English play to use blank verse. Christopher Marlowe was the first English author to make full use of the potential of blank verse. The major achievements in English blank verse were made by William Shakespeare, who wrote much of
Blank verse his last plays was given to using feminine endings (in which the last syllable of the line is unstressed, for instance lines 3 and 6 of the following example); all of this made his later blank verse extremely rich and varied. This very free treatment of blank verse was imitated by Shakespeare's contemporaries, and led to general metrical looseness in the hands of less skilled users. However, Shakespearean blank verse was used with some success by John Webster and Thomas Middleton in their plays. Ben Jonson, meanwhile, used a tighter blank verse with less enjambment in his great comedies "Volpone"