How did Christopher Marlowe help establish blank verse in English drama?

Christopher Marlowe was instrumental in establishing blank verse as the standard medium for English drama during the Elizabethan and Jacobean eras. While the form had been introduced to England earlier by the Earl of Surrey and used in the first English tragedy, Gorboduc, it was Marlowe who transformed it into a powerful and flexible tool for the stage.123

Marlowe achieved this through his development of what the playwright Ben Jonson famously termed the "mighty line". By utilizing this style in his plays—most notably in Tamburlaine the Great, as well as Doctor Faustus and Edward II—Marlowe imbued the unrhymed iambic pentameter with newfound musical qualities and emotional intensity. His work demonstrated the verse's capacity to convey complex human emotions and grand themes, effectively setting the stage for the later, more nuanced dramatic poetry of William Shakespeare.1243