Why Kit Marlowe was the Steve Jobs of London Theatre, and why Shakespeare is like your iPhone skin

Marlowe brought form to the fore, but Shakespeare found individuality in manipulating the form.

A quick and dirty history lesson: long before the "golden age" of Elizabethan theatre, long form poetry recited or sung by traveling bards were the main narrative entertainment. This evolved into traveling groups of players, as the long form poetry gave way to acted-out scenes, although the poetry base remained. It wasn't long before the Burbages built the first theatre, and things started to get real.

Men like Marlowe who went to university came back full of ideas, and a desire to elevate the writing to match the new status of the permanent theatres. Christopher Marlowe in particular, with his play Tamburlaine, did what Steve Jobs did for our gadgets: he made form as important as content. It was Marlowe that established iambic pentameter as the verse line, and Tamburlaine scans almost perfectly in IP. This was, to borrow a modern phrase, extremely freakin' cool, and quickly took over as the style to emulate.

There was only one problem. Just as all of our phones now look the same, all of the characters in IP plays sound the same. As Shakespeare begins writing, following the form, he struggles with giving his characters distinct voices, and expressing changing emotional states.

And so, just as we decorate our iPhones with skins, desktop photos, and ringtones, Shakespeare began to bend the form to create individuality, and to express different emotional states. Everything that we do to decode Shakespeare's not-iambic-pentameter verse is to discover these individual voices and range of emotions.

However, Shakespeare doesn't abandon the form until he starts working in prose. So in his verse lines, some key aspects of the form remain:

--the "sanctity of the verse line": words/thoughts are in the same verse line for a reason. Each line of verse is its own unit, and should not be broken up with pauses or stops. Shakespeare plays with this by having short and shared lines, but that form must be there (the short lines must have a pause, the shared lines must form one verse line) in order to be monkeyed with.
--"driving to the end of the verse line": each line unit has its own internal build to the end of the line, and the last word is key.
--"masculine beginnings" to start: lines that begin a scene (often) begin with a trochee (a stress followed by an unstress) so that they start with a downbeat. This is what I meant when I said Marlowe's Tamburlaine was "almost" IP, it has some masculine beginnings.
--"rhyming couplets" to end: scenes end with the "button" sound of a rhyming couplet. Marlowe would often stack many of these at the end of a scene, and Shakespeare sometimes does a few, but there is almost always one rhyming couplet at the end of every scene. Shakespeare will go on to use the rhyming couplet in other, more meta ways, but still uses them to close scenes.

I hope that helps you sort out how we got to Shakespeare, and what it is he was up to as he experimented with the form. Keep in mind that as he evolved as a writer, he experimented with the verse in different ways, so early plays have a more Marlovian sound, whereas the late-canon plays have a richer texture to the verse.