Can anybody tell me about Elizabethan verse and prose?

Elizabethan Drama evolved from the Miracle. Mystery, and
Morality plays of the Middle Ages.  Perhaps the most famous of these plays is
Everyman.

The biggest step came with the so
called "school dramas".  The first tragedy was by two school friends, Thomas Sackville
and Thomas Norton called Gorboduc.  The first two comedies were
Ralph Roister Doister by Nicklas Udal and Gammer Gurton's
Needle, playwright unknown.  These plays are all in verse which is rather
awkward and clumsy.

It was left up to the University Wits
(Lyly, Lodge, Greene, Nashe, and Marlowe) to further develop both the form and the
verse.  The most influential of this group was Christopher Marlowe who took blank verse
which was already being experimented with by some of his peers and used it better and
more eloquently.

Quit simply, blank verse aka iambic
pentameter is a rhythm, de DUM de DUM de DUM de DUM de DUM.  It was used for several
very practical reasons.  Earlier verse forms were clumsy whereas blank verse most
closely mirrors the rhythm of everyday English speech.  (IE I asked for coffee but you
gave tea.)    It also mirrors the heart beat and finally verse is easier to memorize
than prose because of the rhythm. (It is interesting to note that the rhythm is called
iambic pentameter.  In Greek iam means to throw, meaning the verse is always being
thrown forward.)

Marlowe also used the closet dramas of
Seneca as his model rather than the more rigid Greek.  Both Marlowe and Thomas Kyd
(The Spanish Tragedy) brought the violence right onto the stage to
the delight of the Elizabethan audiences.  In Elizabethan tragedies, the bodies pile up
on stage.

Unfortunately, Marlowe died young in a bar room
brawl or who knows what he would have accomplished as a playwright? Fortunately, William
Shakespeare was there to pick up the mantel of "master of the verse".  Shakespeare
continued the development of blank verse and used it effectively in all of his
plays.

He also used prose.  Often prose is the language of
the lower class but not always.  It can also be used among friends.  For example
King Lear opens with two nobleman "having a chat".  They are
speaking in prose.  When the king enters and the occasion turns formal, so does their
language.  They speak verse.

The play, Much Ado
About Nothing is more than half prose whereas in Romeo and
Juliet, Mercutio speaks in prose but few other characters do.  Here
Shakespeare used a lot of rhyming couplets which is an indication of wrapping up an
idea/thought.

Shakespeare can give you a good picture of a
character's state of mind by how he uses verse.  If the language is smooth and flowing,
this is a mentally calm and in control character.  If the language is short and choppy
with lots of punctuation, the mind is in
turmoil.

Shakespeare seemed to choose the language, whether
it was verse, prose, or a combination of the two for each character according to need
and situation.  Not every line is in the 5 stress/5 unstressed pattern.  Sometimes the
rhythm is a troke.  Key words are always in the stress position.  It must be remembered
that seemingly unimportant words like if or and can be in the stress
position.