Short answers, pulled from the story.
A line may be called end-stopped when the sense and metre naturally make one pause at its close. This definition anchors the concept in both meaning and rhythm where a syntactic unit corresponds exactly to the length of the poetic line.
Robert Southwell composed The Burning Babe during the late 16th century with lines that align perfectly with their clauses. Each segment ends with a full stop in the syntax so every clause finds its home within a single row of poetry.
Shakespeare wrote The Winter's Tale using heavily enjambed lines that refuse to pause at the end of each measure. This technique creates a sense of urgency and fluid motion absent from end-stopped verses while running sentences across line breaks without a syntactic halt.
Scholars examine the proportion of end-stopping to enjambment found within specific plays to estimate approximate dates for undated works based on poetic structure. A higher ratio of end-stopped lines suggests an earlier composition period while a dominance of enjambment points toward later years of his writing life.
Enjambment became central to tragedies and romances written after 1600 as later plays embraced the running sentence as a tool for psychological complexity. This transition mirrors broader changes in Elizabethan and Jacobean theatrical tastes where writers began favoring fluidity over formal rigidity.