Tamburlaine: A Critical Reader

David McInnis

• Publisher: The Arden Shakespeare
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9781350246652
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781350082724
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Arden Early Modern Drama Guides offer students and academics practical and accessible introductions to the critical and performance contexts of key Elizabethan and Jacobean plays. Essays from leading international scholars give invaluable insight into the text by presenting a range of critical perspectives, making the books ideal companions for study and research.

Key features include:
Essays on the plays' critical and performance history
A keynote essay on current research and thinking about the play
A selection of new essays by leading scholars
A survey of resources to direct students' further reading about the play in print and online

The blockbuster Tamburlaine plays (1587) instantly established Marlowe's reputation for experimenting with subversive, outrageous and immoral material. The plays follow the meteoric rise of a Scythian shepherd-turned-warlord, whose conquests of eastern emperors soon sees him established as the most powerful man in the world. The visual tableaux featured in the plays are iconic. He uses his enemy Bajazeth as a footstool, and has other emperors pull his chariot like horses. He burns the Qur'an on stage. The plays were memorable, too, for how they sounded: they showcased the power and variability of iambic pentameter, the meter that Shakespeare would go on to perfect. No history of Shakespeare's theatre is complete without understanding the influence and significance of Marlowe's Tamburlaine plays.

Tamburlaine: A Critical Reader offers the definitive introduction to these plays and new perspectives on these seminal works. It provides an overview of their reception on stage and by critics, and offers fresh insights into the teaching of these plays in the classroom.

1

The Critical Backstory:

Tamburlaine, 1587–2000
– A Reception History

M. L. Stapleton

I. Beginnings to 1900

As with most medieval and early modern literary texts, the reception of Tamburlaine begins with an amalgam of anecdotes, allusions, play references, and offhand comments. Though little of this material amounts to criticism, virtually all editions and commentary have used it and cemented its importance in the play’s history. Its first mention seems to have been in Robert Greene’s preface to Perimedes (1588): ‘latelye two Gentlemen Poets … had it in derision, for that I could not make my verses iet vpon the stage in tragicall buskins, euerie worde filling the mouthe like the faburden of Bo-Bell, daring God out of heauen with that Atheist Tamburlan’. Richard Jones’s preface to the initial publication of the two parts (1590) comprised another type of commentary in his admission that he removed comic scenes from the text: ‘I haue (purposely) omitted and left out some fond and friuolous Iestures, digressing (and in my poor opinion) far vnmeet for the matter’. Philip Henslowe lists performances of Marlowe’s plays at the Rose in 1594–95, along with inventory (in 1598) for items such as a ‘Tamberlyne brydell’, perhaps for the ‘pampered jades’ of Part II, along with ‘Tamberlynes cotte [i.e. coat] with coper lace’ and ‘Tamberlanes breches of crymson vellvet’ for son-in-law Edward Alleyn’s costume. Elsewhere in his diary, the entrepreneur mentioned buying the script for 40 shillings from Alleyn on 2 October 1602.¹ In spite of this seemingly fortuitous purchase, no records of a post-1595 early modern performance survive.

However, this subsequent dearth of theatrical exposure does not signify that Tamburlaine had been entirely forgotten, given the number of allusions, many satirical, in plays and other texts of the time, such as the references to a ‘stalking Tamberlaine’ in Thomas Dekker’s Wonderful Year (1603) and a ‘warlike Tamburlaine’ in his Old Fortunatus (1600); Shakespeare’s parody in 2 Henry IV, courtesy of Pistol (1598); and the injunction to ‘play the Tamburlaine’ in Histriomastix (1598).² The satirist Joseph Hall (1597) imagined a drunk in the theatre swaggering about as ‘the Turkish Tamberlaine’, fuelled by ‘huf-cap termes, and thundring threats’.³ Thomas Heywood’s prologue to The Jew of Malta (1633), performed at the Cockpit before Charles and Henrietta Maria, mentions Marlowe and Alleyn in context with Tamburlaine:

by the best of Poets, in that age,

The Malta Jew had being, and was made;

And He, then by the best of Actors play’d:

In Hero and Leander, one did gain

A lasting memorie: in Tamberlaine,

This Jew, with others many.⁴

Those in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries who interested themselves in ‘Mr. Marloe’ and his conqueror read this piece of evidence differently from one another, and thus created a different controversy: authorship. Based on these couplets, John Milton’s nephew Edward Phillips attributed ‘the first and second parts of Tamerlane, the Great Scythian Emperour’ not to Marlowe but to Thomas Newton, who had edited and contributed to Seneca His Tenne Tragedies (1581).⁵ Francis Kirkman (1671) and Gerard Langbaine (1691), reading the same Heywoodian lines, together settled on Marlowe as the author. Edmond Malone (1790) concurred but vacillated, under the influence of Richard Farmer, who could not believe that the playwright had written Tamburlaine. The writer of the preface to the plays in the landmark Pickering edition of Marlowe (1826) suggested that the aforementioned passage should be read without punctuation of any kind after ‘Tamburlaine’, so that ‘In the words of the poet one “made” and the other “played” the Jew; and therefore as far as relates to this play the latter part of the sentence may be applied to either Marlowe or Alleyn, and in like manner what is said of Tamburlaine, may independently of other evidence, be applied to the author or the actor’. For the record, this commentator did not think Marlowe to be the author. There is, of course, more to the story of the early reception of Tamburlaine, with other play references, parodic or otherwise.⁶

Though the Tamburlaine plays eventually disappeared from the public theatres, references to them or to the historical figure continued from the mid-seventeenth to the early nineteenth centuries. In Timber (1640), Ben Jonson, who learned much of his craft from watching and reading Marlowe, nonetheless famously observed that the ‘true Artificer’ of the theatre should eschew fustian and bombast and ‘speake to the capacity of his hearers’ so that his language ‘shall not fly from all humanity, with the Tamerlanes and Tamer-Chams of the late Age, which had nothing in them but the scenical strutting, and furious vociferation, to warrant them to the ignorant gapers’. Sage as Ben was considered to be, it is difficult to ascertain how influential this pronouncement actually was. The seventeenth century featured no shortage of heroes furiously vociferating to gapers who did not consider themselves to be ignorant. Sir John Suckling mentions Tamburlaine in his play The Goblins (1648), as does Sir William Davenant in A Playhouse to Be Let (1663), and Thomas Shadwell’s The Humourists (1670), whose Drybob exclaims, ‘I have been beaten more severely, than ever Turk was by Tamerlain; which by the way, is no ill Comparison; hah?’. Edmund Gayton (1654) reported that at various ‘festivals’, groups of players would put on Tamburlaine, The Jew of Malta, and other allegedly forgotten old works.⁷

Though Marlowe’s authorship of Tamburlaine was hardly assured in the eighteenth century or the first quarter of the nineteenth, interest in his oeuvre did not abate, taken up by a pair of influential critics in their editions. Charles Lamb (1808), exuberant as always, exclaimed: ‘The lunes of Tamburlaine are perfect “midsummer madness”’. Furthermore, ‘Nebuchadnezzar’s are mere modest pretensions compared with the thundering vaunts of this Scythian Shepherd’. He spoke derisively and humorously, as one might expect, about the ‘pampered jades’ passage in Part II. Yet he then made an amalgam of erotic Marlowe verses, combining a sexy passage from Lust’s Dominion – not thought apocryphal then – with Gaveston’s opening speech from Edward II, and then the ‘Of stature tall, and straightly fashioned’ (1Tam 2.1.7–30) description of Tamburlaine’s manly beauty. John Payne Collier (1820), disdainful of Lamb’s tone and perceived amateurism, countered that though the language may seem ‘extravagant, perhaps bombastic’, the careful reader should note that ‘Marlow was obliged to make his language correspond with the nature of the clime … in the utmost gorgeousness of oriental splendor: what was wanting in the scenery and dresses, he was, in a manner, bound to make up for in the glitter and glare of description’. Tamburlaine’s speeches ‘are not half so exaggerated and wind-swollen’ as those of John Dryden’s Almanzor in The Conquest of Granada. Collier accomplished much for Marlowe’s benefit here, legitimately and otherwise. At about the same time, he had created one of his forgeries in Henslowe’s diary that established Marlowe as the author of the two plays. By this device, and by crediting him as a master innovator of dramatic blank verse with links to Shakespeare, he created a fairly accurate literary history that scholars have accepted ever since.⁸

Alexander Dyce produced an edition of Marlowe (1850) seven years before the first of his three Shakespeares (1857, 1864–5, 1875–6) and two decades after the landmark Pickering publication (1826), which had been the first competently edited text of Marlowe’s works. Dyce’s textual scholarship was relatively accurate, his commentary and introductions providing useful information on Tamburlaine and the rest of the dramatic corpus. Along with the problematic Pickering, Oxberry, and anonymous Regency-era volumes, some expansive and colourful remarks about Marlowe’s works might have struck Dyce as amateurish. This necessitated a learned alternative, a solid text with a named editor whose work followed the philology of the time. James A. Broughton (1830) had implied that he was responsible for at least one of the pair of editions preceding Dyce’s. His handwritten note in his copy of the Pickering (1826) reads: ‘In an edition of Tamburlaine printed (but not published) 1818, I enumerated various circumstances which had occasioned me to be sceptical as to Marlowe’s property in the play’. Broughton thereby continued the authorship issue regarding the twinned works from the previous century. But others thought differently. Arthur Hallam (1839) admired the Tamburlaine technique, credited the plays to Marlowe, yet thought them a ‘failure’. Granted, in Tamburlaine, ‘a better kind of blank verse is first employed; the lines are interwoven, the occasional hemistich and redundant syllables break the monotony of the measure, and give more of a colloquial spirit to the dialogue’. The ‘inflated style’ and ‘bombast’ are ‘not so excessive as has been alleged’, and besides, were ‘thought appropriate to such oriental tyrants. This play has more spirit and poetry than any which, upon clear grounds, can be shown to have preceded it. We find also more action on the stage, a shorter and more dramatic dialogue, a more figurative style, with a far more varied and skilful versification’. Leigh Hunt (1844) admired Marlowe as a romantic radical. His hero’s glorious speeches apparently outweighed any atrocities, and to this old friend of John Keats, Marlowe’s blank verse in the plays bore comparison to Milton: ‘It has latterly been thought, that a genius like Marlowe could have had no hand in a play so bombastic as this huffing tragedy. But besides the weighty and dignified, though monotonous tone of his versification in many places, … there are passages in it of force and feeling, of which I doubt whether any of his contemporaries were capable in so sustained a degree’. Dyce seemed aware of the issues of decorum, attribution, and morality r...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Series Introduction
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 The Critical Backstory: Tamburlaine, 1587–2000 – A Reception History
• 2 The Performance History: ‘High Astounding Terms’ – Tamburlaine and Tamburlaine on Stage
• 3 The State of the Art: The Critical Landscape, 2000–Present
• 4 New Directions: Mending Tamburlaine
• 5 New Directions: Tamburlaine the Weather Man
• 6 New Directions: Towards a Racialized Tamburlaine
• 7 New Directions: Retooling Timür
• 8 Three Tents for Tamburlaine: Resources and Approaches for Teaching the Play
• Notes
• Works Cited and Selected Further Reading
• Index
• Copyright