Tamburlaine

Martin Giesen

tamburlaine the great who from a scythian shepherd by his rare and wonderful conquests became a most puissant and mighty monarch and for his tyranny and terror in war was termed the scourge of god divided into two tragical discourses as they were sundry times showed upon stages in the city of london by the right honourable the lord admiral his servants now first and newly published london printed by richard jones at the sign of the rosen crown near holborn bridge a thousand five hundred ninety quarto the above title-page is pasted into a copy of the first part of tamburlaine in the library at bridgewater house which copy excepting that title-page and the address to the readers is the impression of sixteen or five i once supposed that the title-pages which bear the dates sixteen o five and sixteen o six see below had been added to the quartos of the two parts of the play originally printed in but i am now convinced that both parts were really reprinted the first part in sixteen o five and the second part in sixteen o six and that nothing remains of the earlier quartos except the title-page and the address to the readers which are preserved in the bridgewater collection In the Bodleian Library, Oxford, is an octavo edition of both parts of Tamburlaine, dated 1590.

The title page of the first part agrees verbatim with that given above.

The half-title page of the second part is as follows.

ACT I.

THE PROLOGUE

from jigging veins of rhyming mother wits and such conceits as clownage keeps in pay we'll lead you to the stately tent of war where you shall hear the scythian tamburlaine threatening the world with high astounding terms and scourging kingdoms with his conquering sword view but his picture in this tragic glass and then applaud his fortunes as you please dramatis personae for tamburlaine the great mycetes king of persia cosroe his brother Meander, Persian lord.

Read by David Lewis Richardson.

Yes, stick to blank verse.

Marlowe had one of the greatest debuts of all time, 1587, Tamburlaine.

At 23 years old, Marlowe didn't burst onto the scene, he shattered it, trimmed England's flaccid lines.

Marlowe didn't invent blank verse, he gave it power.

Suddenly every theater company in town needed their own Tamburlaine.

is not thy common talk sound aphorisms are not thy bills hung up as monuments whereby whole cities have escaped the plague and a thousand desperate maladies have been eased yet art thou still but faustus and a man but did it make him famous did it make him rich no he was paid his two nickels to rub together for the work and it was subsumed anonymously into the company's repertoire published circulated without his name I wondered if he thought, sleepless in the plaguey hovel he shared with Thomas Kidd, did I choose the right fucking life? I was thinking the same thing, headed to Maracana.

Two.

And The Massacre at Paris is one that... one hears about, one can read a little bit about it, but it never seems to be done.

It never seems to be spoken of in the same breath as Edward II, Tamburlaine, Faustus.

And yet within that play, there are prototypes of all these characters and many more.

And I was drawn to it because it was written within the living memory of people who had been victims at the massacre.

Yeah.

A confession, a shared aesthetic with the audience.

I mean, as with the nameless Richard III, as with Tamburlaine.

As with Faustus, the character is communicating to the audience their ambitions, setting out their thought.

Dryden, for instance, was not Johnson's successor on the laureate's throne, as Mr. Simmons eloquently puts it, for Sir William Davenant came between them.

And when one remembers the predominance of rhyme in Shakespeare's early plays, it is too much to say that, after the production of the first part of Tamburlaine, blank verse became the regular dramatic metre of the public stage.

shakespeare did not accept blank verse at once as a gift from marlowe's hand but himself arrived at it after a long course of experiments in rhyme Indeed, some of Mr. Simmons' remarks on Marlowe are very curious.

To say of his Edward II, for instance, that it is not at all inferior to the work of Shakespeare's younger age, is very niggardly an inadequate praise, and comes strangely from one who has elsewhere written with such appreciation of Marlowe's great genius, while to call Marlowe Johnson's master is to make for him an impossible claim.

THE PROLOGUE

from jigging veins of rhyming mother wits and such conceits as clownage keeps in pay we'll lead you to the stately tent of war where you shall hear the scythian tamburlaine threatening the world with high astounding terms and scourging kingdoms with his conquering sword few but his picture in this tragic glass, and then applaud his fortunes, as you please.

DRAMATIS PERSONI FOR TAMBERLAIN THE GREAT PART I MYCETES, KING OF PERSIA COSROE, HIS BROTHER Mayanda, Persian Lord.

Read by David Lewis Richardson.

Theridamus, Persian Lord.

And my first book, written while yet under academic or tutorial authority, bore evidence of that ambition in every line.

I should be the last to deny that it also bore evidence of the fact that its writer had no more notion of dramatic or theatrical construction than the authors of Tamburlaine the Great, King Henry VI, and Sir Thomas Wyatt.

Not much more, you may possibly say, was discernible in Chaste Lard, a play also conceived and partly written by a youngster not yet emancipated from servitude to college rule.

I fear that in a former volume there had been little if any promise of power to grapple with the realities and subtleties of character and of motive, that whatever may be in it of promise or of merit must be sought in the language and the style of such better passages as may perhaps be found in single and separable speeches of Catherine and of Rosamond.

THE PROLOGUE Read by Martin Giesen

the general welcomes tamburlaine received when he arrived last upon the stage have made our poet pen his second part where death cuts off the progress of his pomp and murderous fates throw all his triumphs down but what became of fair xenocrate and with how many cities sacrifice he celebrated her sad funeral himself in presence shall unfold at large dramatis personae for tamburlaine the great part two by christopher marlowe tamburlaine king of persia Read by David Goldfarb.

Caliphas, son of Tamberlane.

Read by Sarah Crampton.

I thank thee, Sigismund, but when I war all Asia Minor, Africa, and Greece, follow my standard and my thundering drums.

Come, let us go and banquet in our tents.

I will dispatch chief of my army, hence to Fair Natolia and to Trebizond, to stay my coming against proud Tamerlane.

Friends Sigismund and peers of Hungary, come banquet and carouse with us a while, and then depart we to our territories.