Readaloud: "Tamburlaine", by Christopher Marlowe

Join us in reading plays out loud; no prior experience needed. We assign roles by scenes, and discuss the scenes after. For "Tamburlaine", we will be screen-sharing the text from the Penguin edition.

Trigger warning: this play contains very much that is evil.

Why we are reading Marlowe's Tamburlaine: because we just finished Shakespeare's Henry VI, Parts 2 and 3.

"In 1587, just at the time he was finding his feet in London, crowds were flocking to the Rose to see the Lord Admiral’s Men perform Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine. Shakespeare almost certainly saw the play (along with the sequel that shortly followed), and he probably went back again and again. It may indeed have been one of the first performances he ever saw in a playhouse—perhaps the first—and, from its effect upon his early work, it appears to have had upon him an intense, visceral, indeed life-transforming impact. The dream that Marlowe’s startlingly cruel play aroused and brilliantly gratified was the dream of domination…

The actor in Shakespeare would have perceived what was powerful in Alleyn’s interpretation of Tamburlaine, but the poet in him understood something else: … the hushed crowd was already tasting Tamburlaine’s power in the unprecedented energy and commanding eloquence of the play’s blank verse—the dynamic flow of unrhymed five-stress, ten-syllable lines—that the author, Christopher Marlowe, had mastered for the stage. This verse, like the dream of what ordinary speech would be like were human beings something greater than they are, was by no means only bombast and bragging… Shakespeare had never heard anything quite like this before—certainly not in the morality plays or mystery cycles he had watched back in Warwickshire. He must have said to himself something like, “You are not in Stratford anymore.” To someone raised on a diet of moralities and mysteries, it must have seemed as if the figure of Riot had somehow seized control of the stage, and with it an unparalleled power of language.

This was a crucial experience for Shakespeare, a challenge to all of his aesthetic and moral and professional assumptions. The challenge must have been intensified when he learned that Marlowe was in effect his double: born in the same year, 1564, in a provincial town; the son not of a wealthy gentleman but of a common artisan, a shoemaker. Had Marlowe not existed, Shakespeare would no doubt have written plays, but those plays would have been decisively different. As it is, he gives the impression that he made the key move in his career—the decision not to make his living as an actor alone but to try also to write for the stage on which he performed—under Marlowe’s influence. The fingerprints of Tamburlaine (both the initial play and the sequel that soon followed) are all over the plays that are among Shakespeare’s earliest known ventures as a playwright, the three parts of Henry VI—so much so that earlier textual scholars thought that the Henry VI plays must have been collaborative enterprises undertaken with Marlowe himself.

Shakespeare had determined to write a historical epic, like Marlowe’s, but to make it an English epic, an account of the bloody time of troubles that preceded the order brought by the Tudors. He wanted to resurrect a whole world, as Marlowe had done, bringing forth astonishing larger-than-life figures engaged in struggles to the death, but it was now not the exotic realms of the East that would be brought to the stage but England’s own past. The great idea of the history play—taking the audience back into a time that had dropped away from living memory but that was still eerily familiar and crucially important—was not absolutely new, but Shakespeare gave it an energy, power, and conviction that it had never before possessed. The Henry VI plays are still crude, especially in comparison with Shakespeare’s later triumphs in the same genre, but they convey a striking picture of the playwright poring over Holinshed’s Chronicles in search of materials that would enable him to imitate Tamburlaine.

The imitation, though real enough, is not exactly an expression of homage; it is a skeptical reply."
Greenblatt, Stephen. Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare (Anniversary Edition) (pp. 235-236). W. W. Norton & Company. Kindle Edition.

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Late-comers, unless we know you, will generally not be admitted, as it disrupts the reading. However, it's fine for attendees to drop off at any time they want.