18 October, 1594 - Tamburlaine

Here's what the Admiral's Men performed at the Rose playhouse on this day, 424 years ago...

Henslowe writes: y^e 17 of octobȝ  1594 ... R at tamberlen ... xxxx^s 

In modern English: [18^th] October, 1594 ... Received at Tamburlaine ... 40 shillings.

Illustration of the historical Tamburlaine
from Richard Knolles' General History
of the Turks (1603).

Today, the players performed Tamburlaine, Christopher Marlowe's spectacular epic about the bloodthirsty conqueror of Asia. You can read more about this play in the entry for 30th August.

Well, this is weird: the players have performed a play only two days after their last performance of it. That almost never happens!  Even weirder, today's performance of Tamburlaine drew a much bigger audience than the one two days ago. Clearly, the players were expecting this surge and planned accordingly. But how did they know? It's a reminder of how little we know about what's actually going on in these theatres all those years ago...

Henslowe links

• Transcript of this page of the Diary (from W.W. Greg's 1904 edition)
• Facsimile of this page of the Diary (from the Henslowe-Alleyn Digitisation Project)

Comments?

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