19 December, 1594 - The Second Part of Tamburlaine

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

Henslowe writes: y^e 19 of desembȝ 1594 ... R at the 2 pte of tamberlen ... xxxxvj^s

In modern English: 19^th December, 1594 ... Received at The Second Part of Tamburlaine ... 46 shillings.

Today, the Admiral's Men have finally completed their project of returning Christopher Marlowe's two Tamburlaine plays to the Rose stage. These plays were iconic fixtures of the theatre of 1580s, and in August the Admiral's Men had revived the first one, giving Edward Alleyn the chance to revist a role that had made him famous. But for whatever reason, the company has taken a long time to restore the sequel to their repertory. Now, at last, they are able to tell the entire tale of Tamburlaine in two instalments. The Second Part of Tamburlaine is just as much an epic spectacle as the first, and must have been thrilling to behold, with its huge cast of characters and memorable setpieces.

The play

At the end of the first play, Tamburlaine had decided to "take truce with all the world". But in part two, he returns to his old mischief. His three commanders return from conquering half the known world in epic adventures that they recount to their ruler: Techelles and Usumcasane have swept North Africa and "unpeopled Barbary", subdued the southern coast of Spain, and marched all the way to Zanzibar, while Theridamas has conquered lands around the Black Sea. Tamburlaine now sets his designs on the rest of the world.

As so often in these plays, the weakness of his enemies aids Tamburlaine. In Hungary, the Turks and Hungarians are at war, and are unable to put aside their religious differences to form a united front against him, petty concerns that do not trouble the atheistical Tamburlaine. Meanwhile, in Turkey, Callapine, son of the Emperor Bajazeth whom Tamburlaine had deposed, escapes from prison and is installed emperor, whereupon he musters forces to attack Tamburlaine.

Timur on the march. From the
Zafarnamah of Sharaf al-Din Yazdi

Despite his triumphs, Tamburlaine is faced with reminders of his own mortality that make him angry. He burns the city of Larissa to the ground when his queen, Zenocrate, dies there. He tells his three sons that the strongest will be his heir, not the eldest, but neither of these boys can ever equal his superhuman prowess, and when the weakest, Calyphas, is found playing cards instead of riding into battle, Tamburlaine kills him.

But Tamburlaine's forces continue their successes. Tamburlaine captures three tributary kings of the Turkish empire and forces them with a whip to pull his chariot, as he utters the famous line "Holla, you pampered jades of Asia!" And he marches upon Babylon to commit fresh atrocities: shooting its governor as he hangs from chains off the city walls, seizing the concubines to give to his men, and drowning the citizens of the city in a lake. He decides,

I'll ride in golden armour like the sun,
And in my helm a triple plume shall spring,
Spangled with diamonds dancing in the air
To note me Emperor of the Threefold World. (IV.iii)

Hubris affects even Tamburlaine, though. He scorns all religions, and, in order to spite his Muslim victims, burns a copy of the Koran, challenging Muhammad to punish him. When nothing happens, Tamburlaine scoffs that the prophet is "not worthy to be worshipped" (V.i).

The mausoleum of Timur in Samarkand

But in a classic moment of Marlovian irony, it is the Muslim god (and not the Christian one), who defeats Tamburlaine. Shortly after the book-burning, the conqueror falls ill: "I feel myself distempered suddenly" he admits. Tamburlaine rapidly declines and dies. On his death bed, he laments the regions of the world that he had failed to conquer:

... from the Antarctic pole, eastward behold
As much more land, which never was descried,
Wherein are rocks of pearl that shine as bright
As all the lamps that beautify the sky;
And shall I die and this unconquered?

Eventually, he acknowledges that "Tamburlaine, the Scourge of God must die." His son Amyras inherits his crown and speaks the final lines:

Let heaven and earth his timeless death deplore,
For both their worths will equal him no more. (V.iii)

What we learn from this

 

Once again, we see an old Marlowe play roar back onto the stage and draw a large crowd, despite the otherwise pitiful box office at the Rose this week. We are thus reminded again of the importance of Marlowe to the Admiral's Men; in his book on the company, Tom Rutter points out that The Second Part of Tamburlaine is appearing amid one of several weeks this year in which the majority of plays performed are by Marlowe.

Still, we shouldn't be misled into thinking that the company relied on Marlowe for their bread and butter. In an important article, Holger Schott Syme has shown that despite the frequency with which Marlowe plays were performed, they did not actually make more money than other plays; indeed, as we've been seeing this year, they performed quite weakly, shrinking to below average audiences very rapidly. Marlowe seems to have been the spiritual and artistic backbone of the company rather than its financial one, and as will become apparent next year, other plays, less famous today, were in fact the most popular at the Rose.

FURTHER READING

 

The Second Part of Tamburlaine information

• David Fuller, ed., "Introduction", in The Complete Works of Christopher Marlowe, Volume V (Clarendon Press, 1998), xvii-liii
• Holger Schott Syme, "The Meaning of Success: Stories of 1594 and its Aftermath", Shakespeare Quarterly 61 (2010), 490-525
• Martin Wiggins, British Drama, 1533-1642: A Catalogue, vol. 3 (Oxford University Press, 2013), entry 789.
• Tom Rutter, Shakespeare and the Admiral's Men (Cambridge University Press, 2017), 21, 33-4.

 

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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