11 May, 1597 - A Humorous Day's Mirth

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

Henslowe writes: 11 | ne |  tt at the comodey of vmers... 02 | 03

In modern English: 11^th [May, 1597] ... total at The Comedy of Humours ... £2 and 3 shillings [i.e. 43 shillings]

Today, the Admiral's Men premiered a new play! And in a very unusual turn of events, this play has survived the passage of time and can still be read today, albeit under a different title.

George Chapman, from a
1616 edition of his
translation of Homer.

Although Henslowe calls it The Comedy of Humours, today's play is almost certainly the same one that will be published in 1599 under the title A Humorous Day's Mirth. The evidence can be found in Henslowe's 1598 inventory of costumes, which includes "Verone's son's hose" and "Labesha's cloak with gold buttons", referring to two of the characters in A Humorous Day's Mirth. In Henslowe's list of performances, The Comedy of Humours is the only title that fits the play well.

A Humorous Day's Mirth was written by George Chapman, whom we met last year as the author of the wildly popular comedy of disguises, The Blind Beggar of Alexandria. For his follow-up, Chapman has provided another wacky farce, which this time belongs to the genre known as 'humours comedy'. 

What is humours comedy?

The four temperaments, illustrated in a
15th-century German calendar. Clockwise
from left: phlegmatic, sanguine, choleric
and melancholic.

Confusingly enough, in Elizabethan times, the word 'humour' did not refer to comedy. Medical theory at the time held that the human body was affected by four fluids, known as humours, namely, blood, phlegm, yellow bile and black bile. If one of the humours was present in greater amounts than the others, it could affect a person's temperament, making them sanguine, phlegmatic, choleric, or melancholic.

The word 'humour' thus came to mean an eccentric character trait; hence, as Ben Jonson explains at the beginning of his comedy Every Man Out of his Humour:

   When some one peculiar quality

Doth so possess a man that it doth draw

All his affects, his spirits, and his powers

In their confluxions all to run one way,

This may truly said to be a 'humour'.

A 'humours comedy' is thus a play in which the characters are dominated by peculiar characteristics. It is possible that Chapman actually invented the genre with today's play. It will be followed by Ben Jonson's Every Man in his Humour and Every Man Out of his Humour. And humours are mentioned  on the title pages of many plays of this period, including Shakespeare's: The First Part of Henry IV advertises "the humorous conceits of Sir John Falstaff" and The Merry Wives of Windsor announces the characters' "sundry variable and pleasing humours".  

The play

Set in Paris (but a Paris that feels exactly like Elizabethan England), A Humorous Day's Mirth showcases a variety of humorous characters. It is difficult to describe the plot because there is no central storyline; the play is better thought of as a a jumble of subplots, some quite vague in their execution. 

The figure around which everything revolves is Lemot, whose own humour is his desire to laugh at other people. Lemot acts as a kind of onstage ringmaster, provoking the play's characters into displaying their humours and then commenting on them. When his friend Colinet excitedly says, "we may chance to have a fair day, for we shall spend it with so humorous acquaintance as rains nothing but humour all their lifetime", Lemot announces that he will preside over the affairs "like an old king in an old-fashion play" and will "sit, as it were, and point out all my humorous companions" (scene 2).

Jan Steen, Leaving the Tavern (late 17th century)

So he does. And really, that's all you need to know. Various characters are introduced with eccentric humours. Lemot provokes some storylines in which characters fall in love or become romantically jealous. Some of them have clear story arcs that come to a resolution in the end, while others feel more like short comic sketches. The play as a whole is more akin to a variety show than a straightforward narrative. 

At the end of the play, the characters all end up at an ordinary (a kind of inn). And there, Lemot acts as a master of ceremonies at a lottery, presenting posies (little poems) that tell the truth about each of the characters. Finally, the King announces the conclusion.

And here I solemnly invite you all

Home to my court, where with feats we will crown

This mirthful day, and vow it to renown. (Scene 13)

If you would like to read A Humorous Day's Mirth, there are two modern-spelling editions available: Eleanor Lowe's online edition at Digital Renaissance Editions, and Charles Edelman's for the Revels Plays series.

The humourous characters

What's amusing about A Humorous Day's Mirth is not its story but rather its characters and the humours that they display. Let's look at a few of them.

A classic image of a
melancholic, from
Robert Burton's Anatomy
of Melancholy (1622)

One of the most popular humours in this genre is melancholia, the state of depression that supposedly arose from an excess of black bile. Melancholics were gloomy, antisocial, and disgusted by the world, and were stereotypically portrayed with folded arms and with their hats pulled over their eyes, to illustrate their introverted withdrawal from society.

One of the melancholics in A Humorous Day's Mirth is Dowsecar, whom the other characters find entertaining to watch. In one scene, they gather to observe him encounter a series of objects placed there to try to cure him: a sword (an emblem of warlike bravery), hose and a codpiece (the clothes of a fashionable young man), and a painting of a woman. But Dowesecar rejects them all. When his father tries to persuade him to marry and have children, Dowsecar replies he would be of more value to the world if he simply died, so that his corpse could nourish the grass that feeds the cattle in the field. He gloomily concludes that "Wealth is the only father and the child, / And but in wealth no man has any joy". Everyone thinks he's mad except the King, who thinks that on the contrary, Dowsecar has "perfect judgement" (scene 7). 

But one of the recurring jokes of this play is that humours are not as fundamental to the characters' personalities as they may seem, and are often revealed to be affectations that can can be banished by such things as the power of love. Among the observers of Dowsecar is the beautiful Martia. When Dowsecar sees her, he falls instantly in love, crying "am I burnt to dust / With a new sun", and realizes that his melancholia was not his true self (scene 7). 

Martia herself is pledged to marry another humorous figure, Labesha. His humour is his extreme gullibility which him easy to fool, rather like Shakespeare's Andrew Aguecheek in Twelfth Night. But when he loses Martia to Dowecar, Labesha takes on the humour of melancholia himself, affecting to be a misanthrope at war with the world: "I will in silence live a man forlorn, / Mad, and melancholy as a cat". The other characters test his new humour by placing a cream cake in front of him. He rails upon it in an absurd parody of melancholic posturing:

O sour cream! What thinkest thou, that I love thee still? ... If thou haddest strawberries and sugar in thee - but it may be thou art set with stale cake to choke me! Well, taste it, and try it, spoonful by spoonful. [Tries the cake.] Bitterer and bitterer still! But O, sour cream, wert thou an onion, since Fortune set thee for me, I will eat thee, and I will devour thee in spite of Fortune's spite.

Choke I or burst I, mistress, for thy sake,

To end my life, eat I this cream and cake. (scene 10)

Other humours are on display too. The old man Labervele is obsessively jealous of his young wife, Florilla. And Florilla herself is a religious puritan: on her first entrance, she realizes that she is wearing too many clothes for the warm weather:

What have I done? Put on too many clothes?

The day is hot, and I am hotter clad

Than might suffice health.

My conscience tells me that I have offended

And I'll put them off.

But then she fears that doing so would waste time that could be spent on godly things:

That will ask time that might be better spent;

One sin will draw another quickly so.

See how the devil tempts! (scene 4)

Failed Puritans in a woodcut from the ballad
The Beggar's Delight (late 17th century)

Labervele worries that if his wife encounters a young man, her blood will cause her piety to disappear. He is correct; once again, humours cannot be trusted, because her religious humour is an act that she performs to keep her distance from the old man. Lemot affects to 'test' her for the old man by wooing her, and although she rebuffs him in her husband's presence, she attempts a liaison with Lemot later. But he sends her back to her husband. 

These are the kinds of things that happen in A Humorous Day's Mirth. They don't all come across as very funny on the page, but the talented actors at the Rose must have been able to bring out the comic energy that resides within them. 

Responses

We are fortunate to have a very rare thing for A Humorous Day's Mirth: an eye-witness report. John Chamberlain was a courtier whose letters to his friend Dudley Carleton contain all sorts of fascinating information about the age. On 11 June, Chamberlain wrote about seeing the play at the Rose. He was not impressed:

We have here [in London] a new play of humours in very great request, and I was drawn along to it by the common applause, but my opinion of it is (as the fellow said of the shearing of hogs) that there was a great cry for so little wool. 

Chamberlain may not have liked the play, but his letter mentions that he was drawn by its great popularity. It seems that everyone in London was talking about A Humorous Day's Mirth. Although today's box office is not at all impressive for a premiere, things are going to change.

What we learn from this

What we learn from A Humorous Day's Mirth is that genres that seem baffling today could be massively popular in Elizabethan London. To a modern reader, the play seems a disjointed muddle of silly comic sketches, not a patch on the elegant comedies that Shakespeare was producing across the river. But Chapman's play will prove a tremendous success and will spawn many imitations. 

The title page of the 1599
publication of the play

The other thing we learn is that the printed text of a play may not always reflect what was seen on the stage. A Humorous Day's Mirth feels inelegant on the page because the 1599 printed text is a mess; its stage directions and speech prefixes are muddled, there are confusing plot holes and characters who fade away, and the printer turned all the verse speeches into prose.

One theory is that the text was printed from an early draft of the play, and that the finished version for the Rose may have been more coherent. The modern-spelling editions by Eleanor Lowe and Charles Edelman have done an excellent job of making the play more readable and restoring its poetic verse to the way it should be. As Edelman says in his introduction, "one of the aims of this edition is to show that, in the hands of a talented cast, it could prove a very humorous night's mirth in the theatre".

FURTHER READING

A Humorous Day's Mirth information

• John Chamberlain, The Letters of John Chamberlain, ed. Norman Egbert McClure (American Philosophical Society, 1939), 1:32.
• Charles Edelman, ed. An Humorous Day's Mirth (Manchester University Press, 2010)
• Martin Wiggins, British Drama, 1533-1642: A Catalogue, vol. 3 (Oxford University Press, 2013), entry 1073.
• Eleanor Lowe, ed., "An Humorous Day's Mirth." Digital Renaissance Editions
• Tom Rutter, Shakespeare and the Admiral's Men (Cambridge University Press, 2017), 130-64.

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?

Did I make a mistake? Do you have a question? Have you anything to add? Please post a comment below!

10 December, 1596 - Captain Thomas Stukeley

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

Henslowe writes: y^e 11 of desembȝ 1596 ... ne ... R at stewtley ... xxxx^s 

In modern English: [10^th] December, 1596 ... New ... Received at Stukeley ... 40 shillings

Today, the Admiral's Men performed another new play! It has been a only a few days since we welcomed Vortiger to the repertoire, and now we must welcome Captain Thomas Stukeley. And in a rare turn of events, this play actually survives for us to read today, albeit in a rather muddled form. The play's authorship is uncertain, but most scholars who have worked on it suspect the presence of Thomas Heywood, one of the most prolific playwrights of the period.

Who was Thomas Stukeley? 

Captain Thomas Stukeley was a maverick English mercenary who had many adventures in Europe and Africa. Most famously, he travelled to Morocco to fight alongside the forces of King Sebastian of Portugal as they supported Abd el-Malik's quest to reclaim his throne from the usurper Muly Mahamet. This venture resulted in the loss of his life at the Battle of Alcazar, where a cannonball took off his legs as he was deserting his troops. You can read an authoritative survey of his life in Charles Edelman's introduction to The Stukeley Plays (2005).

Title page of the 1605 text
of the play

If this story sounds familiar, it's because you are remembering the early years of Henslowe's Diary, back in 1592, when Lord Strange's Men were the players at the Rose and performed a play called Muly Molocco that may have been the same play as the extant Battle of Alcazar by George Peele. You might also recall that more recently, the Admiral's Men were performing a play entitled Mahamet, which might have been the same play under yet another title. 

In The Battle of Alcazar, Stukeley plays a relatively small role. This new play, however, focuses entirely on him, and is best thought of as an overlapping prequel that portrays Stukeley's adventures before the battle, and then ends with an alternative depiction of the battle and of Stukeley's death.

As with so many of the surviving plays of the Rose, the playtext of Captain Thomas Stukeley is messy and often incoherent. Scenes appear to be missing, and, bizarrely, one scene appears twice, the second time rewritten in Irish dialect.  Nonetheless, the overall plot of the play is fairly clear, and it depicts Stukeley as an heroic and dashing chaser of glory. 

The play

The title page of Captain Thomas Stukeley, published in 1605, sums up the essence of its plot: "The Famous History of the Life and Death of Captain Thomas Stukeley, with his marriage to Alderman Curtis's daughter and valiant ending at the Battle of Alcazar" .

The play begins in the 1550s, with our eponymous hero as a young law student in London, known more for spending freely than for studying. He marries Nell, daughter of a  wealthy family; her father is concerned about Stukeley, calling him "very wild, a quarreler, a fighter, / Ay, and I doubt a spend-good too" (sc. 1), but Stukeley wins Nell because she loves him and because her former suitor, Vernon, acknowledges his inferiority to Stukeley and withdraws his claim.

Now extremely wealthy, Stukeley is not content to remain in England, but rather seeks glory in foreign adventures. He raises an army to fight in Ireland against the rebels challenging English rule. There, he defeats an Irish army in the town of Dundalk after what the stage direction calls "a good pretty fight" (sc. 11). But things are tense in the English camp; Vernon is among the soldiers there and leaves because he doesn't want to be around Stukeley. 

King Philip II of Spain

Stukeley decides to next seek his fortunes in Europe; in the Spanish city of Cadiz, he is is arrested for not paying harbour taxes, but gets away with it by charming the Governor's wife (who "never saw a fairer gentleman"; sc. 13) and then King Philip of Spain himself into forgiving him.

Meanwhile, Vernon is suffering similar problems with Spanish bureaucracy and Stukeley nobly helps him too. Stukeley learns from Vernon that he is no longer rich: Nell and her family have died and have left him nothing. But you can't keep Stukeley down. He has won the favour of the King of Spain and is confident in his abilities: "Tom Stukeley lives, lusty Tom Stukeley, / Graced by the greatest King of Christendom!" (sc. 17). And Vernon ponders their contrasting successes in life, comparing himself to a colewort (a kind of cabbage):

In Ireland there he braved his governor,

In Spain he is companion to the King;

His fortune mounts and mine stoops to the ground,

He as the vine, I as the colewort grow. (sc. 17)

King Sebastian of Portugal

King Philip hires Stukeley as an envoy to Rome, but doesn't tell him about his devious plan to conquer Portugal. Philip is pretending to support the young King Sebastian of Portugal's intent of intervening in a Moroccan civil war; Sebastian has decided to support Muly Mahamet in his war against his brother Abd el-Malik and Philip is pretending to support him in turn. But he is only doing so because he thinks Sebastian's foolish enterprise will result in his death, leaving a gap for Philip to invade Portugal. 

Stukeley finds out about Philip's duplicity, and decides to support Sebastian's venture in Morocco, raising an army of Italian soldiers. He and Sebastian are delighted to see a portent at this moment: as the stage direction specifies, "with a sudden thunder-clap the sky is on fire and the blazing star appears, which they, prognosticating to be fortunate, depart very joyfully" (sc. 20). Unfortunately, they have interpreted the omen incorrectly; it is anything but a fortunate sign. 

And so, we have now caught up with the events of the older plays, as the Battle of Alcazar begins. Stukeley and Sebastian join with Muly Mahamet and fight the armies of Abd el-Malik under a blazing sun that "so heats our armour with his beams / That it doth burn and sear our very flesh" (sc. 25). At the end of it all, Sebastian, Muly Mahamet and Abd el-Malik are all dead.  

1629 Portuguese illustration of the Battle of Alcazar

Meanwhile, who should Stukeley meet amid the battle, but his old rival Vernon? They are both wounded to the death, and vow to meet again in heaven; as Stukeley says, "we two / Were so ordained to be of one self heart, / To love one woman, breathe one country air, / And now ... we both shall die one kind of death" (sc. 28). And so they do, but not in the way they expect, for the Italian soldiers are angry at the foolhardy enterprise Stukeley has led them into, and stab the two men to death. 

That's the final scene in the published text. But scholars suspect that the last two scenes were somehow reversed during printing, as the penultimate scene provides more conventional closure: Abd el-Malik's brother orders the burial of the Christians who fought for him, and orders the body of Muly Mahamet to be flayed, stuffed, and paraded as a warning to would-be usurpers. In the last lines, he proposes that,

     in memorial of this victory,

For ever after be this fourth of August

Kept holy to the service of our gods,

Through all our kingdoms and dominions. (sc. 29)

If you would like to read Captain Thomas Stukeley, the most readable text is Charles Edelman's modern-spelling edition, which can be found in his anthology The Stukeley Plays (2005).

What we learn from this

From this play we learn, once again, that popular plays at the Rose never die; they just get recycled. It's not clear what happened to the old plays (or play, singular?) of The Battle of Alcazar, Muly Molocco and Mahamet, but for unknown reasons they are no longer being performed at the Rose. Captain Thomas Stukeley appears to be an attempt at reviving popular material by reworking it into a different form. Instead of a focused play about the participants in the Moroccan civil war and the resulting battle, Thomas Heywood created instead a sprawling, episodic play about a glamorous English hero.

It is fascinating to consider that Edward Alleyn, the charismatic leading actor of the Rose, may have played different characters in these plays. In The Battle of Alcazar, he is believed to have played the flamboyantly evil Moor Muly Mahamet. But in Captain Thomas Stukeley, the role of Muly Mahamet is much smaller, and we may presume that Alleyn instead played the flamboyantly heroic Stukeley.

Despite all these good omens, however, the Admiral's Men must be disappointed with the reception of the premiere of Captain Thomas Stukeley. The 40 shillings received as the box office are not at all impressive for an opening night, and suggest that the subject of the Battle of Alcazar might have already been played out. 

FURTHER READING

Captain Thomas Stukeley information

• Charles Edelman (ed.), The Stukeley Plays (Manchester University Press, 2005)
• Andrew Gurr, Shakespeare's Opposites: The Admiral's Company, 1594-1625 (Cambridge University Press, 2009), 154-5, 224
• Martin Wiggins, British Drama, 1533-1642: A Catalogue, vol. 3 (Oxford University Press, 2013), entry 1049.

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?

Did I make a mistake? Do you have a question? Have you anything to add? Please post a comment below!

12 February, 1596 - The Blind Beggar of Alexandria

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

Henslowe writes: y^e 12 of febreary 1595 ... ne ... R at the blind beger of elexendrea  ... iij^ll 

In modern English: 12^th February, [1596] ... New ... Received at The Blind Beggar of Alexandria ... £3

George Chapman, from a 1616 edition of his
translation of Homer.

Today, the Admiral's Men premiered a new play! And, unusually enough, this one can still be read today. The Blind Beggar of Alexandria was written by George Chapman and first published in 1598.

Chapman was in the early years of his career in 1596, but he would go on to be a famous playwright and poet with a classicist bent. He would be admired for his stage comedies and tragedies, but perhaps best known for his translations of Homer (the reading of which made John Keats feel like "like some watcher of the skies / When a new planet swims into his ken").

The Blind Beggar of Alexandria was one of Chapman's first plays, but he hit the ground running: as we'll see in future entries, the Rose audience loved it and made it a popular part of the repertoire.

The play

The Blind Beggar of Alexandria is set in the titular Egyptian city during the Hellenistic era. The beggar in question is a fortune-teller named Irus, who is sought out by Queen Aegiale to help her find an admirer, the general Duke Cleanthes, whom she had earlier banished for making inappropriate advances, but whom she now would like to see again. Irus recommends that she offer a reward.

Beggars in Alexandria; an undated photograph
from Brooklyn Museum's Lantern Slide Collection

But here's the twist: Irus and Cleanthes are the same person! Born a mere shepherd, Irus is neither blind nor a beggar, but is a master of disguise who is busily achieving power and sexual conquest via an array of false identities, 'Duke Cleanthes' being just one of them. In the role of 'Count Hermes', a crazy aristocrat, he marries a young woman called Elimine, and as 'Leon', an old usurer, he marries Psamathis. Things get more bizarre when he begins cheating on himself, using his various guises.

But bigger events are afoot. A prophecy states that if King Ptolemy can marry off his daughter Aspatia to Prince Doricles of Arcadia, he will be able to conquer his neighbouring kingdoms. The neighbouring kings are worried about this and decide to invade, having heard that the great general Cleanthes is missing. Irus sees an opportunity for power.

Irus uses his 'Hermes' persona to assassinate Doricles and then fakes the deaths of 'Leon' and 'Hermes'. When the other kings invade Egypt and kill King Ptolemy, the Egyptians seek out 'Cleanthes', who leads them to victory and is elected king. To make peace, 'Cleanthes' gives away his 'widows' to the neighbouring kings.

And so, a mere shepherd becomes the King of Egypt! In the play's last lines, our hero tells the assembled Egyptian lords,

So let us go to frolic in our court,
Carousing free whole bowls of Greekish wine
In honour of the conquest we have made,
That at our banquet all the gods may tend,
Plauding our victory and this happy end.

If you would like to read The Blind Beggar of Alexandria, you'll need to track down a copy of T.M. Parrott's 1910 edition of Chapman.

What we learn from this

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

This story of the shepherd who becomes king would no doubt have reminded the Rose audience of the eponymous protagonist of Tamburlaine, a Scythian shepherd who becomes the ruler of a vast empire through conquest. Irus achieves power in rather a different way - with some military prowess, to be sure, but also with a great deal of comical trickery and disguise.

Edward Alleyn, the star actor at the Rose who had achieved fame as Tamburlaine, no doubt played Irus the beggar, revelling in the comic twist on his own role, and enjoying the fun of his frenetic costume changes and rapid switching of personae. As with so many of the Rose plays, this one can be read as a love letter to Alleyn.

FURTHER READING

Blind Beggar of Alexandria information

• Andrew Gurr, Shakespeare's Opposites: The Admiral's Company, 1594-1625 (Cambridge University Press, 2009), 22-24
• Martin Wiggins, British Drama, 1533-1642: A Catalogue, vol. 3 (Oxford University Press, 2013), entry 1032.

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?

Did I make a mistake? Do you have a question? Have you anything to add? Please post a comment below!

3 February, 1596 - Fortunatus

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

Henslowe writes: y^e 3 of febreary 1595 ... R at the 1 p of forteunatus ... iij^ll 

In modern English: 3^rd February, [1596] ... Received at The First Part of Fortunatus ... £3

Today, the Admiral's Men performed a play not previously been recorded at the Rose. The First Part of Fortunatus is best described as half-lost, because it may still survive today but in truncated form. Whatever, its exact nature, it retold the German legend of Fortunatus, a man who acquires infinite wealth but lives to regret it. It is a cautionary tale against selling one's soul for temporary pleasure, very much in the manner of Dr Faustus.

Is this a lost play?

There are lots of puzzles about this play, and it's best to approach them in chronological order.

1. In 1509, an anonymous German prose novel called Fortunatus first told the story in print.
2. Today's 1596 diary entry is the first evidence for the existence of The First Part of Fortunatus. Henslowe does not mark it "ne", which suggests that it was an old play newly revived.
3. There is no actual evidence for the existence of a second part (except for the very fact that Henslowe called the other play The First Part - but he only calls it that in the very first diary entry; the rest he simply calls it Fortunatus).
4. In 1599, Henslowe paid the playwright Thomas Dekker  £6 for “a book called The Whole History of Fortunatus". This appears to be a new play or a revision of the old one(s).
5. On 20 February, 1600, a publisher registered his intention to publish "a comedy called Old Fortunatus in his New Livery". This, one assumes, was Dekker's play.
6. Dekker's play was published the same year under the title The Pleasant Comedy of Old Fortunatus.

The mystery is whether Dekker wrote a whole new play about Fortunatus, or whether he took an old (two-part?) play from the Rose and transformed it into a new one, thus preserving elements of the original text. The second theory seems more likely because Dekker's play falls neatly into two halves, the first ending with Fortunatus's death, the second being about his sons.

The story

Fortunatus receives the magic purse from
Lady Fortune (from the 1509 novel)

If The First Part of Fortunatus did indeed tell the story of Fortunatus up to his death, then it would have begun with Fortunatus as an old man who meets a mysterious woman named Fortune in a wood. Fortune offers him a choice of six gifts: wisdom, strength, health, beauty, long life, or riches. Fortunatus chooses riches and is given a magic purse that never runs out of money. As you may predict, this was the wrong choice.

Fortnatus then goes on an epic journey around the world, having many adventures. Ultimately, he ends up in Babylon, where the Sultan shows him a magic hat that can take its wearer anywhere in the world; Fortunatus steals it.

Fortunatus steals the magic hat from the Sultan
of Babylon (from the 1509 novel)

Fortunatus has had a great deal of fun with his magical gift, but, just like Dr Faustus before him, death approaches and he realizes that he made the wrong choice, Fortunatus returns to Fortune and asks her to take back the purse in return for bestowing wisdom on his sons so that they will not make the same mistakes. But Fortune refuses, and when Fortunatus dies, his sons inherit the magic hat and purse.

Whether or not this is exactly what was staged at the Rose today, the Fortunatus play was a great success, filling the theatre with playgoers!

FURTHER READING

The First Part of Fortunatus information

• Cyrus Hoy, Introductions, Notes, and Commentaries to Texts in 'The Dramatic Works of Thomas Dekker', vol. 1 (Cambridge University Press, 1980), 71-3
• David McInnis, "Fortunatus, Part 1", Lost Plays Database (2011)
• Martin Wiggins, British Drama, 1533-1642: A Catalogue, vol. 3 (Oxford University Press, 2013), entry 843

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?

Did I make a mistake? Do you have a question? Have you anything to add? Please post a comment below!

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?

Did I make a mistake? Do you have a question? Have you anything to add? Please post a comment below!

23 October, 1594 - A Knack to Know an Honest Man

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

Henslowe writes: y^e 22 of octobȝ 1594 ... ne ... R at the knacke to know a noneste ... xxxx^s

In modern English: [23^rd] October, 1594 ... New ... Received at The Knack to Know an Honest ... 40 shillings.

Today, the Admiral's Men performed a brand new play with a familiar name. Those of you with long memories will recall that back in 1593, Lord Strange's Men performed a play called A Knack to Know a Knave. Today's title may suggest a sequel, but that is not so: A Knack to Know a Knave is a morality play set in northern England, whereas A Knack to Know an Honest Man is a comic romance set in Venice. There is only one obvious connection between them: both feature an allegorical figure who represents the concept of honesty and moralises on the other characters' sins. It seems likely, then, that the author of today's play simply borrowed the title of a popular old play for marketing purposes.

The title page of the
printed text, 1596

If so, the ploy did not work, because the box office is remarkably unimpressive. Premieres normally drew huge audiences to the Rose, but today the theatre was barely more than half full. And although the play survives in a printed text published in 1596, it's not an easy read: the grammar is messy and the publication may have been assembled by actors remembering - or misremembering - their lines.

But don't feel sad for this play. Keep your eye on it because there will be some surprises in the future...

The play

A Knack to Know an Honest Man is a tale of wrongful arrest in Venice. Lelio fights a duel with Sempronio, who had attempted to seduce his wife, and wounds him. But a group of peasants mistakenly think Lelio is a murderer and chase him away, leaving Sempronio to die. At the instigation of the evil Servio, who wants his property, Lelio is pronounced a murderer, but his father-in-law, Brishio, helps him escape on a ship (leaving his wife and daughter behind in charge of his property).

Two  Young Venetian Men (anon., 1515)

But Sempronio is not really dead! He has been nursed back to health by an old hermit named Philip, and is now a reformed man. The hermit magically disguises Sempronio as an old man named Penitent Experience and he returns to the city, where he utters moralistic commentaries on the evils of Venetian society, unable to reveal his true identity. He becomes a servant to Fortunio, Prince of Venice.

Fortunio and his friend Marchetto desire Lelio's daughter Lucinda and his wife Anetta respectively, but the women rebuff their aggressive approaches (Penitent Experience, observing, tells the audience, "Here's first a knack to know an honest lady"). The young men plot to return and rape the women (yes, this is still supposed to be a comedy), but they are prevented by Brishio's sons and after various shenanigans the end result is that Fortunio is a repentant man.

When Brishio proudly confesses to having helped Lelio escape, Penitent Experience observes "Why, here's a knack to know an honest man!" and Fortunio helps him escape the city. Ultimately, Lelio ends up in Florence and Brishio in Milan, but the cities are at war and the two men somehow end up being chosen as their warrior champions. When they recognize one another, they are unable to fight, and the Dukes of the two cities are so moved that they resolve to end their dispute.

Marino Grimani, Doge of Venice, 1596-1605

Lelio returns to Venice and offers himself up to justice in the hope that Brishio will be forgiven and allowed to go home. More shenanigans ensue, the main result of which is that Lelio is sentenced to the death for the murder of Sempronio. The members of his extended family all offer their lives in his place, and when Brishio proposes the state should execute all or none of them, Penitent Experience observes - yup - "Here is a knack to know an honest man". However, Lelio nobly rejects their offers.

The play ends when Philip the hermit appears at exactly the right moment to release Sempronio from his disguise. Sempronio marries Lucinda and nasty old Servio gets nothing, so everything works out in the end. In the conclusion, Sempronio utters advice on how to tell the difference between a knave and an honest man, none of which is particularly earth-shattering ("An honest man on love and faith relies; / A knave makes lust his love, respects no friend"). The Duke of Venice gets the last words:

Thanks, good Sempronio, for this worthy skill.
To register the memory of this,
Henceforth, where'er this history is heard
The world shall praise thee, in whose life began,
The perfect knack to know an honest man.

If you would like to read A Knack to Know an Honest Man, your only option is the Malone Society's old-spelling text from 1910.

What we learn from this

Once again, Venice is the setting for a play at the Rose. We have already seen a Venetian Comedy on the stage, and there may have been a Venetian character in The Love of an English Lady too. The Admiral's Men are putting a lot of effort into Italian-style comedy, but there's still no evidence that it is scoring with audiences.

In the only detailed study of this play, Tom Rutter points out some more subtle connections with plays in the Rose repertoire. He draws connections between the avaricious Servio and Barabas in The Jew of Malta, and to the idealised male friendships in other plays of the era (including, perhaps, the recently performed Palamon and Arcite). He also connects the play's style, which partly descends from old-fashioned morality plays, with The Jew of Malta, in that both contain figures who appear based on allegorical figures (of virtue or of and vice), but are individualized. And looking forward, Rutter suggests that the Venetian setting, the theme of friendship in opposition to an evil usurer, and the courtroom scenes could all have inspired Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice. This play may be more important than its obscurity today might suggest.

FURTHER READING

A Knack to Know an Honest Man information

• G.K. Hunter, English Drama, 1586-1642: The Age of Shakespeare (Clarendon Press, 1997), 368-9.
• Martin Wiggins, British Drama, 1533-1642: A Catalogue, vol. 3 (Oxford University Press, 2013), entry 969.
• Tom Rutter, Shakespeare and the Admiral's Men: Reading Across Repertories on the London Stage, 1594-1600 (Cambridge University Press, 2017), 24-53.

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?

Did I make a mistake? Do you have a question? Have you anything to add? Please post a comment below!

2 October, 1594 - Doctor Faustus

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

Henslowe writes: y^e 30 of septmbȝ 1594 ... R at docter ffostose ... iij^ll xij^s 

In modern English: [2^nd October], 1594 ... Received at Doctor Faustus ... £3 and 12 shillings

Today is another blast from the past! The Admiral's Men staged Doctor Faustus, which may not have been seen in London since the late 1580s. Written by Christopher Marlowe, this adaptation of an old German legend tells of a scholar who sells his soul to the devil. Most of those in today's audience would have known this story well, for by 1594, Faustus was one of the most famous plays of its era, and it attracted a huge throng to the Rose playhouse.

The return of a play

Henslowe's diary entry is the earliest surviving reference to Dr Faustus in the historical record, but he doesn't label it "ne" (new), so we must be seeing again the same phenomenon that we encountered with Tamburlaine a few weeks ago: the triumphant return of an old play to the Rose.

Dr Faustus was written by Christopher Marlowe, along with some collaborators, around the year 1588. It was originally staged by an older version of the Admiral's Men, with Edward Alleyn playing played the iconic title role. Alleyn then joined Lord Strange's Men and appears to have lost access to Dr Faustus during his time with that company. Now, back at the Rose with a rebooted version of the Admiral's Men, Alleyn has regained ownership of Dr Faustus and is able to bring the anguished philosopher back to the Rose.

The story

Wittenberg in 1536

The tale of Doctor Faustus was not invented by Marlowe: it is an adaptation of an old German folk tale. In Marlowe's version, Faustus is a scholar of Wittenberg University. He has lost interest in the books he is supposed to read, and his curious mind leads him to tomes about necromancy. He uses them to conjure a devil, Mephistopheles, who offers to be his servant and let him achieve his greatest desires for a period of 24 years. The price? His soul. Faustus agrees, signing a contract in his own blood.

As a demonic henchman, Mephistopheles at first seems rather disappointing. He blows off Faustus's request for a wife, gives only old-fashioned answers to questions about astronomy, and when Faustus asks him where hell is located, gives him the worrying answer "where we are is hell, / And where hell is must we ever be". Faustus becomes concerned that he has made a mistaken, and considers repenting, but Lucifer himself appears and seduces him with a pageant of the Seven Deadly Sins.

Mephistopheles takes his 'master' to see the world;
from F.W. Murnau's Faust (1926)

Mephistopheles now takes Faustus on a globe-trotting adventure. They travel to Rome, where Faustus turns invisible and plays tricks on the Pope. In Germany, he impresses the Emperor by summoning the spirit of Alexander the Great. In Anhalt, he summons grapes from across the world for the Duchess. Along the way, he also torments a comic horse-courser. Back in Wittenberg,  he impresses his fellow scholars by summoning Helen of Troy from the dead, and coming up with the legendary lines, "Was this the face that launched a thousand ships / And burnt the topless towers of Ilium? / Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss."

But after 24 years, Faustus's contract is nearly up, and he can only wait in terror as the clock ticks toward its midnight deadline. He cries to God to save him, but to no avail - "See, see, where Christ's blood streams in the firmament!", he sobs, "One drop would save my soul, half a drop!"

But it is all fruitless, and at midnight, devils emerge from the trapdoor to carry him down to hell. The play's last lines are spoken by the Chorus, who describes Faustus as a warning to us all:

Faustus is gone. Regard his hellish fall,
Whose fiendful fortune may exhort the wise
Only to wonder at unlawful things,
Whose deepness doth entice such forward wits
To practise more than heavenly power permits.

The impact

Dr Faustus had an enormous impact on the theatregoers of its day, and its influence can be seen on several of the plays described in this blog. We have already encountered Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, which is an obvious attempt at imitating Faustus (it too features necromantic scholars and magical sheningans), while smaller ideas and phrases from it turn up in A Looking Glass for London and England and A Knack to Know a Knave.

Faustus summoning Mephistopheles: from the
1616 text of the play 

There are obvious reasons for the play's popularity. It is full of glortious theatrical spectacle, which can be glimpsed via its stage directions: "Enter [Mephistopheles] with devils, giving crowns and rich apparel to Faustus, and dance and then depart" or "[Faustus and Mephistopheles] beat the friars, and fling fireworks among them, and so exeunt." It was still being performed as late as 1620, when John Melton wrote in The Astrologaster that in "the tragedy of Doctor Faustus ... a man may behold shag-haired devils run roaring over the stage with squibs in their mouths, while drummers make thunder in the tiring-house, and the twelvepenny hirelings make artificial lightnings in their heavens".

But despite its simple story and spectacular effects, the play is a complex and challenging work that forces its audience to examine their own attitudes toward their own sins. As the Chorus tells us, Faustus's sin is pride, which he himself recognises at the end: he has blasphemously rejected the Bible, has gained immense power and has wasted it on frivolous things. His punishment seems richly deserved, yet it's hard not to have some sympathy with his ambitious desire to know more, and to inquire beyond the limitations placed on him. In 1676, Francis Kirkman, who had read or seen Faustus in his youth, recalled that he enjoyed it when the hero "travelled in the air, saw all the world, and did what he listed [liked]", but he was "much troubled" when the Devil came to claim him; "the consideration of that horrible end did so much terrify me that I often dreamed of it".

A devil pesters St Bernard (from a French
book of hours, 1510)

Much ink has been spilt on the play's murky theological orientation (it can be read as Catholic or Calvinist, depending on how you look at it) and the very uncertainty may have caused disquiet in its audience no matter their persuasion. In 2.3, the Evil Angel warns Faustus that "God cannot pity thee". Faustus insists that "God will pity me if I repent", assuming that no matter what sins he performs, a loving God will always forgive him if he expresses genuine regret before he dies. But the Evil Angel responds "Ay, but Faustus never shall repent", as if God's opinion is not really the issue: Faustus's true problem is the despair in his own soul that will not allow him to believe he truly deserves forgiveness. Such challenges to complacency could unsettle the most stolid believer.

An alarming stage devil
depicted on the title page
of Middleton and
Rowley's The World
Tossed at Tennis (1620)

The play even developed a reputation for spooky occurrences during performances. In his Black Book of 1604, Thomas Middleton refers to an incident when "the old Theatre" (a playhouse in Shoreditch) "cracked and frighted the audience" during a show. Many years later in 1633, William Prynne, a fanatical Puritan campaigner against theatre (admittedly not the most reliable source) claimed in his interminable Histriomastix that once, "in Queen Elizabeth's day", when Dr Faustus was performed at the Belsavage playhouse in London, there was "a visible manifestation of the Devil on the stage", which caused the great amazement of both the actors and spectators". Prynne insists that this is a true story, which he had heard it "from many now alive, who well remember it, there being some distracted with [i.e. driven mad by] that fearful sight".

Intriguingly enough, this story links back to Henslowe's Diary. In 1673, John Aubrey retold a garbled version of Prynne's anecdote, although in his version the play was by Shakespeare and Edward Alleyn himself was in the production, playing a demon, "and was in the midst of the play surprised by an apparition of the devil". According to Aubrey, Alleyn was so disturbed that he vowed to give more to charity. This ultimately resulted in his founding Dulwich College, the school south of London in whose archives Henslowe's Diary remains to this day. So, if the Devil hadn't freaked out Alleyn during a performance of Dr Faustus, this blog might never have existed...

The play in performance

Dr Faustus has never left the stage since Marlowe wrote it, and it is undoubtedly the most popular play that we've encountered in Henslowe's Diary, excepting only those by Shakespeare. It can be performed in many different ways and can appear surprisingly modern: take a look at this (gruesome) trailer for Maria Aberg's amazing 2016 production for the Royal Shakespeare Company. In it, the two lead actors randomly chose who would play Faustus or Mephistopheles on any given night by burning matches, but my strongest memory of this incredibly disturbing production was the parallels it drew between drug addiction and Faustus's thirst for magic.

What we learn from this

The return of Faustus makes undeniable the overwhelming dominance of Christopher Marlowe in the repertory of the Admiral's Men. He may have been dead for over a year, but his Jew of Malta, his Massacre at Paris, and his two Tamburlaine plays have been stunningly popular throughout the various seasons at the Rose.

Henslowe may be gloating at the triumphant return of Tamburlaine and Dr Faustus. But at the other end of London, Shakespeare is ruling the roost at the Theatre in Shoreditch, and is about to produce such instant classics as Romeo and Juliet and A Midsummer Night's Dream. Henslowe should be a little worried that his most successful plays were written by a man who is now deceased. The lack of new blood could be a concern for the future.

FURTHER READING

Doctor Faustus information

• Thomas Middleton, The Black Book (1604)
• William Prynne, Histriomastix (1633)
• John Aubrey, The Natural History and Antiquities of the County of Surrey (1676)
• Roma Gill, ed., The Complete Works of Christopher Marlowe, Volume II: Dr Faustus (Clarendon Press, 1990).
• David Bevington and Eric Rasmussen, eds., Doctor Faustus: A- and B-Texts (1604, 1616) (Manchester University Press, 1993).
• Andrew Gurr, Shakespeare's Opposites: The Admiral's Company, 1594-1625 (Cambridge University Press, 2009), 14-17, 
• Martin Wiggins, British Drama, 1533-1642: A Catalogue, vol. 2 (Oxford University Press, 2012), entry 810.

 

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?

Did I make a mistake? Do you have a question? Have you anything to add? Please post a comment below!

30 August, 1594 - Tamburlaine

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

Henslowe writes: y^e 28 of aguste 1594 ... j ... R at tamberlen ... iij^ll xi^s 

In modern English: [30^th] August, 1594 ... 1 ... Received at Tamburlaine ... £3 and 11 shillings

What a surprise! Today, the Admiral's Men have revived Tamburlaine, an old play that possessed an almost legendary status among the theatregoers of the day.

Christopher Marlowe's Tamburlaine the Great and its sequel had been mega-hits of the late 1580s. Loosely based on the life of the fourteenth century warlord Timur the Lame, it tells the story of a shepherd who becomes an all-conquering emperor. With its grand speeches, its exotic imagery, and its amoral but awe-inspiring protagonist, the plays dazzled their original audiences, who would still have remembered them in the mid-1590s. You can get some sense of what the Tamburlaine plays are like from this trailer for a recent production in Brooklyn by Theatre for a New Audience:

Why Tamburlaine now?

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

In a way, this diary entry represents Tamburlaine coming home. The play had been first performed in 1587 by an earlier version of the Admiral's Men, here at the Rose playhouse. Then as now, Edward Alleyn was the leading actor of that earlier company, and the role of Tamburlaine had helped to make him a star.

But around 1590-91, Alleyn had left the Admiral's Men to join Lord Strange's Men (whose fortunes we were following at the beginning of this blog). The remnants of the Admiral's Men did not perform in London but rather toured the country. And they seem to have retained ownership of the Tamburlaine plays, because Alleyn did not perform them when he was acting with Strange's Men. Indeed, Strange's Men created instead Tamar Cam, a pair of plays about a different conqueror of Asia, but one with a suspiciously similar name.

Now, in 1594, Alleyn is back at the Rose with a reconstituted version of Admiral's Men, and he has clearly regained possession of Tamburlaine. He is therefore roaring back onto the stage in the role that had made him a legend, finally able to perform it again after many years away from it. This must have been an exciting day at the Rose!

So, what is Tamburlaine, and what is all the excitement about?

 The play

At the beginning of the play, Tamburlaine is a mere shepherd from Scythia (the steppes of Central Asia), who has taken up banditry. He leads a gang of highwaymen who rob travellers on the outskirts of Persia. But prophecies have told him in dreams that one day he will be the "monarch of the East"...

Timur holding court; from the Zafarnamah
of Sharaf al-Din Yazdi

Tamburlaine's unlikely rise to power begins when he captures Zenocrate, daughter of the Sultan of Egypt, who is at first his captive but comes to love him. The ineffectual King Mycetes of Persia sends the warrior Theridamas with troops to kill Tamburlaine, but Theridamas is so impressed by his ambitious enemy that he joins him.

Tamburlaine commands admiration in all who meet him, and is presented as a remarkable, almost superhuman figure. He is "so large of limbs, his joints so strongly knit," that he has "such breadth of shoulders as might mainly bear / Old Atlas's burden". His eyes are "piercing instruments of sight / Whose fiery circles bear encompassèd / A heaven of heavenly bodies in their spheres", and "his lofty brows in folds do figure Death" (II.i).

Tamburlaine joins with the fratricidal Cosroe to help him overthrow his brother, King Mycetes. But Tamburlaine becomes enthralled with the idea of winning a crown for himself.  His lieutenants agree: "To be a king is half to be a god", but Tamburlaine scoffs: "A god is not so glorious as a king. / I think the pleasure they enjoy in heaven / Cannot compare with kingly joys on earth" (II.v). He turns his armies against Cosroe and takes his crown, becoming King of Persia.

The Ottoman Sultan Bajazath I
(anonymous Italian portrait)

All Asia is now concerned about the rise of Tamburlaine, who acquires the nickname of "the scourge and wrath of God" (III.iii). The next ruler to take arms against him is Bajazeth, Emperor of the Turks. Like many monarcxhs before and afterward, Bajazeth is contempuous of the upstart Scythian, but lives to regret his But Bajazeth too is defeated by Tamburlaine's army, and subjected to utter humiliation: he and his wife are kept in a cage, and fed scraps from Tamburlaine's sword; Tamburlaine even uses him as a footstool. Eventually Bajazeth and his queen commit suicide by knocking their own brains out against the bars of the cage.

It is now the turn of Zenocrate's father, the Sultan of Egypt, to join the war against Tamburlaine. But Tamburlaine besieges the city of Damascus, using a colour scheme as a countdown. On the first day, he wears white to show that if the city surrenders, he will not kill anyone. On the second day, he wears red to show that he will kill only the soldiers. The Damascans hold off until the third day, hoping that the Sultan will arrive to rescue them.

Timur beseiging a city, from the
Zafarnamah of Sharaf al-Din Yazdi

But the Sultan does not appear, and on the third day Tamburlaine wears black to signify that he will destroy the city and kill everyone. The Governor of Damascus sends four innocent virgins to Tamburlaine to plead for mercy. But Tamburlaine shows them his sword, telling them "there sits Death, imperious Death, / Keeping his circuit by the slicing edge" (V.i.). He has them killed and massacres everyone else in the city.

Tamburlaine then fights and the Sultan's forces. Zenocrate is in torment, as her lover and her father are at war. But although Tamburlaine wins, he lets the Sultan live. And in the play's final moments, glorying in his domination "from the bounds of Afric to the banks / Of Ganges" Tamburlaine tells his subject kings that he will turn to peace: "Tamburlaine takes truce with all the world." Turning to Zenocrate, he ends the play by telling her,

Then, after all these solemn exequies,
We will our rites of marriage solemnize.

The legacy

It is easy to see why Tamburlaine made such an impression on theatregoers in the late 1580s. In the prologue, Marlowe announces that he is doing something new: he dismisses the silly rhyming verse and clowning of the older drama and tells the audience that they will instead "hear the Scythian Tamburlaine / Threat'ning the world with high astounding terms / And scourging kingdoms with his conquering sword".

Persepolis. It would be passing brave to ride in
triumph through it, do admit.

Those "high astounding terms" refer to the play's soaring poetry, especially Tamburlaine's magnificent speeches that build and build. Some of its lines became legendary, in particular, Tamburlaine's dream of power: "Is it not passing brave to be a king, / And ride in triumph through Persepolis?" (II.v). One of the most interesting descriptions of Tamburlaine in performance is by the clergyman Joseph Hall in his Virgidemiarum (1597), who seems to have been disgusted by the experience, but even his sneery description of "big-sounding sentences" and "terms Italianate" being used to "patch me up his pure iambic verse" also admits that the poetry "ravishes" the gazing spectators.

And the speeches must have sounded incredible when declaimed in the mighty voice of Edward Alleyn, who seems to have brought all of his outsized physical presence to the part: in 1597, a book called The Discovery of the Knights of the Post described a character who "bent his brows" and walked "up and down the room with such a furious gesture as if he had been playing Tamburlaine on a stage". Similarly, Hall refers to "the stalking steps of his great personage".

Map of Asia, from Ortelius's atlas of the world (1570)

The poetry transported the audience to exotic places around the world, and opened the eyes of ordinary Londoners to the vast world that was in the process of being explored by Europeans during the so-called Age of Discovery. Tamburlaine's vision is impressively global: he imagines the pirates of the Mediterranean hiding in fear,

Until the Persian fleet and men-of-war,
Sailing along the oriental sea,
Have fetched about the Indian continent,
Even from Persepolis to Mexico,
And thence unto the Straits of Gibraltar,
Where they shall meet and join their force in one,
Keeping in awe the Bay of Portugal,
And all the ocean of the British shore. (III.iii)

He even plans "to travel to th'Antarctic pole, / Conquering the people under our feet!" (IV.iv). (He'd be disappointed when he got there and found it inhabited only by penguins, but neither Marlowe nor his audience knew that...)

But the play is not simply an exercise in glamorous exoticism. It is genuinely radical in what it is saying. Nature, says Tamburlaine,

Doth teach us all to have aspiring minds:
Our souls, whose faculties can comprehend
The wondrous architecture of the world
And measure every wand'ring planet's course,
Still climbing after knowledge infinite
And always moving as the restless spheres,
Wills to wear ourselves and never rest
Until we reach the ripest fruit of all:
That perfect bliss and sole felicity,
The sweet fruition of an earthly crown. (II.vii)

Title page of a 1592 printing
of Tamburlaine

Placed in the mouth of a mere shepherd, this speech is antithetical to the entire principle of Elizabethan hierarchy, in which power is restricted only to those of noble blood. Tamburlaine upends the social hierachy, showing a man at the bottom rising to the top with only his raw talent and aspiring mind to help him, while the ruling classes are represented as inept or decadent.  Even more astonishingly, at the end of this play, Tamburlaine is the winner. One might expect him to suffer hubris and be punished for his ambition. But no: he rules a vast empire and is very happy to be doing so. (Admittedly, Marlowe did write a tragic sequel shortly afterward, but it's not clear that he always intended to).

What are we to make of this triumphant anti-hero? Tamburlaine is terrifyingly cruel, heartless and uncompromising, yet he is also fascinating and charismatic, drawing followers from every nation that he visits. The effect of the play is complex: as David Fuller puts it, the audience is "simultaneously drawn in by the poetry and repelled by the action". Marlowe offers no help in this matter: his Prologue simply advises the audience "View but his picture in this tragic glass / And then applaud his fortunes as you please".

Although its enormous cast requirements make it a challenge for all but the largest theatre companies, Tamburlaine can still be seen on stage today in the 21st century. Indeed, at the time of writing, Michael Boyd's production, starring Jude Owusu as the Scythian shepherd, can be seen at the Royal Shakespeare Company's Swan Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon.

 

What we learn from this

We learn from today's performance that the Admiral's Men were willing to turn back to older plays rather than constantly chase novelty. Tamburlaine may have been a blast from the past, but it drew a huge audience today, and had clearly been greatly missed by the Rose audience. It's a reminder that although theatre in 1594 is flourishing across London, and Shakespeare is about to write his most famous plays, the older pioneers of Elizabethan drama continue to have a hold on the public.

FURTHER READING

Tamburlaine information

• J.S. Cunningham, ed., Tamburlaine the Great. Manchester University Press, 1981. 
• G.K. Hunter, English Drama, 1586-1642: The Age of Shakespeare. Clarendon Press, 1997.
• David Fuller, ed., "Introduction", in The Complete Works of Christopher Marlowe, Volume V (Clarendon Press, 1998), xvii-liii
• Andrew Gurr, Shakespeare's Opposites: The Admiral's Company, 1594-1625 (Cambridge University Press, 2009), 14-17, 33, 207-8.
• Martin Wiggins, British Drama, 1533-1642: A Catalogue, vol. 2 (Oxford University Press, 2012), entry 784.

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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