Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-dzt6s Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-29T18:24:08.999Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The Structure of Tamburlaine

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 February 2022

Clifford Leech
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

When Tamburlaine was first published in 1590, it was described on its title page as “Deuided into two Tragicall Discourses”—a curious reminiscence of George Whetstone's Promos and Cassandra, which in 1578 was similarly described as “Deuided into two Comicall Discourses”—and each part of Tamburlaine was divided into five acts. The publication of 1590, however, does not command our full confidence, for Richard Jones, the printer, admitted in his prefatory address “To the Gentlemen Readers” that he had excised passages that he found “far vnmeet for the matter” which the play as a whole presented. Even so, there is a prima facie case for accepting the division into two parts, each with its characteristic Marlowe prologue, and into five acts for each part, as having authorial warrant.

Type
Research Article
Information
Tulane Drama Review , Volume 8 , Issue 4: Marlowe Issue , Summer 1964 , pp. 32 - 46
Copyright
Copyright © 1964 The Tulane Drama Review

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 All quotations from Tamburlaine are from Tamburlaine the Great, ed. Ellis-Fermor, U. M. (London: 1930).Google Scholar

2 Peri Hupsous, Chap. III.

3 “The Dramatic Structure of Marlowe's Tamburlaine the Great, Parts I and II” English Studies 1948 (London: 1948), pp. 101-126.

4 Introduction to Ellis-Fermor, op. cit., pp. 41-45.

5 “The Unity of Henry IV,” Joseph Quincy Adams Memorial Studies (Washington: 1948), pp. 217-227.

6 Loc. cit.