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consisting of about eighty lines, which Collier had first discovered and had printed in The Alleyn Papers (p. 8) from a single MS. folio at Dulwich College. This fragment, which is written in the MS. (Dulwich College MS. I. f 272) as prose and possesses neither any likeness to Marlowe's work nor any great poetic merit, has inscribed on the back in an unknown hand the words Kitt Marlowe. The folly of taking too seriously such vague hints, particularly in the case of suspected manuscripts like those at Dulwich, has often been made evident.

Only the most indispensable critical matter could be admitted into this volume. Each work is preceded by an introduction which sets forth briefly the facts of most importance and summarizes the editor's conclusions. For further details on all these points the reader must be referred to the library edition of Marlowe now in preparation. There will be found also the discussion of Marlowe's life and genius by Professor Raleigh, as well as the explanatory notes on the text and the investigation of Marlowe's claims to partial or complete authorship of Henry VI, Titus Andronicus, The Taming of a Shrew, Lust's Dominion, and the other supposititious works.

The editor feels himself greatly indebted for the loan of early Marlowe editions to the kindness of his Grace the Duke of Devonshire, the Earl of Ellesmere, and the directors of numerous public and private libraries. He owes particular thanks for critical help and assistance to Professor Walter Raleigh, Mr. Percy Simpson, and Mr. J. Le Gay Brereton. To all of these and to others who have been generous of assistance he begs to offer his sincere acknowledgements, while awaiting the opportunity of a specific statement of indebtedness, along with bibliographical and textual details, in the forthcoming larger edition.

CORNELL UNIVERSITY,

C. F. T. B.

TAMBURLAINE

Date. The two parts of Tamburlaine are commonly ascribed to the years 1587 and 1588 respectively, and these dates are almost certainly correct, at least as regards theatrical presentation. It is possible that some portion of the first part may have been written during Marlowe's residence at Cambridge, but it can hardly have been acted on any stage before the poet came to London in 1586. The downward limit is fixed by a sneer of Robert Greene in the epistle to the gentlemen readers' of Perimedes the Blacke-Smith, where he ridicules the popular tragedy of the time, 'daring God out of heauen with that Atheist Tamburlan,' and goes on to speak of the 'mad and scoffing poets, that haue propheticall spirits, as bred of Merlin's race, if there be anye in England that set the end of schollarisme in an English blanck verse. . . .' The first allusion is pretty clearly to Tamburlaine's speech in Act v of the second part (11. 4290-4313), while the words 'Merlin's race' are a punning reference to Marlin', the common Elizabethan variant of Marlowe's name.

Early editions and stage history. Tamburlaine was entered at Stationers' Hall in 1590. The entry reads as follows: 'xiiijto die Augusti (1590) Richard Jones. Entred vnto him for his Copye The twooe commicall discourses of TOMBERLEIN the Cithian shepparde vnder the handes of Master Abraham Hartewell, and the Wardens. vjd.' The two parts were issued together in octavo form in 1590, and again in 1592, the publisher in both cases being Jones, who takes occasion to announce in his epistle to the readers (cf. p. 7) that he has omitted 'some fond and friuolous Iestures'. How great these omissions were there is no likelihood of our learning. Certainly in their present form the two plays have little claim to the title of 'commicall discourses', even when we allow for Elizabethan roughness of definition.

Henslowe's diary records fifteen performances of Part I and seven performances of Part II between August 28,

1594, and November 13, 1595; the profits are in nearly every case large. From this and from the letter 'j' affixed to the notice of the first performance,1 it may be assumed that Tamburlaine had been to some extent re-written for revival in 1594-5 by the same company which had originally produced it-the Lord Admiral's or Henslowe's. The revised text seems never to have been printed. In 1605-6 Edward White printed a third edition, based on that of 1590; the two parts are here for the first time given separate title pages, and they were published in successive years. There is no reason to believe that any other text of Tamburlaine existed until the beginning of the nineteenth century. Bibliographers' allusions to a quarto of 1590, and to editions of 1593, 1597, and 1600 respectively, are not supported by any discoverable evidence, and the statements of all modern editors previous to A. Wagner (1885) contain inaccuracies.

Authorship. The two parts of Tamburlaine differ from all the other works of Marlowe here printed, in that there is no documentary evidence to establish their authenticity. The title pages of the three early editions bear no author's name, and it so happens that among the myriad allusions to these plays prior to the Restoration we find no pronouncement on the subject of their origin. A reference in Henslowe's Diary 2 to Marloes tambelan' turns out to be a flat forgery, another mention in the Gorgon' poems suffixed to Gabriel Harvey's New Letter of Notable Contents (1593) is much too obscure to prove anything, and the lines in Heywood's second Prologue to the Jew of Malta,3 once taken as a statement of Marlowe's authorship of Tamburlaine, make in fact no such assertion.

That a young poet's first experiment in a not very aristocratic species of literature should go publicly unclaimed and unheralded, even after it had achieved success, is, of course, in the Elizabethan age the reverse of surprising. The fact has for us no earthly significance except that it explains what would otherwise be almost inexplicable, namely, the way in which Milton's blundering nephew, Edward Phillips,4 came to ascribe the plays to Thomas Newton, author of a prose history touching the same events; and the repudiation of Marlowe's authorship in

1 Cf. Henslowe's Diary, ed. W. W. Greg, Pt. II, pp. 167, 168.
2 Ed. Greg, I, p. 38.
3 Cf. p. 239, 11. 5-8.

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