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in the invention. The young poet threw into his work all the energy of his passionate nature. He did not pause to polish his lines, to correct and curtail; but was borne swiftly onward by the wings of his imagination. The absence of chastening restraint is felt throughout; and, indeed, the beauty of some of the most majestic passages is seriously marred by the introduction of a weak or ill-timed verse. Take the following passage

from the First Part :

"Nature that framed us of four elements,
Warring within our breasts for regiment,
Doth teach us all to have aspiring minds :
Our souls, whose faculties can comprehend
The wondrous architecture of the world,
And measure every wandering planet's course,
Still climbing after knowledge infinite,
And always moving as the restless spheres,
Wills us 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. 7.)

The ear exults in the sonorous march of the stately verse as each successive line paces more majestically than the preceding; but what cruel discomfiture awaits us at the end! It seems almost inconceivable that the poet should have spoilt so magnificent a passage by the lame and impotent conclusion in the last line. For the moment we are half inclined to think that he is playing some trick upon us; that he has deliberately led up to an anti-climax in order to enjoy the malicious satisfaction of laughing at our irritation. The noble and oft-quoted

passage on Beauty (1 Tamburlaine, v. 1) is injured considerably by the diffuseness of the context. Marlowe seems to have blotted literally nothing in this earliest play. But that he was responsible for the vulgar touches of low comedy I am loth to allow. In the preface the publisher, Richard Jones, writes:-"I have purposely omitted and left out some fond and frivolous gestures, digressing, and, in my poor opinion, far unmeet for the matter, which I thought might seem more tedious unto the wise than any way else to be regarded, though haply they have been of some vain-conceited fondlings greatly gaped at, what time they were showed upon the stage in their graced deformities: nevertheless now to be mixed in print with such matter of worth, it would prove a great disgrace to so honourable and stately a history." It would be well if he had used his pruning-knife with even greater severity and had left no trace of the excrescences of buffoonery. There can be no doubt that these “vain and frivolous gestures," of which the publisher complains, were foisted in by the players.

The popularity of Tamburlaine must have been extraordinary. A prologue by Heywood, written at the revival of the Jew of Malta in 1633, informs us that the part of Tamburlaine was originally taken by the famous actor Edward Alleyn. The hero's habiliments were of a most costly character. His breeches, as we learn from Henslowe's Diary, were of crimson velvet, and his coat was copper-laced. It is easy to conceive what roars of applause would be evoked by the entrance of Tamburlaine drawn in his chariot by the harnessed monarchs.

One delightfully ludicrous line in his address to the captives :

"Holla, ye pampered jades of Asia!”

was constantly parodied for the next half century. Greene, as we have seen, infuriated at the success of the piece, railed against the "atheist Tamburlaine.” The satirist Hall, in a passage quoted by Dyce, is equally severe :—

"One higher pitch'd doth set his soaring thought
On crowned kings that Fortune hath low brought,
Or some uprearèd high-aspiring swaine

As it might be the Turkish Tamburlaine.
Then weeneth he his base drink-drownèd spright
Rapt to the three-fold loft of heaven hight,
When he conceives upon his fained stage
The stalking steps of his great personage,
Graced with huf-cap termes and thund'ring threats
That his poor hearers' hayre quite upright sets."

Then he proceeds to ridicule the comic business introduced by the players :

"Now least such frightful showes of Fortune's fall

And bloudy tyrants' rage should chance apall
The dead-stroke audience, midst the silent rout

Comes tramping in a selfe-misformèd lout,
And laughs and grins, and frames his mimik face,
And justles straight into the prince's place :
Then doth the theatre eccho all aloud

With gladsome noyse of that applauding crowd:

A goodly hoch-poch when vile russettings

Are match with monarchs and with mightie kings."

These lines were written in 1597. Ben Jonson in his

Discoveries observes :-"The true artificer will not run away from Nature as he were afraid of her; or depart from life and the likeness of truth; but speak to the capacity of his hearers. And though his language differs from the vulgar somewhat it will not fly from all humanity, with the Tamerlanes and Tamer-Chams of the late age, which had nothing in them but the scenical strutting and furious vociferation to warrant them to the ignorant gapers." Wither in Britain's Remembrancer (1628) alludes to "great Tamburlaine upon his throne" uttering

"A majestical oration

To strike his hearers dead with admiration."

Taylor, the Water-Poet, in his Oration to the Great Mogul, states that Tamburlaine "perhaps is not altogether so famous in his own country of Tartaria as in England." From a passage (quoted by Dyce) of Cowley's Guardian it appears that the old play was revived at the Bull about 1650. In 1681 it had become almost wholly forgotten; for in the preface to his play, Tamerlane, published in that year, Charles Saunders writes:- "It hath been told me there is a Cock-pit play going under the name of The Scythian Shepherd, or Tamberlain the Great, which how good it is any one may judge by its obscurity, being a thing not a bookseller in London, or scarce the players themselves who acted it formerly, cow'd call to remembrance."

In the pages of the Academy (October 20, 1883), two able scholars, Mr. C. H. Herford and Mr. A. Wagner, have investigated the authorities from which Marlowe

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drew his conception of Tamburlaine's character and history. They show, at some length, and at the cost of considerable research, that Marlowe was indebted to the lives of Timur, by Pedro Mexia the Spaniard, and Petrus Perondinus. Mexia's Silva de varia lecion, published at Seville in 1543, obtained great popularity, and was translated into Italian, French, and English. The English translation, known as Fortescue's The Foreste, appeared in 1571; and there can be little doubt that the book was an early favourite of Marlowe's. When he determined to dramatise the story the poet probably supplemented the information derived from Mexia by a study of Perondinus' Vita magni Tamerlanis, Flor., 1551. The description of Tamburlaine's person, as given by Perondinus, seems certainly to have been in Marlowe's remembrance. "Of stature, tall" is a translation of "Statura fuit procera ;" and "his joints so strongly knit," exactly corresponds with "valida erat usque adeo nervorum compage." But, in order to render his hero's appearance as majestic as possible, Marlowe omits mention of the lameness on which Perondinus dwells. Messrs. Herford and Wagner conclude their scholarly paper with a suggestion that the poet "enriched his conception of the remote and littleknown countries, Persia and Scythia, from his classical reading in Herodotus, Euripides, and Xenophon," and that "the drawing of the weak Persians, Mycetes, Chosroes, and Theridamas, whose 'weakness' is not touched by Mexia, is exactly what we should expect from a youth fresh from those old books in which

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