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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,
On some upreared 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 fainèd 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-misformed 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

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

Persian effeminacy is so piquantly contrasted with the hardihood of Greece."

Before leaving Tamburlaine a word must be said about Marlowe's introduction of blank verse. Unrhymed verse of ten syllables had been employed both for epic and dramatic purposes before Marlowe's time. The Earl of Surrey, in his translation of Books ii. and iv. of Virgil's Eneid, had been the first to transplant the metre from Italy. Surrey was a charming sonneteer and graceful lyrist; but it would be absurd to claim that his translations from Virgil afford the slightest hint of the capabilities of blank verse. It is impossible to select six consecutive lines that satisfy the ear. Without freedom or swing the procession of languid lines limps feebly forward. When we come to Gorboduc, the first dramatic piece in which rhyme was discarded, the case is no better. Little advance, or rather none at all, has been made in rendering the verse more flexible. Misled by classical usage, all writers before Marlowe aimed at composing blank verse on the model of Greek iambics. Confusing accent with quantity, they regarded accentuated and unaccentuated syllables as respectively long and short. Hence the aim was to end each line with a strongly accentuated syllable, immediately preceded by one that was unaccentuated; in the rest of the line unaccentuated and accentuated syllables occurred alternately. Then, to complete the monotony, at the end of each verse came a pause, which effectually excluded all freedom of movement. This state of things Marlowe abolished. At a touch of the master's hand the heavy

gaited verses took symmetry and shape. That the blank verse of Tamburlaine left much to be desired in the way of variety is, of course, undeniable. Its sonorous music is fitted rather for epic than dramatic purposes. The swelling rotundity of the italicised lines in the following passage recalls the magnificent rhythm of Milton:

"The galleys and those pilling brigandines
That yearly sail to the Venetian Gulf,

And hover in the Straits for Christians' wreck,

Shall lie at anchor in the Isle Asant

Until the Persian fleet and men-of-war,

Sailing along the oriental sea,

Have fetched about the Indian continent
Even from Persepolis to Mexico."

Later, Marlowe learned to breathe sweetness and softness into his "mighty line,”—to make the measure that had thundered the threats of Tamburlaine falter the sobs of a broken heart.

On the authority of a memorandum in Coxeter's MSS., Warton stated that in the year 1587, the date to which Tamburlaine is usually assigned, Marlowe translated Coluthus' Rape of Helen into English rhyme. This translation, if it ever existed, has not come down. The version of the Amores must belong to a somewhat earlier date. Dyce conjectures that it was written as a college exercise (surely not at the direction of the college authorities). It is a spirited translation, though the inaccuracies are manifold; in licentiousness, I am compelled to add, it is a match for the original. Its popularity was great,

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