Predecessors of Shakespeare in Drama. The first English theatres. University wits. Christopher Marlowe “Tamburlaine the Great”.

By the middle of the 16^th century there were companies of strolling actors who performed in town-squares, inn-yards and manor-houses of the nobility. But after Queen Elizabeth’s decree against vagabonds many of these companies enlisted, only nominally as servants of some peers and began to settle down. In 1576 the company of the Earl of Leicester’s men built the first regular playhouse and called it “the Theatre”, using this Greek word for the first time in England. It was open to the sky, except for a sheltered gallery on three sides, and the stage was a large raised platform that came out into the audience.

Thus, theatres began to be established, and their popularity kept growing. They gave public performances, and were also invited to the court.

As the public became more demanding and the art of the theatre developed, old plays were considered too primitive. They didn’t deal sufficiently with the problems of the time; the necessity for new plays became obvious. The demand was answered by some university, graduates, who belonged to the middle-class or gentry. They were actually the first professional authors in England who learned their living by writing and are known as the Academic Dramatists, or “the University wits”. Among them were Thoma Kyd, George Peele, John Lyly,Christopher Marlowe and Thomas Nashe.

“The Spanish Tragedy” (1592) by Thomas Kyd is an example of the tragedy of blood, popular at the time. Blood and death play a large part in such plays. The Spanish Tragedy is in some ways rather like Shakespeare’s Hamlet: a ghost appears, demanding revenge; but it appears to the father of a mudered son not to the son of a murdered father, as in Hamlet. A girl who is mad and a man with the name Horatio also appears in the play. There is a belief that Kyd once wrote a play based on the Hamlet story, and that Shakespeare saw it; but it has never been found.

The first great dramatist of the time was Christopher Marlowe. His great tragedy, “Tamburlain the Great”, is in two parts. It is written in the splendid blank verse that Marlowe brought to the stage. The first part deals with the rise to power of Tamburlain, a shepherd and a robber. His terrible ambition drives him ever onwards to more power and more cruelty. His armies conquer Bajazet, ruler of Turkey, whom Tamberlain takes from place to place in a cage, like a wild animal. In the second part Tamburlain is pulled to Babylon in a carriage. It is drawn by two kings, whom he whips and curses when they do not go fast enough. He shouts angrily: What: Can ye draw but twenty miles a day?

His unbound ambition is to become the emperor of Asia and to conquer the world, placing himself above everything and everybody:

“I hold the fates bound fast inn iron chains,

And with my hand turn Fortune’s wheel about,

And sooner shall the Sun fall from his sphere

Than Tamburlain be slaine or overcome.”

Thanks to his strong will-power and ruthless cruelty he succeeds tremendously. His ferocity is softened only by his love for his captive Zenocrate, the daughter of the Sultan of Egypt, who is defeated and captured at the battle of Damascus but is spared to the pleadings of Zenocrate.

In this tragedy Marlowe depicts Tamburlaine as a personification of an elemental power whom no one in the world could oppose. He is depicted as a strong physically as he is spiritually:

Of stature tall, and straightly fashioned

Like his desire lift upwards and divine

So large of limbs, his joints so strongly knit,

Such breadth of shoulders as might mainly bear

Old Atlas, burden …

Tamburlain’s aim is to conquer the world. he undertakes campaign after campaigns and conquers kingdom after kingdom, rates city after city and shocks the whole world by his cruelties. He is afraid neither of god nor of men. As his generals say:

“To be a king, is half to be a god” and

“a god is not so glorious as a king;

… the pleasure they enjoy in heaven

cannot compare with kingly joys on earth …”

Lecture 5.