Depending on when Dido, Queen of Carthage was written, Tamburlaine the Great may or may not have been Marlowe’s first play. As was noted in Chapter 1, however, it was this play that gave Marlowe an immediate and lasting notoriety. The impact caused by Tamburlaine can be inferred from various pieces of evidence: Robert Greene’s complaints about it in Perimedes the Blacksmith (which have already been quoted); the choice of ‘Tamburlaine’ as the name with which to sign a xenophobic libel in 1593; and the appearance in the late 1580s and early 1590s of a series of plays evidently influenced by Tamburlaine, including Robert Greene’s Alphonsus King of Aragon, the anonymous Selimus, and George Peele’s The Battle of Alcazar. Although it is conceivable that Philip Gawdy’s 1587 anecdote about audience members being accidentally shot at a playhouse does not actually refer to the second part of Tamburlaine, its date tallies with these pieces of evidence, and the company Gawdy says performed the play – the Admiral’s Men – is also the one mentioned on the title page of Tamburlaine’s 1590 first edition (see figure 1). Neither source mentions the playhouse where it premiered, but from 1594 onwards it was a staple at the Rose theatre, and its style became sufficiently familiar for Shakespeare to make comic capital out of it in the second part of Henry IV, where Pistol garbles the first lines of Tamburlaine Part Two, 4.3 into ‘hollow pampered jades of Asia / Which cannot go but thirty mile a day’ (2.4.161–2). A central concern of this chapter, therefore, will be what it was about this play that proved so exciting and so influential. At the same time, it needs to be emphasised that one reason for the play’s success was the way Marlowe used existing theatrical techniques – albeit with significant twists and variations. Accordingly, the section below will attempt to place Tamburlaine in the context of the theatrical world of the 1580s.

1580s drama and its influence

The professional theatre of the 1580s was dominated by the Queen’s Men, an acting company formed in 1583 from key members of existing companies at the instigation of the Privy Council. In their important study of the Queen’s Men, Scott McMillin and Sally-Beth MacLean (1998) argue that one of the company’s functions was a political one: to perform plays, both in London and around the country, that served the state by espousing Protestant nationalist values. Only a handful of the plays written for the Queen’s Men survive, and the earliest one to be published (Robert Wilson’s The Three Lords and Three Ladies of London) appeared in print the same year as Tamburlaine (1590), so we cannot be sure that the printed plays we have precisely reflect what the company was performing in the 1580s. Furthermore, Three Lords and Three Ladies itself appears to date from 1588, after the first performances of Tamburlaine by the Lord Admiral’s Men, so it cannot be considered an influence on Marlowe. However, it is helpful to place it alongside Marlowe’s play as another example of 1580s drama, the product of a theatrical tradition by which Tamburlaine is also informed.