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Possible Evidence for the Date of Tamburlaine
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Extract
The first extant edition of Tamburlaine bears the date of 1590, but we have evidence of its existence as early as 1588 in the well known reference to “that atheist Tamburlan” found in the address To the Gentlemen Readers, which forms the introduction to Greene's Perimedes the Blacke-Smith. Many authorities give 1587 as the date of the play, but there is no direct evidence for it. The date of the first appearance of Tamburlaine on the stage is of such importance in the history of the English drama that any evidence bearing upon the matter, however slight or however doubtful, should be brought to light for the consideration of students of Elizabethan literature. This is my apology for presenting a matter that seems to me somewhat doubtful; it may turn out to be of no value whatever as evidence; on the other hand, some one of keener insight may see in it strong corroboration of other evidence, or show it to be conclusive in itself.
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- Research Article
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- Copyright
- Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1918
References
1 Greene's Works, Huth Library, vii, p. 8.
2 A. H. Bullen, The Works of Christopher Marlowe, 3 vols., 1884–5.
3 I give titles and text of these poems as they are printed in Grosart's Edition of Harvey's Works (Huth Library), i, p.p. 295–7.
4 Harvey's New Letter is dated September 16, 1593; Marlowe was buried June 1 of that year.
5 Vol. iii, Introd., pp. xii-xvi. MeKerrow seems to have overlooked Bullen's interpretation of the poems. See Works of Thomas Nashe, v, p. 102.
6 Harvey in the New Letter praises this anonymous lady and her writings in the most extravagant terms. Cf. Works, i, pp. 276–284. For Grosart's discussion of the question of her identity, see Works, iii, Introd., pp. xxiii-xxiv, also McKerrow, Works of Thomas Nashe, v, pp. 89–90.
7 Works, i, pp. 260–265.
8 “Heere lies my hatte, and there my cloake, to which I resemble my two Epistles, being the vpper garments of my book, as the other of my body: Saint Fame for mee, and thus I runne vpon him” (Nashe's Works, i, p. 263). Harvey never tires, of making fun of this, sometimes using St. Fame as a nickname for Nashe, who refers to the fact in Have with you to Saffron Walden, 1596. Cf. Nashe's Works, iii, pp. 52, 53.
9 The modern reader will inevitably think of the Spanish Armada and its defeat, and there is a possibility that this is the right interpretation of the allusion. The present article presents evidence for a different interpretation. See further, p. 443.
10 There is a similar association of Scanderbeg and Tamberlaine in Randolph's Hey for Honesty (1651), iii, i, 21: “And I will be the Scanderbeg of the company The very Tamberlaine of this ragged rout.” See N. E. D., s. v. Scanderbeg.
11 Harvey's Works, ii, p. 339.
12 McKerrow, Works of Thomas Nashe, v, p. 103. The latest date in Pierce's Supererogation is August 3, 1593; the New Letter is dated September 16, 1593.
13 Nashe himself associates this poem with the Gorgon poems in the following passage from Have with you to Saffron Walden: “his occasionall admonitionatiue Sonnet, his Apostrophe Sonnett, and time titmouse Lenuoy, like a welt at the edge of a garment, his goggle-eyed Sonnet of Gorgon and the wonderfull yeare, and another Lenuoy for the chape of it, his Stanza declaratiue, Writers postscript in meeter, his Knitting up Cloase and a third Lenuoy” (McKerrow, Works of Thomas Nashe, iii, p. 133).
14 See p. 438, note 8. Pierce's Supererogation is Harvey's reply to Nashe's Strange News, in which “St. Fame” first appears. One of the sub-titles to Pierce's Supererogation is A Preparative to certaine larger Discourses, intituled Nashe's S. Fame.
15 Works of Thomas Nashe, iv, p. 2.
16 We know, further, that Gabriel Harvey's brother Richard in his Lamb of God (published 1590) had attacked Nashe for presuming to pass judgment on contemporary writers. See McKerrow, Works of Thomas Nashe, v, pp. 75–6.