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As the Eighties progressed, a higher standard of dramatic production was attained by the group of "University" play wrights -Peele, Greene, Nash, and others; wild Bohemian spirits for the most part, careless of conventions whether moral or literary, wayward, clever, audacious; culminating with Marlowe, whose first extremely immature play Tamburlaine, was probably acted in 1587 when he was only three and twenty; his career terminating in a tavern brawl some six years later.
In order to learn magic he sells himself to the devil, on condition that he shall have twenty-four years of absolute power and knowledge. The play is the story of those twenty-four years. Like Tamburlaine, it is lacking in dramatic construction, but has an unusual number of passages of rare poetic beauty.
"Without the voyagers," says Professor Walter Raleigh, "Marlowe is inconceivable." His imagination in every one of his plays is preoccupied with the lust of adventure, and the wealth and power adventure brings. Tamburlaine, Eastern conqueror though he is, is at heart an Englishman of the school of Hawkins and Drake.
Her mother had died young, and her gifted father had taken her to a hundred places that the school-teacher on a holiday never gets to and thinks of only in connection with geography lessons. She had followed the Great Wall of China, she had stood before the tomb of Tamburlaine, she had shaded her eyes from the glare of Kaïrouan the Holy, she had chaffered in Tiflis and in Trebizond.
That Selimus was published four years later than Tamburlaine, in the year following the death of Marlowe, proves of course nothing as to the date of its production; and even if it was written and acted in the year of its publication, it undoubtedly in the main represents the work of a prior era to the reformation of the stage by Marlowe.
MARLOWE'S WORKS. In addition to the poem "Hero and Leander," to which we have referred, Marlowe is famous for four dramas, now known as the Marlowesque or one-man type of tragedy, each revolving about one central personality who is consumed by the lust of power. The first of these is Tamburlaine, the story of Timur the Tartar.
It has, however, been conjectured, partly on account of his familiarity with military matters, that he saw service, probably in the Low Countries. His first play, Tamburlaine, was acted in 1587 or 1588. The story is drawn from the Spanish Life of Timur by Pedro Mexia. Its resounding splendour, not seldom passing into bombast, won for it immediate popularity, and it long held the stage.
When Christopher Marlowe came up to London from Cambridge, a boy in years, a man in genius, and a god in ambition, he found the stage which he was born to transfigure and re-create by the might and masterdom of his genius encumbered with a litter of rude rhyming farces and tragedies which the first wave of his imperial hand swept so utterly out of sight and hearing that hardly by piecing together such fragments of that buried rubbish as it is now possible to unearth can we rebuild in imagination so much of the rough and crumbling walls that fell before the trumpet-blast of Tamburlaine as may give us some conception of the rabble dynasty of rhymers whom he overthrew of the citadel of dramatic barbarism which was stormed and sacked at the first charge of the young conqueror who came to lead English audiences and to deliver English poetry
Will added that he had made himself Naumann's pupil for the nonce. "I have been making some oil-sketches under him," said Will. "I hate copying. I must put something of my own in. Naumann has been painting the Saints drawing the Car of the Church, and I have been making a sketch of Marlowe's Tamburlaine Driving the Conquered Kings in his Chariot.
It was followed in 1604 by Faustus, a great advance upon Tamburlaine in a dramatic sense. The absence of "material horror" in the treatment, so different in this respect from the original legend, has often been remarked upon.
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