Tamburlaine: A Critical Reader

About the Author David McInnis is the Gerry Higgins Senior Lecturer in Shakespeare Studies at the University of Melbourne, Australia. He is author of Mind-Travelling and Voyage Drama in Early Modern England (2013) and co-editor (with Claire Jowitt) of Travel and Drama in Early Modern England: The Journeying Play (2019). With Matthew Steggle, he edited Lost Plays in Shakespeare's England (2014). He serves on the editorial board of Marlowe Studies: An Annual, is Secretary of the Marlowe Society of America, and also created and maintains the Marlowe Bibliography Online.Andrew Hiscock is Professor of English at Bangor University, UK.Lisa Hopkins is Professor of English at University of Sheffield Hallam. She has published numerous works on Shakespeare including her most recent work, Beginning Shakespeare (2005) and has written on film adaptations including Screening the Gothic. She is the Senior Editor of the online journal, Early Modern Literary Studies. Product Description Arden Early Modern Drama Guides offer students and academics practical and accessible introductions to the critical and performance contexts of key Elizabethan and Jacobean plays. Essays from leading international scholars give invaluable insight into the text by presenting a range of critical perspectives, making the books ideal companions for study and research. Key features include: Essays on the plays' critical and performance history A keynote essay on current research and thinking about the play A selection of new essays by leading scholars A survey of resources to direct students' further reading about the play in print and onlineThe blockbuster Tamburlaine plays (1587) instantly established Marlowe's reputation for experimenting with subversive, outrageous and immoral material. The plays follow the meteoric rise of a Scythian shepherd-turned-warlord, whose conquests of eastern emperors soon sees him established as the most powerful man in the world. The visual tableaux featured in the plays are iconic. He uses his enemy Bajazeth as a footstool, and has other emperors pull his chariot like horses. He burns the Qur'an on stage. The plays were memorable, too, for how they sounded: they showcased the power and variability of iambic pentameter, the meter that Shakespeare would go on to perfect. No history of Shakespeare's theatre is complete without understanding the influence and significance of Marlowe's Tamburlaine plays.Tamburlaine: A Critical Reader offers the definitive introduction to these plays and new perspectives on these seminal works. It provides an overview of their reception on stage and by critics, and offers fresh insights into the teaching of these plays in the classroom.