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October 2026
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“Tamburlaine the Great.
Who, from a Scythian Shepherd
by his rare and wonderful Conquests
became a most puissant and mightye Monarque,
And (for his tyranny, and terrour in Warre) was termed
The Scourge of God.”
So reads the 1590 title page of the printed version of recent smash hits on the Elizabethan stage, the two parts of Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine. Nothing was to be the same again. As Professor Stephen Greenblatt has written in his recent monograph on Marlowe (Dark Renaissance, 2025), “Virtually everything in the Elizabethan theatre is pre- and post-Tamburlaine. Most literary innovation is incremental; it is rare for a work of art to change everything so quickly and decisively. But Tamburlaine is one of those rare instances.”
The plays plot the career of Tamburlaine, who from his origins as a humble shepherd conquers the mighty empires of Persia and Turkey and makes inroads into Europe, a trajectory encompassing the most horrific acts of cruelty and barbarity, yet all done to the accompaniment of the most extraordinary language.
Tamburlaine established unrhymed iambic pentameter (what we now call blank verse) as the dominant form for English drama, a form adopted and developed by Marlowe’s contemporary Shakespeare. Here was a fresh verbal music to ravish the ears of Elizabethan audiences, with its “high astounding terms” and pyrotechnical rhetorical flourishes, but also a form capable of expressing tender intimacy and labyrinthine inward reflection. The language of Tamburlaine is exotic and intoxicating, incorporating spellbinding repetitions of words and names – Zenocrate, Usumcasane, Persepolis – it is a thrill to read aloud, and there will be plenty of opportunities to do this during the study.
Marlowe’s Tamburlaine is a character who provokes varied reactions and questions. Is he a conquering hero or a bloodthirsty tyrant? Are we meant to respond to him with horrified revulsion or vicarious pleasure, ravished by his language and superhuman energy and daring? Here is a man of unlimited aspiration, unconstrained power and an inhuman consistency of purpose, a progenitor of Shakespeare’s Richard III, Milton’s Satan and Melville’s Ahab, an analogue for many real-life political leaders, even in our own times.
In this study we will read through Part 1 of Tamburlaine. If there is interest, we will follow with the sequel, in which “Tamburlaine the scourge of God must die”.
JOINING DETAILS:
- Five meeting study, live on Zoom, led by Tim Swinglehurst
- Wednesdays, 6.00-8.00 pm (UK time), 16, 23, 30 September & 7, 14 October 2026
- Recommended edition: Tamburlaine, Parts One and Two by Christopher Marlowe, edited by Anthony B. Dawson, Methuen Drama (UK), 2003. ISBN: 978-0-7136-6814-8.
- £175.00 for five meetings, including background notes and resources.
REDUCED COSTS: We are committed to making our studies as affordable as possible. We can’t promise to help but please email us if you would like to be considered for a reduced-fee place (your details will be treated as confidential).
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Juliet, John William Waterhouse, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
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The NATO phonetic alphabet was devised so that words could be spelled out over radio or telephone, to avoid mistakes in communication through interference of any kind. The fact that the word selected for the letter J is Juliet, and for R is Romeo confirms the universal recognition of those two names. The story of the star-crossed lovers had been told several times before Shakespeare’s play, but it is this – his second tragedy – that brought the story undying fame.
Romeo and Juliet was written around 1595-6 and shares these dates and broad themes with A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The opening scenes of both plays include stern edicts: in Romeo and Juliet Prince Escalus of Verona, tired of the public disturbances caused by the feud between the Montagues and the Capulets, warns the two families ‘If ever you disturb our streets again, Your lives shall pay the forfeit of the peace.’ In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Egeus, father to Hermia, asks Duke Theseus to condemn her to death if she will not agree to marry the groom he has chosen for her.
Either play could end in tragedy, but in A Midsummer Night’s Dream a journey through the woods and the intervention of spirits leads to a happy resolution and the farcical performance by ‘rude mechanicals’ of Pyramus and Thisbe, the play within the play which reflects the plot of Romeo and Juliet. In contrast, Romeo and Juliet have no such luck, the series of errors and accidents that befall them, from the death of Mercutio to the failure of the Mantua postal service, leads to the tomb rather than the wedding feast.
The language of the play is wonderfully varied and intricate. It begins with a chorus speech – a sonnet very much in the Petrarchan mode – and goes straight from there to a prose scene between servants that begins with jokes but rapidly leads to a street fight and the entrance of Prince Escalus. Our first sight of Romeo, entering after the fight is over and sighing over Rosaline, is of the doting lover, seemingly more in love with love than with a flesh and blood creature:
‘O heavy lightness, serious vanity,
Misshapen chaos of well seeming forms,
Feather of lead, bright smoke, cold fire, sick health,
Still-waking sleep, that is not what it is!
This love feel I, that feel no love in this.’
His first encounter with Juliet is a conversation contained within a sonnet. The language they use has none of the fashionable oxymorons, it takes one simple image – that of a pilgrim – and gives it the intensity and all-consuming passion of first love. They understand each other completely.
Shakespeare’s only other tragedy at this point was Titus Andronicus, firmly placed in ancient Rome and, although nominally set in the Renaissance of the 1300’s, Romeo and Juliet feels much closer in time to the contemporary audience than the usual classical settings. The play is culturally ubiquitous, it has reached beyond theatre to film, song, meme and even the NATO phonetic alphabet! It dramatises the conflicts – between love and hate, social structure and individual desire, tradition, fate and free will – that every generation reinvents in its own terms.
JOINING DETAILS:
- Eight-meeting study, live on Zoom, led by Jane Wymark
- Mondays, 19 October – 7 December, 6.00-8.00 pm (UK time)
- Recommended edition: Romeo and Juliet (The Arden Shakespeare Third Series) edited by Rene Weis, ISBN: 978-1903436912
- £280.00 for eight two-hour meetings, to include background notes and resources.
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