believed they were incredibly inept and every one of their increasingly desperate attempts failed. Finally Mosbie and Alice concealed them in the house and arranged for Arden to be home playing a game of backgammon, during which ‘Black Will’ would creep up behind him and do the deed. But Will bungles it again, leaving Mosbie to ‘stroke Arden on the head’ – with a 14lb weight! They then lug the body outside, not taking into account that it is snowing and that their bloodstained footprints will lead the authorities directly to the corpse. The play ends there but in reality the aftermath was grim; Alice was burned at the stake, the punishment for murderous wives, her maid suffering a similar fate. A chilling item in the Canterbury town record notes: ‘for the charges of burning Mistress Arden and the Execution of Geo. Bradshaw – thirteen shillings’. Mosbie was hanged and as for Black Will, he disappeared and was never seen again. A slightly later play, also anonymous and based on a real incident, is
A Yorkshire Tragedy
, in which a feckless, violent and jealous husband kills two of his children, attempts to murder his wife and baby, then turns his knife on himself.
It was Marlowe, though, who stood head and shoulders above his immediate contemporaries with his poetic ‘mighty line’. He brought about a sea change in writing for the theatre. Compared to Shakespeare and the second wave of dramatists that were to come, his plays have no complex plots or subplots but consist almost entirely of a sequence of events in which we follow the course set by the protagonist, Tamburlaine, Edward II, Barabas the Jew and Faustus. What is without question is that his plays had an enormous influence on what came after. It was the first part of
Tamburlaine
, written while he was still at Cambridge and put on by Henslowe, which first gave Marlowe his soaring reputation as a popular dramatist whose work audiences flocked to see.
The original for Tamburlaine was Timur, the fourteenth-century son of a Mongol chief who fought his way west, laying waste everything as he went. When the citizens of Baghdad stood in his way, he razed the city to the ground and massacred all the inhabitants. Timur was reputedly both ugly and lame, but Marlowe’s character is whole and handsome, sweeping him across the known world bringing war, murder, torture and slavery until he finally meets the only enemy he is unable to conquer: death. He is the first of Marlowe’s great overreachers. ‘Is it not passing brave to be a king, And ride in triumph through Persopolis?’ he asks, to which the king in whom he is confiding replies: ‘To be a king is half to be a god’. ‘A god’, responds Tamburlaine, ‘is not so glorious as a king’.
Tamburlaine
also produced what must be one of the first great catchphrases in popular use. There are a number of scenes in which Tamburlaine is brought on in triumph, the most famous being that in which he is dragged across the stage in a chariot hauled by four kings, bridled like horses, whipping them on and shouting ‘Holla, ye pampered jades of Asia!’ For some reason the phrase really tickled the fancy of audiences who found the notion of royalty being used as horses and described as ‘pampered jades’ highly amusing, given the casual violence of the day. So popular was it that it also crops up years later in different contexts in plays by Marlowe’s contemporaries. Tamburlaine was one of Edward Alleyn’s greatest roles and we know he played the part wearing a magnificent suit of clothes, with red velvet breeches, for it is listed in Henslowe’s inventories of costumes; also that there was a splendid saddle for Tamburlaine’s use. Nor was any effort spared with the special effects for during one of the earliest performances real bullets were used, with the result that during the scene in which the Governor of Babylon is executed, one went astray and killed a member of the audience.
Part of a
A Yorkshire Tragedy
, in which a feckless, violent and jealous husband kills two of his children, attempts to murder his wife and baby, then turns his knife on himself.
It was Marlowe, though, who stood head and shoulders above his immediate contemporaries with his poetic ‘mighty line’. He brought about a sea change in writing for the theatre. Compared to Shakespeare and the second wave of dramatists that were to come, his plays have no complex plots or subplots but consist almost entirely of a sequence of events in which we follow the course set by the protagonist, Tamburlaine, Edward II, Barabas the Jew and Faustus. What is without question is that his plays had an enormous influence on what came after. It was the first part of
Tamburlaine
, written while he was still at Cambridge and put on by Henslowe, which first gave Marlowe his soaring reputation as a popular dramatist whose work audiences flocked to see.
The original for Tamburlaine was Timur, the fourteenth-century son of a Mongol chief who fought his way west, laying waste everything as he went. When the citizens of Baghdad stood in his way, he razed the city to the ground and massacred all the inhabitants. Timur was reputedly both ugly and lame, but Marlowe’s character is whole and handsome, sweeping him across the known world bringing war, murder, torture and slavery until he finally meets the only enemy he is unable to conquer: death. He is the first of Marlowe’s great overreachers. ‘Is it not passing brave to be a king, And ride in triumph through Persopolis?’ he asks, to which the king in whom he is confiding replies: ‘To be a king is half to be a god’. ‘A god’, responds Tamburlaine, ‘is not so glorious as a king’.
Tamburlaine
also produced what must be one of the first great catchphrases in popular use. There are a number of scenes in which Tamburlaine is brought on in triumph, the most famous being that in which he is dragged across the stage in a chariot hauled by four kings, bridled like horses, whipping them on and shouting ‘Holla, ye pampered jades of Asia!’ For some reason the phrase really tickled the fancy of audiences who found the notion of royalty being used as horses and described as ‘pampered jades’ highly amusing, given the casual violence of the day. So popular was it that it also crops up years later in different contexts in plays by Marlowe’s contemporaries. Tamburlaine was one of Edward Alleyn’s greatest roles and we know he played the part wearing a magnificent suit of clothes, with red velvet breeches, for it is listed in Henslowe’s inventories of costumes; also that there was a splendid saddle for Tamburlaine’s use. Nor was any effort spared with the special effects for during one of the earliest performances real bullets were used, with the result that during the scene in which the Governor of Babylon is executed, one went astray and killed a member of the audience.
Part of a
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