Tamburlaine the Great (Revels Student Editions)

Rating:
Summary: Frickin' great!
Review: I love the "Tamburlaine" of Christopher Marlowe, because I've read it and couldn't resist it. The story is not melodramatically forced, but rather follows in a smooth and epic line, giving it the texture of a documentary. As a tragedy it's weird, encompassing all drifts of literature: darkly humorous, rhetorical, romantic, violent and deep, with an indescribable grandeur. People commenting on Marlowe's work usually regard him as psychologically shallow, but in this play the terrifying hero is so charismatically evoked in his language, sometimes rhetoric and sometimes commonplace, that I left the book with a queer sense of something between love and dread. Even Tamburlaine's worst deeds, like his cursory humiliation of the captive kings, gain an odd flavour of predestination: they're more of the hijinx of a power-drunk teenager than the actions of a cynical tyrant. Everyone should read this work, in which the dark-tinted wonders of the mediaeval Orient are called up in some of the most steelishly beautiful poetry I've ever read.

Rating:
Summary: A triumphant work of drama
Review: This is the exciting story of Tamburlaine's relentless rise to greatness. His military victories are not presented directly, but evoked and described in some of the most splendid verse of the early Elizabethan theater. We also get to see a love story as Tamburlaine woos Zenocate, the captive daughter of one of his rivals.