Inferior Readings: The Transmigration of 'Material' in <i>Tamburlaine the Great</i>

Abstract

In 1597, had the ghost of Christopher Marlowe returned from 'th'eternal clime' (3.188) 1 where George Chapman sought him in 1598 and wandered down the streets of London, he might have found the experience somewhat disturbing, even for a spectral presence such as himself. If he had looked in at William Ponsonby's bookshop at the Bishop's Head in St Paul's Churchyard, where, according to Thomas Thorpe, even as late as 1600 his 'ghost' could be 'seen walk ... in (at the least) three or four sheets', 2 he would have been able to pick up and peruse Jean Dubec-Crespin's The History of the Great Emperor Tamburlaine, newly published. Still in St Paul's, he might have stopped at Adam Islip's printing house and bookstore, where he could have lost himself in another book published that year, Thomas Beard's The Theatre of God's Judgements. Finally, if from there he had strolled to the vicinity of St Andrew's Church in Holborn, he might have entered Richard Jones's printing house and bookshop at the Rose and Crown, where he could have thumbed the freshly printed octavo leaves of Tamburlaine the Great, who, from the state of a shepherd in Scythia, by his rare and wonderful