London, 1593. A city on edge. Under threat from plague and war, strangers are unwelcome, suspicion is wholesale, severed heads grin from the spikes on Tower Bridge. Playwright, poet and spy, Christopher Marlowe walks the city's mean streets with just three days to find the murderous Tamburlaine, a killer escaped from the pages of his most violent play. Tamburlaine Must Die is the searing adventure of a man who dares to defy both God and the state and whose murder remains a taunting mystery to the present day.

One of the smash hits of the late 1580s and 90s, Tamburlaine established blank verse as the poetic line of English Renaissance drama, Edward Alleyn as the first English star actor and Marlowe as one of the foremost playwrights of his time. The rise and fall of a Scythian peasant-warrior who conquers the Middle East and is struck down by illness after burning the books of the Koran is presented in two parts crammed with theatrical splendour and equally spectacular cruelty. Marlowe's original audiences were delighted with the blasphemous and ruthlessly ambitious hero; the introduction to this edition discusses the problems that such a character poses for modern audiences and highlights the undercurrents of the play that lead towards a more ironic interpretation.

Tamburlaine the Great, Part One and Part Two are the first plays that Christopher Marlowe wrote for London’s then new freestanding, open-air public playhouses. They trace the progress of Tamburlaine, a Central Asian leader, as he “scourge[s] kingdoms with his conquering sword” and rises to imperial power. The plays were a powerful beginning to Marlowe’s brief career as a public theatre dramatist: the brutally masculine and martial main character immediately captured audiences, and the plays were widely imitated and parodied. Even four hundred years later, Marlowe’s Tamburlaine remains a shocking and seductive figure. The introduction and historical appendices to this new Broadview Edition provide many avenues for readers to understand these plays, presenting other portrayals of Islam from the period, related lives of Tamburlaine from other writers, and material on Marlowe’s scandalous reputation.

The definitive biography: a masterly account of Marlowe's work and life and the world in which he lived Shakespeare's contemporary, Christopher Marlowe revolutionized English drama and poetry, transforming the Elizabethan stage into a place of astonishing creativity. The outline of Marlowe's life, work, and violent death are known, but few of the details that explain why his writing and ideas made him such a provocateur in the Elizabethan era have been available until now. In this absorbing consideration of Marlowe and his times, David Riggs presents Marlowe as the language's first poetic dramatist whose desires proved his undoing. In an age of tremendous cultural change in Europe when Cervantes wrote the first novel and Copernicus demonstrated a world subservient to other nonreligious forces, Catholics and Protestants battled for control of England and Elizabeth's crown was anything but secure. Into this whirlwind of change stepped Marlowe espousing sexual freedom and atheism. His beliefs proved too dangerous to those in power and he was condemned as a spy and later murdered. In The World of Christopher Marlowe, Riggs's exhaustive research digs deeply into the mystery of how and why Marlowe was killed.

Christopher Marlowe was the most successful dramatist of his time, his untimely death cutting short a career that may well have rivalled Shakespeare's. His four major works (Doctor Faustus, Edward II, The Jew of Malta and Tamburlaine) are remarkable pieces of theatre, daring explorations of themes such as the nature of kingship, salvation and damnation, sexuality and ethnic prejudice. This book looks in depth at extracts from each of the plays, exploring them in parallel to uncover key concerns, including heroes and anti-heroes, gender and power and politics. As well as guiding readers in an understanding of the place of these issues in their Elizabethan context, and inviting them to consider their resonance today, the book looks in depth at Marlowe's style: his use of rhythm, the complexities and richness of his poetry, and his evolving development of 'character'. Particular attention is given throughout to the plays in performance.