Tamburlaine the Great

John Davies Jump was professor of English at the University of Manchester.

"Arguably the single-most important play of the Elizabethan era, Tamburlaine did more than any other to transform an insignificant form of public entertainment, barely distinguishable from the juggling, fencing, and animal-baiting with which it shared its performance space, into an art of national importance. . . . Tamburlaine cranks the excitements of language and spectacle to an unprecedented pitch, not simply to indulge the fantasies of the audience but as an exemplary demonstration of poetry's dangerous potency."—The New York Review of Books