title: Tamburlaine Must Die
author:  Louise Welsh 
description: Christopher Marlowe, "playwright, scenester, and celebrated wit," was a superstar in Elizabethan London. Unfortunately for him, Elizabethan London was a risky place to attract notice. In Welsh's slim, taut follow-up to her 2003 debut, <I>The Cutting Room</I>, she reimagines the bitter end of the great dramatist's life, retold in his own words on the eve of his still-unsolved murder. The beginning of the end comes in the form of a messenger from the queen's Privy Council, summoning him back to the city from a comfortable ensconcement at his patron's country house. Turns out that heretical verses signed by Tamburlaine, his most famous (and famously ruthless) creation, have been turning up all over plague-decimated London in his absence. Faced with charges of heresy and blasphemy, Marlowe has an unspecified, "but clearly short," window of opportunity to offer up a more appealing scapegoat in his place. Welsh doesn't waste a word on any of the florid romanticizing so common in historical fiction: no heaving, corseted breasts or speeding steeds here. Just a hard, sharp little rapier of a thriller/mystery that packs a punishing schedule of sex, violence, wheeling and double-dealing into its brief length. The tension is unabated throughout this frantic, 72-hour dash among backstabbers, spies, murderers and prostitutes&mdash;even as Marlowe realizes that not even he will be able to talk his way out of this one. <I>(Feb.)</I> <BR>Copyright &copy; Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
zlib_text: TAMBURLAINE THE GREAT
  1
  TAMBURLAINE THE
  GREAT (FIRST PART)
   EDITED BY THE REV. ALEXANDER DYCE.
  
  TAMBURLAINE THE GREAT
  2
  Tamburlaine the Great. Who, from a Scythian Shephearde by his rare
  and woonderfull Conquests, became a most puissant and mightye
  Monarque. And (for his tyranny, and terrour in Warre) was tearmed, The
  Scourge of God. Deuided into two Tragicall Discourses, as they were
  sundrie times shewed vpon Stages in the Citie of London. By the right
  honorable the Lord Admyrall, his seruauntes. Now first, and newlie
  published. London. Printed by Richard Ihones: at the signe of the Rose
  and Crowne neere Holborne Bridge. 1590. 4to.
  The above title-page is pasted into a copy of the FIRST PART OF
  TAMBURLAINE in the Library at Bridge-water House; which copy,
  excepting that title-page and the Address to the Readers, is the impression
  of 1605. I once supposed that the title-pages which bear the dates 1605
  and 1606 (see below) had been added to the 4tos of the TWO PARTS of
  the play original