Michael Prescott on All The Mysteries That Remain

Here’s my issue with the court plays theory. When Marlowe debuted Tamburlaine circa 1587, it was greeted as an innovation. Marlowe himself announced as much in his opening lines: "From jigging veins of rhyming mother wits, And such conceits as clownage keeps in pay, We'll lead you to the stately tent of war." His fluent blank verse avoided the end-stopped lines and singsong accentuations of earlier poetry, his characters were larger than life, and their oratory was (sometimes tediously) grandiose. The play was a sensation and was quickly imitated by inferior playwrights like Robert Greene. If Shakespeare had been writing court plays for more than a decade earlier, in anything like the form in which we know them, then he also had mastered this freer form of blank verse coupled to large themes and high-flown rhetoric, in which case Marlowe wasn’t doing anything new. At the time, however, Kit and his contemporaries clearly believed that he had ushered in a whole new style. This suggests to me that the court plays were comparatively primitive works like Gorboduc, and not likely to resemble the Shakespearean canon. It is possible to argue that the court plays were always more sophisticated, and that Marlowe's innovation lay only in bringing this level of quality to the public stage. But we don’t have any examples of plays with Marlowe's style of blank verse that are unambiguously pre-1587, so this supposition is unsupported by evidence. And the contemporary reaction to Tamburlaine, even among other poets and playwrights, suggests that no one had seen anything like it before.